Reconfigured in 1949 to accommodate newly independent Asian republics, the Commonwealth was the empire’s sequel, and a vehicle for preserving Britain’s international influence.
Initially imagined as a consortium of the “white” settler colonies ( championed by the South African prime minister Jan Smuts), the Commonwealth had its origins in a racist and paternalistic conception of British rule as a form of tutelage, educating colonies in the mature responsibilities of self-government. “The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past,” she insisted in her Christmas Day message of 1953. On Coronation Day in 1953, The Times of London proudly broke the news of the first successful summiting of Mount Everest by the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and the New Zealander Edmund Hillary, calling it a “happy and vigorous augury for another Elizabethan era.” The imperialistic tenor of the news notwithstanding, Queen Elizabeth II would never be an empress in name - the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 stripped away that title - but she inherited and sustained an imperial monarchy by assuming the title of head of the Commonwealth. In 1947, Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday on a royal tour in South Africa, delivering a much-quoted speech in which she promised that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” She was on another royal tour, in Kenya, when she learned of her father’s death. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged. By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. For the queen was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence. She has been a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world.
The queen embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties - her final public act was to appoint her 15th prime minister - and for her unflagging performance of them, she will be rightly mourned. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs - which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. She had a different birthday for each role - the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June - and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution.
“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
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