Her family is well aware of how she separates her two roles as monarch and matriarch. Prince Harry told Oprah that the queen’s private secretary had begun an agreed visit to meet her at Sandringham as he and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, want to step back from royal duties to co-ordinate. while pursuing commercial opportunities. But he clearly couldn’t understand what the rest of the family had absorbed from the time he was in the crib. Her advisers intervened only to provide the Queen with a denial of the CEO. A conversation with his grandmother is very different from an occasion where matters affecting the Crown and the Constitution will be discussed. The merry tea Harry imagined was replaced by what was known as the “Sandringham Summit”, called by the queen, who hosted Charles, then the Prince of Wales, both sons of he and his senior aides each of the four. It was a meeting in which her sovereign, not her grandmother, took control. “Megxit” is not an agreement but a decree. There will be no “backward” step for the Sussexes, only a step down.
But usually, it’s the queen’s perfect implementation of the softer, or softer, power we’ve seen, especially during her time. more than 250 overseas trips. The greatest political success of her reign was based on apolitical expression of regret – her historic visit to the Republic of Ireland in 2011 when she spoke of “being able to bow to the past, but not bound by it”. Presiding over the past seven decades her country’s dwindling dominions and dwindling world power, the queen is a master of the art of retreating graciously while preserving the aura of sovereignty. . Some of the 2.5 billion people in the Commonwealth of Nations hope for more candid recognition of the long-term harms of colonialism. But for the queen, an apology for her country’s history would be seen as a political statement she would not make. She left it to her heirs to begin to finally deal with what Charles, in Barbados last year, called “the appalling brutality of slavery. In this case, royal “regret” will never be enough.
It is the extraordinary luck of the British monarchy that the sober 25-year-old woman who became queen in 1952 possesses unique properties that honor her youthful commitment to her life. his life in the service of the nation. She saw how the heavy burdens of duty took on her beloved father, George VI, who passed away in the care of 56 years old.
According to Anne Glenconner, in the months leading up to his coronation, a four-year-old Prince Charles was sitting at his desk, wearing the headache-inducing Royal Crown, encrusted with 2,868 diamonds and a ruby as big as a hen’s egg. memoir, “Lady in Waiting.” The Queen explained that the tiara was very heavy and that she wanted to get used to wearing it. She understood the weight of the crown both literally and figuratively.
As the new king put it in his bitter first speech as monarch, his mother’s life of duty was “a promise with fate kept”. She will now be remembered as Elizabeth the Steadfast, Elizabeth the Great. Perhaps the best quote the young monarch ever uttered was her response to the archbishop of Canterbury’s question at her coronation. “Madam, are you willing to take the oath?” With a high, feminine voice, she replied, “I’m willing.”
Tina Brown is the author of “Diana Chronicles” and “Palace Papers”.
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