This year marks the platinum jubilee of Her Royal Majesty the Queen of England. It will also, if all goes well, see her reach her ninety-sixth birthday.

Her father had reluctantly accepted the crown in 1936, upon the abdication of his Nazi-sympathizing brother. He had nevertheless come to impress the nation with his devoted and courageous service, atoning for his predecessor’s follies, most particularly during the war and in his insistence on remaining in Blitz-torn London. Yet, exhausted by his unsought and unwanted office, he had died in 1952 at the age of fifty-six.

When Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor ascended to the British throne at the age of twenty-five, some seventy years ago, the world was a very different place. Seven years after the end of the Second World War, Britain still believed it ruled the waves, and much of the planet’s landmass too. The coming decades were to change all that, as there unfolded a series of events that would have seemed utterly unimaginable just a few decades earlier.

India and Pakistan had gained independence from the British Empire five years before the start of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, and Sri Lanka and Myanmar had followed suit the next year. The collapse of British imperialism gathered pace through the course of Elizabeth’s first few decades on the throne, aggregating an average loss of one-and-a-half dominions each year for a period of thirty years. These included Ghana and Malaysia in 1957, Nigeria and Cyprus in 1960, Tanzania and Kuwait in 1961, Jamaica and Uganda and 1962, and in 1963 Kenya, the country she had been visiting eleven years earlier when she had learnt of her father’s death and her own accession in his place. Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates had waited until 1971 to secede; Zimbabwe departed from British rule in 1980.

Nevertheless, the Queen has toiled on, faithfully though for the most part fruitlessly, as the titular head of her beloved Commonwealth of Nations, and as head of state of a number of its members, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. The Commonwealth’s influence has barely, however, registered upon the flow of global events since the heady days when it campaigned against South Africa’s system of apartheid, excluding that regime from its membership between 1961 and 1994.

Last week, the Queen’s grandson Prince William embarked on a jubilee tour of the Caribbean nations of Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, all of which have chosen to maintain his grandmother as their monarch. One controversial stop had been removed from his itinerary, in order to avoid a series of protests planned against the visit, when it transpired that the interests of a conservation organization that he supports clashed with those of local people. It was also reported that, at that particular location, further objections had been raised over his intention to land his helicopter on a local football pitch without prior consultation. It would appear that, even in the entourage of this popular young prince, traces of the presumptuous paternalism of his forebears’ faded imperial dreams have lingered on.

At the height of an international crisis of an intensity unknown for a generation, and as so many lives have continued to fall apart around him, the supreme irrelevance of this privileged prince and his glamorous wife was neatly captured in a striking headline run by the BBC, ‘William and Kate dance and try chocolate in Belize’. They could hardly have looked more out of touch if they’d tried. The incongruity of their frivolous antics felt almost obscene. 

When the royal party later landed in Jamaica, it was greeted with demonstrations against Britain’s historical involvement in the slave trade and talk of his host’s republican aspirations. Prince William expressed personal sorrow at the misery caused by slavery but offered no apologies.

In November 2021, the Prince of Wales had represented his mother at a ceremony to mark the transfer of the role of head of state of another Caribbean nation from the British crown to the new republic’s freshly elected president. His presence in Barbados was however somewhat overshadowed when their homegrown superstar Rihanna took centre stage. This might be taken as an apt enough emblem of how the British monarchy, and Britain’s international influence itself, might be seen by many to have waned into phenomena peripheral, and indeed often totally immaterial, to the outside world.

It was as far back as 1956 that the beginning of the end of Britain’s global power was first made clear for all the world to see, in the event that British historians like to call the Suez crisis. Others tend to see the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company not so much as a catastrophe but as the liberation of a crucial economic resource from the imperialist yoke. Britain’s failure, as part of an aggressive military alliance, to reclaim operational control of this vital shipping route led not only to the ignominious resignation of its Prime Minister but also to a sense of public embarrassment in the very evident reversal of the manifest destiny of his nation.

It is difficult today to appreciate the full trauma of this event upon the national consciousness, upon the UK’s historical sense of its place in the world. It would take more than a quarter of a century to restore any vestiges of British military pride overseas, through Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War, and, even then, that triumph was remarkably short-lived. By the start of the twenty-first century, the extent of the geopolitical impact of Britain’s armed might was merely to act as a loyal confederate, almost as a vassal territory, in wars of retribution and aggression led by the United States.

Yet this early humiliation of British power also made possible the rise of a counterculture that would sweep the country over the course of the following decade and overturn an ingrained deference to the authority of the patrician establishment, through the generational, gender, sexual and social revolutions of what became known as the Swinging Sixties. This upsurge in anti-establishment sentiment would later be embodied and escalated in the rise of the punk movement during the latter half of the 1970s. This cultural shift would transform the UK’s international emphasis on the hard military, political, and economic power into an understanding of the value of soft power, as it began to export to the rest of the world the ethos of the nation of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Mini Cooper and the miniskirt, Jean Shrimpton, Emma Peel, David Bailey, and James Bond.

Nevertheless, the reactionary forces of the conservative establishment were never far behind. Indeed, it has been reported that, in 1968, during a time of popular student uprisings across western Europe, such was the fear of this growing revolutionary fervour that a distant cousin of the Queen had considered mounting a military coup d’état against an ailing Labour government. Eleven years later, that senior member of the royal family was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army.

In 1969, in protest against the dying traces of his country’s colonial legacy, John Lennon had returned the award – his membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – that the Crown had bestowed upon him some four years earlier. Eight years later, in the year of Elizabeth’s silver jubilee, the Sex Pistols topped the music charts with their anarchic anthem ‘God Save the Queen’ – in which they contended that Her Majesty was not a human being but the moronic figurehead of a fascist regime.

Such an overt irreverence toward the authority of the royal family would have been unthinkable in 1952 when Elizabeth had become queen. But the UK had by now entered a period of unprecedented social and industrial unrest, an era of strikes and power blackouts culminating, at the end of 1978, in that so-called winter of discontent, when (if the popular press were to be believed) mountains of trash rotted uncollected on dark and lawless city streets.

The defiant last gasp of the old guard had come in 1979 when an antiquated structure of entrenched privilege had, in a bid to protect itself from a highly damaging scandal, ensured the acquittal, through a rather questionable criminal justice process, of the former leader of a major political party on a charge of conspiracy to murder – specifically, of hiring a hitman to kill his blackmailing ex-boyfriend. (The inept assassin had however only succeeded in shooting his intended victim’s dog.)

This proved to be the last nail in the coffin of an archaic form of established power that had fallen entirely out of touch with the realities of modern life. In 2018, this once-taboo topic resurfaced to provide the material for a popular and surprisingly light-hearted mainstream television drama series. The moral attitudes of polite English society have certainly changed quite fundamentally over the past four decades.

More threatening to the House of Windsor, however, than all these scandals and social upheavals was the emergence at the end of the seventies of a tough new Prime Minister, the first woman to hold the position in the UK. Margaret Thatcher had entered Downing Street the month before the conclusion of that infamous murder trial and would go on to drape herself in the union flag like a latter-day incarnation of the mythical figure of Britannia. At times, Mrs. Thatcher appeared to consider herself an alternative monarch, even to the extent of using the royal 'we’ – the plural version of the first-person-singular pronoun (the use of ‘we’ for ‘I’) whose deployment is generally considered exclusive to the reigning incumbent upon the English throne. On the occasion of the birth of her first grandchild in 1989, Mrs. Thatcher had famously declared to the assembled press that ‘we have become a grandmother’. As Elizabeth’s own great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was reputed to have said, we were not amused.

The Iron Lady, as she became known, had meanwhile sold into private ownership great swathes of national utilities but had been reported to have met tacit resistance from Her Majesty herself when she had mooted the possibility of the privatization of the Royal Mail. She had presided over an increasingly fractured nation, a land of inner-city riots, a realm in which striking miners clashed violently with mounted police. A radical individualist and an advocate of marginally enlightened self-interest, she had notoriously gone so far as to announce that there was no such thing as society. Under Thatcher, an emphasis on wealth (and specifically upon new money: riches acquired rather than inherited) came to replace a value system based upon notions of noble family heritage and traditional social class, dissipating the patrician influence of the aristocracy and the old Tory grandees.

In 1981, Buckingham Palace had sought to regain the initiative from Downing Street with the immensely popular wedding of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, to a demure London socialite called Diana Spencer. Even more so than the gaudily patriotic street parties that had marked Elizabeth’s silver jubilee four years earlier, these celebrations brought with them an extraordinary degree of national euphoria. Little could anyone have realized at the time that this hastily arranged marriage would eventually lead to public accusations and confessions of infidelity, the most extraordinarily acrimonious separation and divorce, the untimely death of the people’s princess, and an increasing public distrust of the monarchy, as the fairytale romance morphed into an unmitigated nightmare.

The repercussions of this doomed relationship continue to echo to this day in an ongoing sequence of horribly public royal controversies, all the way through to the decision last month to reach a financial settlement to close a court case alleging sexual assault on the part of Her Majesty’s second son.

In June 1987, in a doubly vain attempt to revitalize their brand, four senior royals – princes and princesses all – had participated in the broadcast of what we can only describe as a comedy sports gameshow. This celebrity-strewn jamboree had been called 'It’s a Royal Knockout'. The indignities meted out on the royal family since 2016 by the Netflix series The Crown – which has, among other things, ventured into hints of Prince Philip’s marital infidelities previously considered out of bounds by the British media – or even by the scabrous satire The Windsors (which launched on British TV that same year) cannot compete with the reputational damage to the mysterious majesty of the Windsor dynasty which they inflicted upon themselves during those ninety minutes of misjudged slapstick in the late nineteen-eighties.

Such self-inflicted PR disasters were later repeated when Prince Charles admitted to adultery in a television interview in 1994, when Diana did the same the following year, when in November 2019 Prince Andrew spoke to the BBC to try to justify his friendship with a convicted paedophile, and when Prince Harry last year denounced the racism in his family in a well-choreographed conversation with Oprah Winfrey.

The family seems not to have learnt when it is best to keep their mouths firmly shut. That appears to represent a major disadvantage of such extreme power and wealth: the fact that deferential courtiers and sovereign subjects rarely tell their hereditary rulers that they might want to refrain from being such tedious nincompoops. Nobody really wants to know the heir apparent’s old-fogey views on contemporary architecture, but that has never stopped him from articulating them. Most people would probably have preferred not to hear the late Duke of Edinburgh’s outrageously derogatory remarks about the people and places he visited, yet that rarely prevented him from sharing them with anyone within earshot.

One morning in March 2016, the popular newspaper The Sun, owned by that well-known Eurosceptic, the Australian-born American billionaire Rupert Murdoch, led with a front-page headline that announced that the ‘Queen backs Brexit’. The tabloid’s claim was ostensibly based upon an unguarded remark that it said she had made at a private lunch some five years earlier. This report was immediately denied. The British monarch is constitutionally excluded from involvement in partisan politics: she must not publicly express political opinions, and she cannot even vote. Although all national legislation requires her assent, this is an automatic process: she does not in practice have the right to refuse her approval.

Three months later, a referendum resulted in the decision to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. It is unclear whether the public perception of Her Majesty’s view on the matter had made any difference to the eventual outcome. What was certain however was that this development yet again diminished Britain’s international influence and its prospects of ongoing economic prosperity.

Over the course of seventy years, Elizabeth II has watched her nation’s gradual slide from its position as a major world power. It has lost an empire, joined the world’s greatest trading bloc, and then left it. The arrival of a global pandemic and the resurgence of war in mainland Europe have, of course, only made things far, far worse.

The first Prime Minister of her reign was Winston Churchill, a revered national icon battered and tempered by the winds of war. These days, Her Majesty is required to tolerate, in weekly audiences dictated by constitutional custom, the rambling idiocy of an asinine and morally vacuous Prime Minister whose own office broke lockdown rules to party drunkenly on the eve of the funeral of her husband of nearly three-quarters of a century, a funeral at which, properly observing those lockdown rules, she had been obliged to sit alone. We may find the notion of monarchy a horribly outdated relic of an era of privilege and patronage, but we must surely still admit that this woman has, over all these decades, demonstrated an extraordinary degree of patience and perseverance in her loyal adherence to her duties.

She is the country’s longest-reigning monarch: she has so far bested the incumbency of her illustrious nineteenth-century predecessor Victoria by some seven years. As she sits there in her dimly lit palace, perched mirthless on the edge of her tarnished throne, one might imagine some of the darker thoughts that churn through her grey old head. She may well, for example, lament the decline of her nation's international power, the absurdity of its current political leadership, or the opinion common among her people that her dreary, pompous eldest son seems woefully unfit to succeed her. 

But perhaps she also considers the social freedoms and economic opportunities that have grown in Britain since those dull, illiberal, and austere years in the immediate wake of the Second World War. She may relish the flourishing of the UK’s abundance of vibrant popular cultures whose influence enjoys a real global reach, within a multicultural society that, for the most part, functions with a remarkably easy degree of mutual respect and harmony. And it may also be that she recognizes that the end of the empire was not only inevitable and necessary but also fundamentally right. 

She might even admit in the privacy of her own thoughts to the inappropriateness of that outmoded deference to inherited titles and privilege typical of the age into which she was born. She may possibly acknowledge quietly to herself, as she looks out from the twilight of England’s fortunes, out across a continent at war and a world of suffering, that the state of her nation could certainly be a great deal worse, and that we should perhaps be grateful for the relative peace and prosperity we enjoy.

And, in doing so, she might reasonably allow herself a moment’s indulgence, as she dreams of rejoining her dear departed husband in that final rest, to commend herself on her life’s work, a job well done, a bad job perhaps, resonant with centuries of illegitimate authority, a job she never sought and one which her father was known to have loathed, but one at least decently and sincerely done. And so, in that same spirit, the people of her sovereign territories might be forgiven for choosing to cry, together and perhaps for one last time, God save our Queen – and God help all of us.