The 96-year-old monarch acceded to the throne in 1952 at the age of 26. Revered by the British public, she was an unemotional sovereign who left a lasting imprint on the monarchy.
The year is 1991. In Harare, the capital of Zimbabawe, at the end of a Commonwealth summit, Elizabeth II appears in the marquee on the lawn of the British High Commission. The guest freezes. The sovereign is smaller than you might imagine. Her handshake is limp and her voice nasal, the ends of her sentences trailing off. And yet she exudes a natural authority. She looks her guest up and down with the faintest hint of a smile. Conversation is limited to two banal questions. A short silence ensues. The queen disappears. The monarch excels at this role: appearing at once accessible and inaccessible. She is a true queen, as former French president François Mitterrand once declared admiratively.
One always had the impression of having already seen Elizabeth II in a wax museum like at Madam Tussauds in London. The queen, who died on Thursday, September 8, at the age of 96, was a living page of history who worked with no fewer than 15 British prime ministers, 13 American presidents and all the heads of state of France’s Fifth Republic. She held audiences with political personalities from all over the world, from Churchill to de Gaulle, to Kennedy and Nehru.
She was also a symbol. Under her reign, the United Kingdom saw the joys of success and the pangs of defeat, demonstrating that the monarchy could be the connecting thread between the old, broken order and a new one yet to be invented.
The most photographed and painted monarch in the world, Elizabeth II was perhaps more of a living computer. Had she not been Queen, walled up in the silence and dignity that befits not only a head of state and head of an Empire – now a Commonwealth – but also the head of the army and the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, what a writer of memoirs she could have been! It makes you wonder, though, if this small, shy, poorly-educated woman secretly hated her role all her life. No one was ever able to read on her impassive face the secrets that she took to the grave.
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