Beyond the call of duty: Britain’s queen dies

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer, in London, the capital of a country in mourning. Yesterday, a moment that had been as anticipated as it was dreaded.

The BBC is interrupting its normal programmes to bring you an important announcement.

The whole of Britain, it seemed, came to a halt.

This is BBC News from London. Buckingham Palace has announced the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. In a statement, the palace said the Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and the Queen—

All the Queen's children had traveled to be with her at Balmoral Castle, her beloved private residence in Scotland. It's hard to overstate, even to explain, what and how much the Queen meant to Britain. If only because of how long she reigned. As head of state, she seemed imbued with great power from a bygone age. Yet for all the trappings and symbols of royalty, her formal role remained ceremonial. Yet she held—holds—untold power over the British spirit. A motherly figure who created the modern monarchy, presiding over a period of immense change as the sun set over the British Empire. Prime ministers and American presidents came and went, and there she remained. As the tributes poured in, one of the most common words to be heard was continuity. The other was duty. Her reign was filled with ribbon cuttings and meet-and-greets, proof of her sense of obligation to the people of Britain, all of them, not just the politicos and the elites. She was tireless in those duties, official and otherwise, right up until Tuesday, when she tapped the 15th prime minister of her reign, Liz Truss, who spoke from Downing Street last night.

Queen Elizabeth II was the rock on which modern Britain was built. Our country has grown and flourished under her reign. Britain is the great country it is today because of her. We are now a modern, thriving, dynamic nation. Through thick and thin, Queen Elizabeth II provided us with the stability and the strength that we needed. She was the very spirit of Great Britain, and that spirit will endure.

And so a king follows the Queen, her eldest son to be known as Charles III. In a written statement, he said he and his family would be comforted and sustained by the knowledge of the respect and deep affection in which the Queen was so widely held. Over the coming 10 days, there will be meticulously planned pageantry as the Queen is laid to rest and much hand-wringing about the future. There will also be fond remembrances of the past.

It's an incredibly evocative piece of film.

Let me begin by saying thank you to all the thousands of kind people who have sent me messages of goodwill.

Catherine Nixie is a Britain correspondent for The Economist. It was made in 1947.

Through the crackling, you can hear Princess Elizabeth speaking to what would become her empire on the occasion of her 21st birthday. I am grateful and I am deeply moved. She makes a famous vow. You can hear it ringing out in her high, clear, and unmistakable tones.

I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.

Few would have thought when she made that speech that she would be called upon to fulfill that promise as soon as she was. When the Queen was born, there wasn't any expectation that she would be Queen. She was merely the niece of the heir to the throne, who was Edward. And then, out of the blue, when she was still a girl, came this thing which no one could have predicted, no one would have foreseen. And that was Wallis Simpson.

King Edward and Mrs. Simpson have been pictured together on many occasions, and in this topsy-turvy world, it may be time for an American woman to marry a British king.

Wallis Simpson was a glamorous American socialite, and Elizabeth's uncle Edward fell passionately in love with her, which would've been fine had it not been for the fact that she was also divorced. And so when the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, came to the conclusion that no one was able to marry a divorcee and be king, Edward did the thing that nobody expected and abdicated. It's said that when her father found out, found out that he would now be king, he went to see his mother, and he's recorded as having said, "When I told her what had happened, I broke down and sobbed like a child." When Elizabeth heard that her father was going to be king, she began to ardently pray for a brother. She didn't get one, and she submitted willingly to her destiny.

It was announced from Sandringham at 10:45 today, February 6th, 1952, That the King, who retired to rest last night in his usual health, passed peacefully away in his sleep earlier this morning.

She had lived through the horror and the glory of the Second World War, but the glory was fading, and now the country was in a pretty grim and tedious period of austerity. And she saw her role and the monarchy's job as bolstering the country's sense of unity and continuity. And you can see this in her decision, which was a radical decision to have the coronation televised for the very first time. She did the job in the same way decade after decade, dutifully going about opening things and meeting ordinary people.

No day has ever dawned that rivals this.

And she was instantly recognizable to everyone in Britain. She was a monarch of habit. She would often wear the same brightly colored, often fuchsia suits and those same buckled brogues. You could recognize the Queen from her shoes alone.

In the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, fresh from the Queen's first investiture, are three who received the Military Medal.

Thanks to a combination of dedication and longevity and sheer hard work, the Queen was able to scatter this fairy dust over a vast number of people. As well as seeing the British public through their own difficult times, the Queen had to guide the monarchy and, of course, her own family through some challenges as well. In a single infamous year, 1992, she witnessed the public unraveling of 3 of her children's marriages and a fire at her main home of Windsor Castle.

In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.

But however bad that year of 1992 might have seemed, it would be eclipsed by what was to come. Because 5 years later, there was the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Outside St.

James's Palace, people queued quietly to record their tributes in a book of condolence. 200 people each hour stepped through the lower corridor to sign one of the 2 books which are being kept open throughout the night.

There was a general feeling after Diana's death that the Queen wasn't mourning enough publicly. This was a moment of mass outpouring of emotion from the British people. The press, who sensed less blood than bloodlessness, started their attack. And the Queen did eventually speak out, but there was a feeling for some time afterwards that it had been too little, too late.

I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief Diana's loss and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.

The Queen was always the most discreet of monarchs. She knew that to take a position on anything which might lend ear to one group of her subjects would would very likely alienate her from another group of them. To take any political position was anathema to her because her role, in her eyes, was to unify her country, not to divide it. On those occasions when she did get involved in politics publicly, it was only to heal and to unify. She had one very important visit to Ireland after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. That brought an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland. And the fact that she used some words of Irish in her speech went down beautifully.

Ar uchtaróin, agus a chéise.

Throughout her latter years, she had a lot of family difficulties, including the death of her husband, who she had always loved so passionately and who had been at her side supporting her through all of her adult life and her reign.

The Duke's coffin was borne on the shoulders orders of a bearer party from the Grenadier Guards. The coffin was covered with the Duke's personal standard and surmounted with his sword and naval cap and a wreath from the Queen.

And then there were the family troubles and the public split with her grandson Harry, who chose to leave the family and go to America. And then her son Andrew was then revealed to have links with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and that put an end to his career as a public royal. But during the pandemic, when the nation needed bringing together again, at a time when it was quite literally kept apart, she was there.

While we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.

In life and in history, the importance of luck is often underestimated. And Britain just really got lucky in 1953. It got a monarch who was wise enough to understand that she had to put her duty before herself, and who was selfless enough to do so. She did her job with extraordinary skill and tact and devotion. She is going to be a very hard act to follow.

The Queen vacated the throne at a time not so unlike the one in which she inherited it, a time of uncertainty and strife for the country and for the monarchy itself.

The second Elizabethan era is over.

Miranda Mitra is a senior editor at The Economist.

Elizabeth II was Britain's oldest and longest-reigning monarch. And to understand the amount of time that she's been on the throne, just consider that the first of the 15 prime ministers whom she advised was Winston Churchill. He was born in 1874. And the last prime minister, our current prime minister, Liz Truss, she was born in 1990. 1975. Almost everyone in Britain, at least those under the age of 80, will have no other memory of anyone else as the head of state. This is a huge change for Britain.

And how have people been reacting so far?

I went to Buckingham Palace last night in the dark and the rain. It suited the rather somber mood. People were quiet. Hundreds and hundreds Standing around in crowds, there were pagodas of the world's media around the Victoria Memorial, and there were some groups bursting into quiet renditions of God Save the Queen. There was clapping, but it felt a little uneasy. People seemed a little unsure at this great national moment. Among those we spoke to were some of London's black cab drivers who had lined up along the Mall, which is the road leading to Buckingham Palace, with their lights on.

So we're just paying our respects to the Queen. It's a tradition at London Cabs. Obviously, we've been around a long time. We did it with when Philip died. We'll just line the Mall with our lights on and show our respects. It's what we do. I mean, I love the Queen. Absolutely love the Queen. She's been a stalwart and I say, I've known her ever since I was born, and now she's not here. So I was upset earlier, and this is how I pay my respects.

Other people told us it would be hard to imagine life without her. Emotional.

We've definitely been crying.

Definitely.

And I mean, she's been a constant in my life. She's been the monarch since I was born, and, you know, she's, she's the epitome of public service, and as public servant myself, I'm, you know, I thought it was a good place to come and pay my respects.

To me personally, my dad brought me up as a little girl to appreciate, to respect the Royal Family, and I think she was a great Queen to us, a monarch, and I'm very proud to call her our Queen.

Few, if any, other figures in British public life were met with such respect. Most Britons say that they approved of their monarch.

And why is it that there is so much respect for her?

I think it was her sense of duty and her obvious diligence. Her dedication to the job made her seem perhaps staid, but those who spent private time with her speak of her rather sharp wit and her sense of fun. And when she was out and about, she was the job, though, and the job was her. And she is supposed to have said that she liked wearing bright colors and standing out in crowds because she had to be seen to be believed. She understood how important her own symbolism was for the British people and for people around the world. Her unwavering professionalism helped ensure the survival of the British monarchy and actually strengthened it through her decades on the throne. In spite of obstacles and in spite of scandals.

Is that to say that in her death, the monarchy is necessarily weakened then, do you think?

It's difficult to say. Some monarchies, especially in the Arab world, have absolute power, and then some, as in Japan and here in Britain, have power because they have none. It's about soft power. But Even among those constitutional types of monarchy, some have done better than others. The Dutch, Danish, and Swedish monarchies are fairly insignificant now. The British one, like that of the Japanese, has managed to retain a powerful hold on the public imagination, and that is largely thanks to Elizabeth II.

And given that, what do you think we can expect from the new king, King Charles III?

So Charles is stepping into very big shoes, and his role is not an easy one. I think we referred to him in The Economist once as the world's oldest intern. He has been waiting in the wings for a long time, and at moments he has been ridiculed. People at one point found his views on the environment rather eccentric, and actually now they look farsighted. I, in a previous role, covered the environment for the paper and saw him speak on related issues, and he was impassioned and also able to show leadership on an issue that is international and also one that requires sustained effort beyond the short-term political horizons of many politicians. And so someone like Charles taking the reins on the environment and on climate change issues has been very helpful.

But there's a real contrast there in that we know his views, for example, on the environment, among many other things. And with the Queen, we did not. That seems to signal a difference in what we can expect from him as king.

Yes, I think there's a question around whether he will meddle in matters and how much he will meddle. And we'll have to see what would be tolerated in the current modern environment in that regard. We're very used to having a monarch who quietly stays out of affairs and maintains dignity and keeps their own counsel.

[Speaker:GHION.AI] And what about more broadly, the international picture here? What it means for the Queen to have passed and a new era to begin?

She was the architect of the Commonwealth in many ways, and there were cracks in that club showing even before she died. It has recognized Charles, but its future now and its purpose is going to be called into question. We also know that countries such as Barbados had decided that they no longer wanted her as a head of state. It will now need to be seen whether other countries decide that they no longer want Charles as their head of state. And you have to remember that when she came in, Britain was basking in the afterglow of an empire, and now it is perhaps no more than a regional power in the North Atlantic. The Queen was a figure of unity and one of consistency. And with her gone, the difficulties with Scotland and the question of whether it wishes to remain in the Union, of problems post-Brexit in Northern Ireland, and indeed the state of relations within the royal family itself. The onus is on Charles to emulate his mother and to be as consistent and as unifying a figure as she was.

Miranda, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here on Monday.