Innholdsfortegnelse for The Queen i The Queen

When Elizabeth II was born in April 1926, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister, the General Strike was a few weeks away and the scars of the First World War were strongly evident in British society. Over the next 90 years, Britain experienced tremendous changes, but one thing has remained constant – the Queen, our longest-reigned and longest-lived monarch. In this collector’s edition from BBC History Magazine, we’ve assembled a group of expert historians to explore the story of those nine decades – inside and outside the palace walls. You’ll discover the Queen’s journey from a young princess with no expectations of the crown, through her wartime service, marriage and family, to her recent jubilee triumphs. At the same time, we chart some of the transformations that have occurred in the…

Philip, even at this early stage, told his naval commander that he might marry the future queen H er husband, said Queen Elizabeth II in her golden wedding speech, “has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years” – and what a lot of years it has turned out to be. This is the longest royal marriage in recorded history. Her grandson, the Duke of Cambridge, says the support that Prince Philip has given the Queen is something of which she often speaks in private too. This partnership has been one of the great achievements of the Queen’s reign. And it is all the more striking because the choice of consort for a female monarch has always been a vexed one – so vexed that, back in the…

Matilda confounded the traditional views of women in medieval society, inspiring a new model of queenship 1 Matilda of Flanders (c1031–83) William the Conqueror’s wife raised the role of queen to a whole new level The diminutive wife of England’s most famous conquering king, William of Normandy, Matilda (shown left), is one of the earliest and best examples of a queen who asserted royal authority by respecting and upholding the traditions of the monarchy. In contrast to her husband, the illegitimate son and heir of the Duke of Normandy, Matilda was of impeccable pedigree and could trace her descent to most of the royal houses of Europe – including Alfred the Great. Thanks in no small part to her royal blood, as well as her understanding of the traditions associated…

It is possible to take almost any 90 years from the last few hundred to show how exponential has been the pace of historical change in all areas of human life. But the 90 years spanned by the life of the current Queen have not only witnessed an unavoidable acceleration in the rate of change but have also embraced a cluster of fundamental alterations in the way the global order is shaped. The challenge for the historian is separating out those more fundamental changes from the progressive movements in science, technology, medicine, education and economic development whose roots lie much further back in time. These perennial patterns of change are important enough. Progress since 1926, when Elizabeth was born, in all branches of the natural and medical sciences has been…

Virtually all other institutions have declined in esteem over the last 70 years On the morning of 6 February 1952, when the BBC broadcast on the radio that King George VI had died at Sandringham overnight in his sleep, men stopped their cars, got out and stood to attention as a mark of respect. The septuagenarian prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, spending the morning in bed with a cigar and working on state papers, burst into tears when Sir Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary at Buckingham Palace, took a taxi round to Downing Street to break the news. Churchill exclaimed: “Bad news? The worst!” There was a sense of genuine national shock. Despite the fact that the king had been seriously ill with cancer for some time and had…

On 9 September 2015, Queen Elizabeth II became the longestreigning monarch in British history and, at 90, seems to lack neither the physical nor mental powers to continue for some time yet. Comparisons with the previous longest-reigning monarch, Victoria, are inevitable and, in at least four respects, illuminating. To begin with, Victoria saw herself as the daughter of a soldier and therefore a ‘warrior queen’, a monarch in whose hands defence and foreign policy rested. By contrast, Elizabeth is the daughter of a reluctant, hesitant king – a man who, before he unexpectedly became king, and substantially after too, looked to the philanthropic side of monarchy. This has also been the core of his daughter’s role: even on the cusp of her 10th decade, in 2015 the Queen undertook 341…

Shortly before 3am on 21 April 1926, a little girl was born to Prince Albert, Duke of York and his wife Elizabeth. The new arrival’s exhausted mother had been hoping for a girl, while her father could barely contain his joy. “We always wanted a child,” Albert wrote afterwards, “to make our happiness complete.” Few could have guessed it at the time, but that little girl would become perhaps the most recognisable British face of the century. In many ways, her life could hardly have been more different from the experiences of most ordinary people. Elizabeth II has never shopped at Asda or at Aldi; never spent a week at Butlin’s or at Center Parcs; never filled in a pools coupon or gambled on the Lottery; never worried about her…

Elizabeth was conscientious, dutiful and orderly – she couldn’t sleep without unsaddling and feeding her nursery horses and lining them up neatly In April 1926, Britain was on the brink of the General Strike called by the TUC. There had been an economic perfect storm: the postwar crash in coal prices, combined with the government putting Britain on the gold standard, had put mining under pressure. After a government commission recommended reducing miners’ wages, the stage was set for an all-out strike of miners and other workers covered by the TUC, including railway and transport workers. But despite being in a crisis, the home secretary Sir William Joynson Hicks could not be excused witnessing the legitimacy of a royal baby. The Duke and Duchess of York – George V’s second…

Queen Victoria hated babies. Though she had nine of her own, she despised being pregnant, viewed breastfeeding with disgust and found her offspring to be “ugly” and “frog-like”. Maternal she was not. Fortunately, attitudes towards royal children have changed dramatically over the last 170 years. Following Prince Charles’s christening, the then Princess Elizabeth wrote to a friend, saying of her son: “Don’t you think he is quite adorable? I still can’t believe he is really mine.” Gone is the belief that children should be seen and not heard, and with each new generation modern philosophies have been embraced. A relatively recent mother, the Duchess of Cambridge appears to have been given unofficial permission to focus almost all of her time on her young family while carrying out a smattering of…

Prince Albert’s earnest striving is in marked contrast to his brother’s callous disregard for duty 1 The King’s Speech (Dir: Tom Hooper, 2010) With Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce Princess Elizabeth appears in only a few scenes of The King’s Speech, which is set from 1925 to 1939, but the film portrays events that would frame her life. Certainly one of the key developments of her life was the growth of mass media and the demands that this placed on the monarchy. In a scene set in 1934, George V completes his Christmas Day radio broadcast, and then vents his resentment to his son Albert (the future George VI). “In the past, all a king had to do was look respectable in uniform and not fall…

Dickie Arbiter is Queen Elizabeth’s former press secretary, a seasoned television and radio commentator and author of On Duty with the Queen (Blink, 2014). Dickie looks at life within Buckingham Palace past and present on page 44. Victoria Arbiter, the daughter of Dickie, is an experienced broadcaster who has served as royal commentator for CBS, ABC and CNN. On page 8 she takes us through the milestones in the Queen’s life, then on page 50 she examines the tension between family life and royal duties. Stephen Bates is a writer and former royal correspondent of The Guardian newspaper. His latest book is Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best-Known Brand (Aurum, 2015). On page 66 Stephen looks at public attitudes to the Queen’s jubilees, then on page 108 he examines the modernisation of…