My mother was born a mere five days later.
Queen Elizabeth II is the longest serving monarch in British history. She grew up in a United Kingdom that was one of the most powerful nations in Europe and she came of age young, as many English did, due to the Second World War in which she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Services. At the time of her birth to her parents, George and Elizabeth, the chances of her becoming monarch were remote. The King at the time was King Edward VIII, who remained so until 1936 at which time he abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Therefore, for the first ten years of her life, "Princess Lilybet" was on a different path in life. Her name, therefore, was not intended to bring about a second Queen Elizabeth, recalling the controversial final Tudor monarch.
Princess Elizabeth in 1933.
She became Queen in 1952, following the death of her father, and remained Queen for seventy year, serving in that role with dignity, if occasionally with criticism, as the United Kingdom ceased to be an Empire and became a junior partner of the United States, then a member of the European Community and then Union, and then a country free of it. She also went from being a young princess whose parents basically saved the monarchy, to seeing it threatened again as the media came to focus increasingly on their private lives, exposing conduct, which she did not participate in, which royals often had, but which had remained hidden from public eye. In her final years, she delivered a speech regarding COVID 19 which many Americans lamented that their own leaders could not, making her appear to be so much more dignified than our own, that an American public that always somewhat regarded the British throne as their own, sort of, did more so.
God save the Queen.
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