For a nation that rebelled two and a half centuries ago against British rule, Americans have surprisingly remained connected to the monarchy across the Atlantic.
Like much of the world, America has been enthralled with the comings and goings of the House of Windsor — of their marriages, the births of their children, their divorces, their scandals and their deaths.
The death Thursday of Queen Elizabeth II, though not shocking given her 96 years of age, still has saddened many in this country. For the vast majority of Americans, she is the only British monarch they have ever known.
Ascending to the throne at the age of 25, Elizabeth spent the next 70 years as the face of the United Kingdom to the world. Though her duties were largely ceremonial, Elizabeth was at least as well-known — and certainly more loved — than the 15 prime ministers who served during her reign.
She was stoic and modest, despite her vast wealth and celebrity. As The Associated Press remarked in a retrospective on her life, Elizabeth was an “exemplar of ordinary British decency” and a “reassuring anchor in a fast-changing world.”
A post-World War II queen, Elizabeth knew that a big part of her job was to lift her nation’s spirits when it was feeling frightened or uncertain or sad. Even as she aged, she was rarely out of step with her people, the most glaring time being when she failed to make a public show of grief after Princess Diana, the first wife of her eldest son and royal heir, Charles, died in a 1997 car crash.
Her people soon forgave Elizabeth for that, unlike Charles, whose popularity has never fully recovered from the messy demise of his marriage to Diana.
Elizabeth was not born to be a queen. She got in line for the throne at age 10 only because her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated to marry a twice-divorced American woman. When Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, died at age 56, she was thrust into a role that many thought she wasn’t ready to handle.
She might herself have agreed, but she made the best of it. Seven decades later, there was hardly a person in the world, much less in her kingdom, that had tired of the longest-serving monarch in British history.
She keenly felt her responsibility was to serve her people with dignity, no matter the public or personal crises of the moment, and to stay true to the job until the very end. And that she did.
