When Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952 Britain, though left bankrupt and reeling from the Second World War, was still a major global power.
By the end of her reign in 2022, the longest in Britain's history, the nation and its place in the world was in a markedly different place.
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Sir David Cannadine speaks to Danny Bird about the dizzying changes of the Second Elizabethan Age.
From devictorianisation to deindustrialisation, how did the UK change around the monarchy?
And how did the monarchy respond?
David, when Elizabeth II became Queen in 1952, there was real talk of a new Elizabethan age.
Looking back, was that ever a meaningful comparison, or was that more a reflection of post-war optimism than reality?
I think the notion of a new Elizabethan age, which didn't of course last all that long, was an attempt to to believe that the advent of a young, glamorous queen, whose coronation of course coincided with the British conquering Mount Everest, did portend a new Elizabethan age of adventure.
Of derring-do, James Bond made his first appearance at the same time as the coronation, And British Railways, as they then were put on a train called the Elizabethan which ran nonstop from London to Edinburgh.
And so there was a sense of excitement about the second Elizabeth.
But it didn't last because, of course, not many years after the coronation there came the Suez de Barclay, which made it pretty plain that Britain could no longer act as an independent force in the world in the way that it had done earlier.
Antony Eden, the prime minister, had to resign in humiliation.
And of course, shortly afterwards, John Greig, Lord Altrincham, wrote a very critical piece of the monarchy in general and of the queen in particular.
So the new Elizabethan era lasted about three years and really we didn't hear much of it thereafter.
Was there ever any sense of the Queen herself being aware of that expectation on her that she was the head of this new era?
I think she was fairly skeptical about that.
What she really cared about, of course, was her pledge of lifelong service and duty, which she had made in 1947, when she was visiting South Africa with her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, was 21 years old and she made this famous broadcast where she pledged the whole of her life, be it long or short, to the service of the great imperial and Commonwealth family.
And I think her notion of her own life was one of duty and service.
I think her notion of the Commonwealth, as she expressed it in that broadcast, was that it would be a great global force for good in the world.
And while I think she cared deeply about the Commonwealth and worked hard at being its head, it never quite delivered on that expectation.
And Suez back to.
That not only made plain that Britain was no longer a great world power, but the Commonwealth was split over Britain's action at the time of the Suez Crisis.
And, in a sense, from then on, it was never quite going to be the global unified force for good.
I'd like to zone in on something you mentioned a little bit earlier on, which was when the Queen became the head of state.
She was obviously very young.
She represented this new dynamism, especially after the drab years of the Second World War and obviously, the fact that things like rationing continued long after the war had ended.
Had she been an older person when she became Queen?
Do you think that would have worked against her in terms of the visual propaganda of this new reign, this new beginning in Britain's history?
Well, it's certainly the case, embodied of course in the Cecil Beaton photographs taken at the time of the coronation, that she was very glamorous.
She was very young.
And that certainly played to the wish, the broader wish for a kind of new beginning for Britain after the rigors of war and the austerity of peace.
There isn't any doubt of that.
Would she have done better had she been 20 years older from the beginning?
Well, as it were, we'll never know.
But it's worth noticing, for example, that had in fact the Duke of Windsor, her uncle, remained as king but not had any children, she would not have succeeded to the throne for another 20 years than when she did.
And as it were, she then would have been older.
But of course, that didn't happen.
It is an interesting counterfactual.
One of the striking notions about Elizabeth II's time on the throne is that she didn't so much shape events as respond to them.
So how should we understand her reign as quietly influential or fundamentally reactive?
Well, I think probably both.
I mean, of course, there is a difference between monarchs who rule – Catherine the Great Peter, the Great Maria Theresa –
Monarchs who reign, who are thought to be constitutional monarchs, and the work of government is done by the prime minister.
And that's the position in Britain, memorably described by Walter Badgett as the division between the dignified and the efficient parts of the constitution.
The dignified parts being the monarchy and the House of Lords, the efficient parts being the cabinet and the House of Commons.
Well, Queen Elizabeth II was certainly dignified, even if not all of her prime ministers were necessarily efficient.
But it does mean that on the whole it was a reactive monarchy, that the dynamic of events was elsewhere than on the whole in Buckingham Palace.
I think that's certainly true.
But part of the process of being reactive was nevertheless to accommodate to the changes occurring in Britain and to Britain's place in the world and to the Commonwealth, but also to adapt in terms of some aspects of the monarchy itself.
So, for example, in the late 1950s, the presentation of debutantes at court was abolished.
In the 1990s, the Queen started paying income tax on her private income.
Arguably, in both cases, those things should perhaps have happened earlier than they did.
But nevertheless, they did happen.
And of course, she had to react to the fact that the Royal Yacht was not replaced.
And that, in a way, made the monarchy less of a global institution.
But on the other hand, there would be those who think it would be necessary downsizing.
So there was a complex dynamic, I think, between the broader changes in Britain and the broader changes in Britain's place in the world and the evolution of the empire to Commonwealth.
And the way in which, to some extent, the queen did adapt to that, which she certainly did.
Whether she could have adapted more rapidly, I think, will always be a matter of debate.
Somebody once said the queen never put a foot wrong, but she hardly ever put a foot forward, that she always proceeded very carefully and circumspectly.
And on the whole, I think that served her well.
I'd like to look into this a little bit further, because you say that it was quite a reactive monarchy in the sense that the head of state, ie
Elizabeth II at the time, had no control over events.
She was responding to the world that was shifting around her.
But on the flip side of that, how unusual was it for the British monarchy to have survived and remained relatively stable well into the latter half of the 20th century and beyond, when so many other monarchies had disappeared by the year 2000.
Do you think that was entirely down to Elizabeth II's stewardship, or were there other factors involved?
Well, it's certainly the case that across the 20th century monarchy around the world wasn't exactly a growth industry.
The First World War saw the end of the great monarchies of Russia and Austria, Hungary and Germany.
The Second World War and its aftermath saw the disappearance of the Balkan monarchies monarchies in Italy, in Egypt and in Iraq.
And the only countervailing factor was the restoration of the Spanish monarchy in the 1970s.
So monarchy was not a growth industry in the 20th century.
And the survival of the British monarchy, along with the Scandinavian monarchies, Belgium and the Netherlands, stand out against the general trend of that century, which was anti-monarchical.
Why then did the British monarchy survive?
I think part of the answer is that it was a fluke that Britain was on the winning side in both the First and the Second World Wars.
And I think that mattered enormously.
The reason the Austro-Hungarian and the German monarchies disappeared was because of spectacular military defeats in the First World War.
And the consequences of the Second World War were equally inimical to the Italian and the Balkan monarchies.
Britain was on the winning side in both wars.
And there are various explanations for that, ironically part of which, of course, is American support in the First World War and even more in the Second, so that the United States, which had thrown the British monarchy out in a sense, came to the British monarchy's rescue in the First and Second World Wars.
So I think that's a very large part of the answer the sheer good fortune that Britain was on the winning side.
And that has meant that we're constantly told that whatever the latest crisis is could spell the end of the House of Windsor.
But I've lost count of the number of times when that has been predicted and portended.
But if you actually ask the question now, what would it take to get rid of the British monarchy?
It would be the crowd storming Buckingham Palace and taking them off to the guillotine.
That's not going to happen.
Parliamentary legislation abolishing the monarchy, that's not going to happen.
A referendum voting the monarchy down, that's not going to happen.
Or they just pack it in and go off to Sandringham to breed horses.
And that's not going to happen.
So I think it's victory in war plus inertia.
Now, the shorthand term for all of that from another perspective is probably loyalty.
But the balance between those explanations is, I think, an interesting one to try to get right.
Because of course there is this contradiction as well that following the Second World War, we live in an era of democracy.
We live in an era where there is a greater focus on mass politics and the idea that the people are sovereign.
How do you think Britain, following the Second World War and right up until the end of Elizabeth II's reign, have managed to square the idea of the hereditary principle still being in place for the head of state whilst having this parliamentary democracy?
It is a good question.
And I mean, there is a sort of serious answer to it.
However well one tries to put it, it still seems slightly strange.
But it's back to Walter Badgett and the dignified and the efficient part of the Constitution that it's probably a better arrangement to have a head of state and a chief executive and for them not to be the same person as, of course, in the case of the American presidency they are.
The American president is both head of state and chief executive.
And there might perhaps be thoughts as to whether that's the right way to do things.
So there is an argument that it's better to split those jobs up, and the chief executive is chosen by the people electing their representatives to parliament.
And it comes – it follows from that.
And if you want a head of state who is in some sense separate from that world and above that world, then why not make it hereditary?
Not everybody buys into that argument.
And one could argue that it's contrary to sense or reason, but it seems to work.
I wonder as well if – just to delve into this question a little bit further – whether the personality, the figure of Elizabeth II herself, and the fact that she was in the position she was in for seven decades, over a period of enormous changes socially politically culturally, whether had a less benign figure been there.
Do you think there may have been more open questioning of retaining that system?
Well, I suppose that's possible, but we'll never know.
What I think became very important about her was that she was just around for so long.
She was on the throne for 70 years, the longest reigning monarch with the exception of Louis XIV.
But that's a cheat anyway, because he became king at the age of four and wasn't doing much by way of government for a few years after that.
But that sense that she provided some kind of stable reassurance, as so much else changed in Britain and so much else changed about Britain's place in the world.
I think that became enormously important as her reign unfolded and as she seemed to keep going on and on, and on and on.
I was born in 1950 and I don't have any recollection of King George VI.
So by the time she died, I had no recollection of any other person ever having been sovereign.
And that's, of course, even more true for people younger than me.
And I think the fact that she was there for so long of itself was enormously important.
And I think the fact that we knew very little about what she really thought about anything, even though we like to think we did, was also very important that she managed to keep her own counsel on almost every subject across those 70 years, which is an astonishing achievement.
So it might be true, if somebody had done it differently, that esteem for the monarchy would have been less.
But we'll never know.
And of course, we should remember also that there were some pretty sticky patches.
The late 50s after Suez were not a good time.
And of course, the 1990s were a very difficult time.
Yes.
And people, of course, predicted the end of the House of Windsor many, many times in the 1990s.
But, you know, 30 years on, it's still there.
I have my own theory, which is the fact that, as the then Princess Elizabeth was so associated, and the royal family by extension, with the finest hour and Britain's victory during the Second World War and that moment, as I guess a national, almost the founding myth of modern Britain in many respects, and the royal family's association with that, the fact that they didn't abandon the country, that they lived through the Blitz, etc.
That esteem that they were then held in, then carried into the new reign.
And then I think that kind of acted as a footing from Britain of the 1950s, the post-war era, right up until the end of her life in 2022.
Yes, I think that's right.
I think that the Second World War was certainly the making of George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
There were many doubts as to whether they were really and, in particular, he whether he was up to the job or not.
He lacked the charisma of his elder brother.
He had a terrible stammer.
Could they make it work?
And I think the trip to the US early in 1939 helped persuade them that they could.
But it was in a sense the Blitz and the Second World War that really was the makings of the monarchy in its current guise.
And of course –
Queen Elizabeth II was the last great link with the finest hour of the Second World War.
And I think that was enormously important.
Of course, one has to be a little bit careful about it.
I mean, although they went to Buckingham Palace and Buckingham Palace was bombed and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother said, that means we can look the East End firmly in the face.
Of course, they spent every night at Windsor.
And although Queen Elizabeth also famously said the children won't leave the country without me, I won't leave without the king and the king will never leave.
In fact, of course, there were very careful plans made to evacuate them to Canada.
If needs be, safe houses were assigned on the route to Liverpool, and they would have headed off to Canada.
But that didn't happen.
And so the monarchy did seem to be a great symbol of stability, focus of loyalty.
And as the Queen, as it were, got older and older and older, and as the Second World War got further and further away, she really did remain that last great link with it.
And of course there's that famous photograph of George VI and Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth and Winston Churchill on the balcony at Buckingham Palace which I think for many people, as it were, summed the Second World War up.
There were many other things to say about the Second World War, but that was certainly a very powerful image and it lasted.
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Now we've touched upon it, but the shift from empire to Commonwealth is often framed as a great success story.
But how should we understand this process?
Was it a genuine reinvention or a carefully managed retreat from Britain's geopolitical hegemony prior to Elizabeth's accession?
And what exactly was her role in all of this?
The transition from empire to Commonwealth is enormously important.
It's very complicated.
It has great implications for understanding the late Queen's reign.
When she came to the United States in 1976 for the bicentennial 50 years ago, She made a speech saying that the British were hugely grateful to the American colonists for having rebelled, because Britain then wised up and decided that in future it should grant responsible government to all its colonies in due time.
And so the Queen's line was without the American rebellion, we in Britain would never have created the Commonwealth.
It's a fanciful reading of history, I think, to put it mildly.
The retreat from empire, which is perhaps another way to think about it, was, I think, unavoidable.
By the end of the Second World War, Britain was bankrupt.
The will to rule, certainly in places like India, was much weakened.
Nationalism, initially in India, but subsequently in Africa, was of course an irresistible force.
And while there is a school of thought that actually, if only Britain had made peace with Hitler in 1940, they could have kept the empire and not had a welfare state,
And that would all have been a better Britain than the Britain we've had.
I don't think that's a really plausible argument.
The British perhaps and I stress that word, perhaps dismantled their empire or conceded power, depending on how you want to put it, with fewer traumas than in the Belgian Congo or Indochina, though the partition of India was certainly a pretty terrible episode.
They certainly tried to present it as a story of triumph that the British had only become tied to empire because their mission was to ensure that the colonies, sooner or later, would be able to govern themselves a rather condescending view, of course, as it now seems and that therefore the whole purpose of empire was that the empire would end that that was a measure of the empire's success.
The colonies had been schooled by the British in the arts of self-government which, it was thought, the Anglo-Saxons were especially good at.
And sooner or later they'd all be able to become independent and live their own lives as free and separate nations.
But that links of sentiment to Britain remained strong, precisely because the British had not prevented their evolution towards independence.
And so there was this thing called the Commonwealth, which is kind of alumni association of the British Empire, which was therefore created.
And the pivotal period for that was 1947.
1947, extraordinarily important.
Elizabeth is in South Africa, makes the pledge about her lifelong service to the empire and Commonwealth.
She marries Prince Philip later in the year.
India became independent and was partitioned.
A terrible tragedy, but that's what happened.
And India, and latterly Pakistan, become republics in the Commonwealth, whereas previously the Commonwealth had consisted of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, of which the British monarch was head of state.
So once you get a president, as in India, the British monarch is no longer head of state.
So what role could be left for the British monarch?
And would it be possible for independent nations, previously colonies, who have presidents, to remain in the Commonwealth at all?
What would it mean?
And so a lot of time was spent between 1947 and 49 inventing this notion of head of the Commonwealth, that the crown, the British monarch, was head of the Commonwealth and a symbol of the free association of these independent nations agreeing to remain in the Commonwealth.
And it was in a sense just a form of words.
And by 1947, George VI was ailing, didn't have much longer to live.
And so it was not a job that he ever thought of as a job, which he fulfilled.
The Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, essentially made the job a real job.
Lots of Commonwealth tours, attending the heads of Commonwealth governments' meetings.
And taking great pains over the Christmas message to the Commonwealth which, of course, was televised from the late 1950s.
So she really did make a sort of job of it.
And, of course, in so doing she remained a global monarch in a way that no other surviving monarch after the Second World War actually was.
And I think it's obviously very important to bear in mind that she was the head of state of several other nations around the world right up until the end of her life in 2022.
Yes, the Commonwealth is a very complicated construction in many ways.
But as you've just said...
The queen was head of state of Australia, New Zealand and Canada and many other countries, especially in the Caribbean, right up until the end of her reign.
Those are called the realms where the monarch is represented by a governor general.
Whereas most of the other members of the Commonwealth became republics after they became independent.
But, of course, part of the interest in the fact that the British monarch is still a multiple monarch of different realms is, of course, that the King of England, King Charles, is also King of Canada.
Absolutely.
I'd like to turn back to Britain itself.
If we compare Britain in the early 1950s to Britain at the end of Elizabeth II's reign in 2022, just how profound was the social and economic transformation and how effectively did the monarchy adapt to it throughout those seven decades?
There's absolutely no doubt that the 70 years of the Queen's reign witnessed enormous changes in Britain.
The Britain that she became queen of in 1952 was still a nation that conformed, at least outwardly, to the teachings of the Church of England.
Britain was still a major military nation.
Women on the whole knew their place, except in the case of the Queen herself.
Educational opportunities were very limited.
Very few people went to university.
And it was a very white country.
There were some people of colour, but not very many.
And Victorian morality still held sway.
Divorce was very difficult to get, and it still in certain quarters spelt social disgrace.
Abortion... was illegal, and so was homosexuality.
So in many ways, the nation that Queen Elizabeth II came to reign over in the early 1950s was a recognizably Victorian nation.
Another example of which is that heavy industry coal mining, the railways shipbuilding, iron and steel and cotton the great staple industries that have propelled Britain towards industrial dominance in the late 18th and 19th century were still the great staple industries, although they were seriously in need of attention.
So that was the Victorian world that, in a way, the queen inherited.
I grew up in Birmingham in the 1950s and it was still recognizably a Victorian city in terms of the architecture.
The Chamberlains had only given up a few years before as the family's major dynasty.
It was a city of a thousand trades. which were mainly Victorian.
Well, fast forward 70 years, and to put it mildly, there have been a huge number of changes.
The great staple industries have disappeared almost completely de-industrialisation, the miners' strike and all that.
The army, the navy, the air force, the empire no longer provided careers for middle class people or working class people in the way that they had, on such a huge scale, at the beginning of her reign.
Britain had become a multi-faith country with many different forms of religion, and the number of people admitting to being Christians or members of the Anglican Church had very considerably diminished.
Higher education had become a mass possibility for far larger numbers of people than it had been at the beginning of her reign.
And the place of women had, of course, changed enormously.
After all, the queen had several female prime ministers which at the beginning of her reign would, I think, have been completely unthinkable.
So that's a huge amount of very, very significant change.
Not, of course, uniquely confined to Britain.
Those changes were also happening in many other Western European countries, I think.
But one of the arguments not resolved and probably never to be resolved is the following that did the fact that the queen reigned for so long and therefore was this extraordinary person of stability and continuity, did that help Britain adapt to these extraordinary changes more easily than it otherwise might have done?
Or Did the fact that the one thing that didn't change very much amidst all these other changes, namely the monarchy, mean that change could have been more rapid if the monarchy itself had been willing to change more?
And I think, you know, that's a question that's going to be endlessly debated.
Let's get into that question now, because of course Elizabeth II was so often celebrated as the living embodiment of continuity, but of course in the 70 years that she was queen, the world changed around her dramatically, as you've just illustrated.
How much do you think those decades?
We don't really know very much about her as a person.
Perhaps when the official biography is written we will know more.
And of course we like to think we know lots more about her than we really did.
It is clear that she did in some ways understand that the monarchy had to change and had to adapt.
There was a sense in which the monarchy was gradually becoming a less grandiose imperial Victorian institution.
I think that's certainly true.
But of course, other ways in which the monarchy itself had to change were to do with the fact that the broader social changes
Impacted on the monarchy itself.
It's important to remember that the queen's sister got divorced and three of the queen's four children got divorced.
And so that of itself was the recognition that such matters as divorce were becoming more widespread and more prevalent.
And the monarchy itself, the royal family, was not immune to that.
So there's a variety of slightly complicated ways in which the monarchy did indeed change during the Queen's time.
Some of it, as it were, deliberate and planned.
Some of it just a consequence of broader social changes in which the royal family was itself caught up.
And Elizabeth II became for many people almost indistinguishable from the monarchy itself.
Do you think that deep identification ultimately strengthened the institution, or has it left it vulnerable since her death?
Well, of course, when Queen Victoria died in 1901, many people wondered whether they could carry on without her, because she had been around for well over 60 years.
And there's that marvellous paragraph at the end of Lytton Strachey's biography of her about astonished grief sweeping over the country because she had become part of the indissoluble order of things.
And to imagine life without her seemed, as it were, a terrible worry.
But, you know, life went on.
Edward VII coped and survived.
He didn't reign for long, but there he was.
And so an institution which had apparently become very closely identified with Queen Victoria actually carried on.
Well, it may be too soon to know whether, as it were, King Charles III is playing King Edward VII to Queen Elizabeth's Queen Victoria, if I can put it that way.
But the precedents are that it will carry on.
I remember the great historian Sir Michael Howard saying he thought that the death of Queen Elizabeth II, which he didn't live to see, would be enormously wrenching.
It was enormously wrenching, partly because none of us could remember any other monarch and that took some getting used to, and partly because she was the great living link with the Second World War.
And I think in that sense, her death was very significant.
But you know monarchy, provided the broader context, is okay, and that's of course a big proviso it does carry on.
What I think is difficult for the present kings is that, as we are seeing, Britain's position in the world is perhaps less secure and less settled now than perhaps at any time during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
David, we cannot avoid this question, so I'm going to ask it.
And that is the matter of mass culture, because...
One of the seminal opening acts of Elizabeth II's reign was her coronation which, of course, was a landmark moment in the history of early television.
But how did the coincidence of her reign with things like celebrity culture, satire and even TV programmes like The Crown, which dramatised her own life, sit with her?
Do we know much about that?
And how did the monarchy's relationship with popular culture evolve during her reign?
And what impact did that have on how the monarchy was perceived, do you think?
Well, it's certainly true that the monarchy's relationship with the media evolved.
And of course, it's a very complex relationship.
The monarchy needs the media.
Walter Badgett back to him, said you know, to be a successful monarch you have to be frequently and often seen.
And that means that there have to be stories in the newspapers that you're out and about.
There had to be newsreels, there had to be television, and there's all the social media now.
And if public interest in the monarchy disappeared, I think that might represent a serious threat.
But as long as the media keeps writing about the monarchy, there's no likelihood of that happening.
On the other hand, of course, the newspapers in particular were, up until the 1960s, fairly deferential to the monarchy.
And so was television embodied, of course, in the person of Richard Dimbleby, who was a great monarchist and a great believer in the institution, and not wholly without good reason.
But from the 1960s on, with the advent of much of the devictorianization of Britain in the 60s, the reform of the divorce laws and abortion and homosexuality and the growth of a less deferential media made even less deferential in the 1980s with Thatcher.
That has changed the environment within which the British monarchy and the royal family have to live and function.
And it's harder because scandal sells newspapers in a way that good behavior on the whole doesn't.
And in different ways, the Queen's four children provided material which could be used in that way.
And I think the fact that the Queen believed that monarchy was a serious activity which she took seriously, which I think Prince Philip took seriously in supporting her, which I think Prince Charles King took seriously,
I think it must be very difficult when you're trying to do a serious and important job which actually a lot of people agree is serious and important when the appeal of scandal, the caricature of the monarchy put about in the series The Crown, seems to be what the public want.
In a recent feature, you wrote to mark the centenary of Elizabeth II's birth, The History Extra.
You concluded that she made the recessional majestic.
What does that really capture about the tone and legacy of her reign, do you think?
Well, I ought to explain, of course, that recessional was the title of a poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1897 for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, in some ways the greatest imperial occasion ever to have taken place, I think, in Britain.
And Kipling's poem came as a bit of a shock, because instead of dwelling on the dominion over palm and pine, as he put it elsewhere,
That's a poem about the transience of earthly dominion and the evanescence of imperial power.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
And the recessional agenda really only kicked in with the independence of India in 1947.
And ironically, the end of the British Empire if one wants to find a single date was 1997, exactly 100 years after Kipling wrote Recessional, when Hong Kong was returned and the Royal York Britannia, returned.
The emblem of a maritime empire was decommissioned.
So Kipling's word recessional seems to me to apply.
There are other ways of thinking about it, but it's one of the ways of understanding Queen Elizabeth II's reign that she fronted recessional.
She made recessional in some ways majestic.
And at least in public, she never let on that that was what she was doing.
That was Sir David Cannadine speaking to Danny Bird.
David is Dodge Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University.
His book Queen Elizabeth II A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign, is out now, published by Oxford University Press.
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