As the British celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s sixty years on the throne, Americans congratulate them and share the celebratory moment. She isn’t, thank goodness, our queen, but she is a symbol of some enduring British qualities and accomplishments that are worth remembering and celebrating at a time like this.
This year Queen Elizabeth passes George III as the second longest reigning monarch in British history; another four years on the throne would see her pass Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning monarch in the history of a crown that goes back to the dim days of the Alfreds and Ethelreds.
The durability of monarchical government is in itself nothing to celebrate, but what is remarkable about the British monarchy has been its capacity to adapt to change — and the ability of the English and British people to mix reverence for tradition with the capacity for innovation. This is a queen who knighted Beatles, a conservative traditionalist who presided gracefully over a nation in the midst of rapid and sometimes almost overwhelming change. She survived the Blitz in London; Winston Churchill was her first prime minister; she accepted Anthony Eden’s resignation after the Suez debacle, saw the British Empire melt away, entertained the Kennedys, and managed the storm over Princess Di.
In all of that, she was true to the best instincts of her precedessors. The British monarchs kept their thrones when so many royal houses lost theirs because they were better at reading their people — and responding creatively to their demands — than were so many of their haughtier continental colleagues. In return, the British people have repaid their royals with loyalty and, better still, good sense. If the monarchs were wise enough to bow gracefully before the winds of change, the British people were level headed enough to avoid (most of the time) the kind of violent and destructive upheavals that, in so much of Europe and the world, have aimed to build utopias with one great leap, and ended by the construction of tyrannies worse than those they sought to overthrow.
America owes much more to the British monarchy than we usually care to admit. Between Elizabeth I’s dispatch of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists to the new world and the revolution, eight kings and three queens reigned here as well as there (Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II, William, Mary II, Anne, George I, George II, George III). In their wisdom and in their folly, these kings and queens and their supporters and opponents protected the US in its infancy and stimulated the development of the political tradition and the economic culture to which, under Providence, we owe so much of our present freedom and prosperity.
Even in rebellion against George III, Americans invoked the traditions of liberty we learned from the English overthrow of James II and installation of William and Mary. Our Declaration of Independence was an adaptation of the English declaration that justified the overthrow of James; the political heirs of England’s own Glorious Revolution denounced England’s attempt to suppress the American Revolution and, in the end, helped negotiate an end to the war.
The British monarchy was long a bogeyman in the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s most bitter charge against Alexander Hamilton and John Adams was that they were secret monarchists. The constitutional requirement that inspired the birthers (which requires that only a native born US citizen can become president) was written partly to ensure that no British prince could ever be installed in power here. When George III finally died in 1820, the American minister in London at the time put the US embassy into mourning at his own expense; he knew that Congress would never reimburse mourning expenses for a king whose armies fought two wars against the United States. But relations began to mend; the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) took the US by storm on his visit on the eve of our Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s surviving son would be known to newspaper readers as the “Prince of Rails” — due both to his father’s connections with rail splitting as a young man and rail roads as a lawyer, and to his own career as the president of the Pullman Car Company. The young Lincoln also served as ambassador to Great Britain from 1889 t0 1893 and from his time on, relations between Buckingham Palace and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have been generally cordial.
The deepest hostility to the House of Windsor remained among Irish-Americans, many of whom fled to the US following their involvement in the struggle for Irish independence. Queen Elizabeth’s 2011 state visit to Dublin, where an Irish band played “God Save the Queen” as she was warmly received as the first British monarch to visit republican Ireland, helped heal this last remaining breach.
Today, Americans don’t want the Windsors back, but most of us are glad to see them hanging on. They function as a kind of virtual royal family here; we follow their affairs and their gossip (and not a few mothers daydream about having a daughter snare a prince) and, in the case of the Queen, we admire the dignity and constancy she has shown through sixty years of dedication to the public good. Sixty years of relentless public scrutiny have not seen her tainted by any personal or financial scandal. Whatever her private thoughts and judgements — which one suspects are often quite sharp — she has fulfilled her mandate to serve as the non-political head of state without any serious fault.
If all of us can do our duty in our place in life as well as Queen Elizabeth II as done in hers, this world will be a better place. As the bearer of an ancient title, the sovereign of our mother country and the Queen of some of our oldest and closest allies around the world, she deserves our respect. As a woman who has done her duty in good times and bad she has earned our admiration and our thanks. Her dignity and her steady devotion to duty may not be the most fashionable of qualities but they are examples to the whole world.
This Day of Jubilee is one that even democratic, republican Americans can celebrate, and on this day at least, we join our British friends and allies in the prayer: God save the Queen!