The reign of Isabel II had completed fifty years in 2002. That same year she had lost her sister Margarita, who died at 71, and her mother who lived to be 101. The celebration brought together one million people in The Mall who listened to the national anthem performed by Queen guitarist Brian May, from the roof of Buckingham Palace. The darkest days of the monarchy after the divorce of Carlos and Lady Di and her lack of official reaction to her death were behind her. Perhaps it was time to make way for the next generation…
The sovereign swept away the abdication run run in one sentence: “I’m going to carry on to the end” (I’m going to get to the end). Elizabeth II told George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently retired. We are in 2003, a year in which the sovereign went to the hospital to treat her knee and an injury to her left eyebrow.
It was a confirmation because already in 1952, in her first address as queen, on February 8, she had said: “My heart is too moved today to say anything more than I will always work, like my father did, to uphold constitutional government and enhance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples. I pray to God to help me fulfill with dignity the heavy task that has fallen upon me so early in my life.”
[En directo: Reacciones y última hora tras la muerte de Isabel II]
The counterpoint to the gravity of the Queen was put, many times, by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, a nerd. “Where did you get that hat?” It was the first thing that came out of her big mouth, at the end of the coronation ceremony, in June 1953. She was referring to the imperial crown that has 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and 269 pearls.
Meeting with Monroe
Not everything is solemn in Elizabeth II. After greeting Marilyn Monroe at a film premiere in London in 1956, she confided in a woman to a friend: “I felt sorry, she was so nervous that her lipstick had run“.
In 1961, Elizabeth II scored two indisputable diplomatic successes. Putting aside fears about her safety, she traveled to Ghana, which had just gained independence from her. Looking for the country to remain within the Commonwealth, she did not hesitate to dance with President Kwame Nkrumah. Seeing the images, which went around the world, Martin Luther King commented: “This photograph has done more for human rights than a thousand speeches”. The same year, on the first trip by an English monarch to India since independence in 1947, he gathered 250,000 people to hear him speak in New Delhi. Not even Philip of Edinburgh’s comment that he wanted to “kill a tiger” tarnished the Queen’s personal success.
Elizabeth II, last queen of the Empire and first of pop culture
On July 30, 1966, he presented Bobby Moore, captain of the English soccer team, with the cup as the winner of the World Cup against West Germany (4-2). Isabel praised the “spirit, commitment and pride”. Three months later, she put a slate on her career that she later deeply regretted: It took her eight days to visit a Welsh mining town where a coal pit collapse killed 116 children and 28 adults.
a big crown
His successor, Charles III, was invested as heir a distant year in 1969. The coronation ceremony as Prince of Wales went reasonably well after a disastrous rehearsal in which the Queen and her son burst out laughing because the crown was too big for the the prince. “It was like blowing out a candle with a candle snuffer.”
Carlos III inherits a (little) United Kingdom at 73 and in the greatest crisis since the coronation of his mother
“Lady Diana is one of ours” Isabel II wrote to a friend after the wedding in July 1981 with Carlos. She was unaware that her daughter-in-law, on the eve of the ceremony at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, had been about to cancel it all after learning that the Prince of Wales had given his old friend, Camilla Parker Bowles, a bracelet engraved with the initials of their intertwined nicknames.
“Sir, you have the wrong room,” the queen said one day in 1982 to an Intruder who broke into the palace to the Queen’s room. Isabel and the guy who was standing at the foot of the bed when she woke up talked for the seven long minutes it took for palace security to arrive.
“If I wore beige, no one would know who I am” he replied in 1990 when asked why he always wore bright colors at all ceremonies.
“Annus horribilis”
In 1993 the recordings, of course illegal, of intimate conversations, scatologically intimate, between Carlos and his then-lover, Camilla Parker, were published in two Sunday papers. “I would like to be your tampax” said the king today to the queen consort today. Carlos and Diana had announced their separation at the end of 1992. Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson had made the break public in March of the same year after some compromising photos of Fergie and her lover circulated. And on top of that, Windsor Castle burned down. The Queen used Latin to summarize the unfortunate 92 as “Annus horribilis”
“What I am going to tell you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I tell you from my heart”… This is how the televised address begins after the death of Lady Di and fiancé Dodi al Fayed in a car accident on August 31, 1997. Five days of official silence, with the royal family barricaded in Balmoral as tens of thousands of bouquets piled up outside the gates of Buckhingham Palace. “I want to pay tribute to Diana. She was an intelligent and exceptional human being…”
In 2014, he walked through a meadow at the Tower of London ‘planted’ with 888,246 red poppies to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War. In her Christmas address, she commented: “The only possible reaction when seeing them and walking among them was silence. For each flower, a life”.
During the first days of confinement, in 2020, due to the Covid epidemic, he concluded with a message of hope: “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again, we will meet again.”
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