Drolet: How Queen Elizabeth shaped the monarchy

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If there was one constant throughout the Queen’s long life, it was her unwavering devotion to duty.

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Through good times and bad, with patience and forbearance honed by a lifetime of practice, she smiled graciously and did what was expected of her, with great aplomb and without complaint.

If she ever found a ceremony too tiresome, a speech too long, an official too officious, she did not let it be seen. If she was upset by the all-too-public marital difficulties of her children and her wayward sister, she did not let it interfere with her duty to the countries and peoples of her realms.

Her dignity and singular devotion to duty earned her universal respect. This, as much as anything else, is what is being mourned with her passing.

“Duke of York’s Daughter May Some Day Be Great Britain’s Queen” trumpeted the Ottawa Citizen in announcing her birth on April 21, 1926. It was journalistic hyperbole: the daughter of a second son, Elizabeth was never destined for the throne.

Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, changed all that. It was King Edward VIII’s insistence on marrying Simpson that led him to abdicate and pass the throne along to his younger brother, Elizabeth’s father, George VI.

For the monarchy, this was a stroke of luck. George VI was dutiful, solid and earnest, and Elizabeth was cut from the same cloth. The job of Queen — she came to the throne when her father died suddenly in 1952 — was one to which she was particularly suited, both by temperament and by training. Her grandfather, George V, recognized this; before his death, he had expressed the hope that his favourite granddaughter would one day inherit his Crown.

In his book The Queen and Us, author Nigel Nicolson described the Queen’s personality as straightforward and uncomplicated. This, he said, was the essence of her appeal. Nicolson, whose family has a long history of association with royalty — his father, Harold Nicolson, wrote the official biography of George V — added that her greatest public gift was her smile.

Elizabeth differed from her father in one important way. George VI was essentially a shy man who had to work hard to overcome a stammer; she, however, was always at ease in public. She was always regal — even under stress.

In 1982, for example, she demonstrated cool courage when a deranged man called Michael Fagan managed to enter her bedroom at Buckingham Palace, wake her up and engage her in conversation. She kept him talking until police were able to take him away.

When challenged, she would occasionally show flashes of very royal temper. She was furious, for example, when the Spanish government refused to let the royal yacht Britannia dock at Gibraltar during Prince Charles’s honeymoon in 1981. “It is MY son, MY yacht and MY dockyard!” she exclaimed.

“Royalty inspires awe, and awe ties the tongue,” noted Nicolson. “To meet her is not like meeting any other celebrity. I once saw a man so overcome by her presence that he curtsied instead of bowing.”

“If she had a fault,” he added, “it was the narrowness of her interests. She has never enjoyed opera, ballet or classical concerts. It is said that she rarely reads a book.”

She was inclined to other pursuits. When she was still a child, Elizabeth famously announced that were she not destined to be Queen, she would like to be “a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs.”

Despite being a queen, to a large extent she attained her goal. Dogs — in particular, corgis — were her constant companions, horses her passion, and the country life was in her blood.

On her own, she developed her knowledge of horses, and in particular the breeding and racing of thoroughbreds. “Her knowledge of them is more than a hobby,” noted Nicolson. “It is an expertise.”

Many people around the Queen felt she had an affinity for animals in part because they allowed her an emotional outlet: They reacted to her as a person, not as Queen.

She was not emotionally demonstrative herself.

Her governess, Marion Crawford, wrote in The Little Princesses that like her father, “she was reserved and quiet about her feelings. If you once gained her love and affection, you had it for ever, but she never gave it easily.”

In her personal tastes, the Queen was a simple — even frugal — person. She did not relish the comforts and luxuries so enjoyed by the Queen Mother. Unlike her daughters-in-law, she was never a clothes horse; her own preference was for comfortable country tweeds. She wore bright clothes to public events so she could be seen.

She had been brought up simply. “No two children had a simpler outlook on life,” wrote Crawford of young Princess Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret. “Early to bed and very few treats or outings, and those of an extremely unsophisticated nature, were the common rule.”

And Crawford pointed out that life in a series of palaces did not automatically translate into a love of luxury.

“People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart could desire and that people who live there do so in absolute comfort,” added Crawford. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Life in a palace rather resembles camping in a museum.”

Elizabeth had the extreme good fortune to fall in love, at a young age, with an entirely appropriate man.

She first noticed Prince Philip of Greece in 1939, when she was 13 and he was 18 — “a fair-haired boy, rather like a Viking, with a sharp face and piercing blue eyes,” in the words of Marion Crawford. Elizabeth was smitten. There never was anyone else.

An officer serving with the British navy during the Second World War, Philip occasionally managed a visit. The couple married in 1947, when Elizabeth was only 21.

Though forthright to the point of brash, and with a reputation for utterances that could surprise, shock or even offend, Philip proved to be a good choice. A descendant of the monarchs of Greece, Denmark and Russia, he shared his wife’s devotion to duty. It was something he understood innately and found easy to accept.

For all his faults, Philip was always the Queen’s greatest booster. He remained fiercely loyal to her to the end of his own life, in 2021. They were a team.

As with any marriage, there were ups and downs, not to mention the occasional argument. But the foundation of the relationship remained solid. In fact, many royal watchers sensed that the couple grew closer in their later years, particularly as they faced problems with their adult children.

Those problems were of gargantuan proportions.

The worst years were 1992 — the famous “Annus Horribilis” in which Windsor Castle burned and her sons Charles and Andrew separated from their wives — and 1997, when public reaction to the dramatic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, shook the whole monarchical edifice.

At first, the Queen and her courtiers could not — or would not — see and react to the unprecedented outpouring of emotion that followed the sudden death of the beautiful princess who had become the Queen of Hearts. Their inherent reserve and belief in tradition was too strong.

But no institution survives without adapting. And once the enormity of it all sank in, the Queen and her court were able to take action that did much to restore the monarchy’s place in public esteem.

Diana’s death, so poignantly portrayed in the film The Queen, removed a thorn in the side of the monarchy.

After Diana’s death, the royal family took a page from her book and attempted, with a good measure of success, to be in better touch with the public. And the Queen’s son and heir, Charles, found happiness with his second wife, Camilla.

The Queen’s own life, unlike her children’s, was largely without controversy. Perhaps the most serious issues of her reign that directly affected the Queen herself concerned money.

Her main expenditures were covered by what is called a Civil List. It had been traditional to set a monarch’s annual Civil List income at the start of a reign and leave it unchanged. But the Queen reigned for so long that inflation and rising wages took their toll. In 1969, Philip famously told an American television interviewer that the royal family might soon go into the red: “We may have to move into smaller premises, who knows?”

There were many who argued that the spectacle of the monarchy provided good value, but the issue of money continued to hound the Queen. As with other issues, she accepted with good grace that times had changed: In 1992, it was announced that the Queen would begin paying income tax on her private income, and also underwrite the working expenses of most members of the royal family.

“It has been said that the Queen has never made a mistake,” wrote Nicolson. “She is well advised, and her natural instinct is to play safe.”

Still, the shortness of the list of failures, he adds, is extraordinary for a reign of 70 years, and it cannot be attributed to her advice and caution alone: “She uses her judgment too.”

Being monarch is a relentless job. Even at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, the Queen was never on holiday. There were always documents to read, papers to sign, and ministers to meet. It never seemed to get her down. She had, wrote Nicolson, “an actress’s determination that the show must go on.”

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PHOTO GALLERY: Queen Elizabeth II in Ottawa over the years

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Her legacy extends beyond the shores of Britain.

The Queen always took her role as head of the Commonwealth seriously. In many ways the role gave her more pleasure — and allowed her to exert more influence — than her role as Queen of England, particularly as her subjects became more critical at home.

Thanks to decades of trips and visits, she developed a deeper knowledge of the Commonwealth than any of her prime ministers could ever have, as well as relationships with Commonwealth leaders. It gave her great moral suasion. What she lost in power as her reign progressed, she gained in affection.

“Her authority derives from her respect and care for her own office, which she never forgets is greater than herself, and from her unremitting diligence,” wrote Robert Lacy in his book, Royal.

“Maintaining her Commonwealth family of nations has been a genuine triumph against all odds. Who could have foreseen a peacefully elected black South African president riding down the Mall with Elizabeth II at her side before the 20th century was out?”

It is impossible to exaggerate how much the world changed over the course of Elizabeth’s reign.

In 1952, at the time of her accession, there was still no television in Canada, no satellites transmitting pictures across the oceans, and certainly no Internet. People read newspapers and listened to the radio and watched newsreels of events days or weeks old.

In the 19th century, British constitutional expert Walter Bagehot argued that to be effective, the monarchy should retain an aura of mystery. Daylight, he said, should not be let in on the magic. The modern world demanded otherwise, and Elizabeth’s reign marked a transition from a coolly distant monarchy to one much more open.

The Queen was occasionally criticized for not moving fast enough to keep up with the changing times. Paradoxically, because the times changed so much during her long reign, her very steadfastness had a reassuring quality about it. It was a mark of stability in times of turbulence. In the end she moved, but at her own dignified pace.

For the Queen, the expression “It’s lonely at the top” was never an abstract concept. She lived her whole life cushioned from many harsh realities. She had few friends outside the royal circle.

Yet paradoxically, in a world in which we often don’t know our neighbours, we could feel we knew the Queen. She became a cultural talisman, the focal point of a multi-generational saga everyone could identify with. Hers was one of the few faces the whole world instantly recognized.

Her passing severs a tangible link to a world now vanished.

Daniel Drolet is a former Ottawa Citizen journalist.