Queen Elizabeth II, who died on Thursday, “led a life made up of privilege and sacrifice, and even those who resented the former acknowledged the latter,” Rebeccamead_NYC writes.
became only more towering as her personage dwindled. By instinct, constitution, and training, the Queen knew that what was demanded of her was an almost superhuman splitting of self. She was the hereditary ornament of the nation—as impractical as the Crown Jewels, with which herhad been celebrated. At the same time, her modus operandi was founded on a principle not of display but of concealment.
Duty, rather than whimsy, would rule the Queen, who was crowned with the formidable formal title of “Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.” Her education insured, either by accident or by design, that she was uncommonly well qualified to be a figurehead.
During the long course of the second Elizabethan era, the Queen’s realms underwent dramatic transformation, with former imperial territories becoming independent countries, and with the expansion of the Commonwealth as a voluntary association of affiliated nations, some of them retaining the British monarch as sovereign, but many others declining to do so.
The usefulness of a nonpolitical national figurehead was never more evident than in the Queen’s final decade, when the deficits of the alternative, electoral model were vividly on display across the Atlantic.
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