Queen Elizabeth II Biography: Seventy Years, Fifteen Prime Ministers

She was not supposed to be queen. That single fact organises the whole life, and it is the one most often skipped over.

Elizabeth was born third in line behind an uncle who was expected to marry and produce heirs of his own. She was raised as a minor royal — a duke’s daughter — with the informality that implied. Then a constitutional crisis rearranged her future when she was ten, and she spent the next eighty-six years being extremely careful.

Mayfair, April 1926

She was born on 21 April 1926 at 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, the first child of Prince Albert, Duke of York, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Her only sibling, Margaret, arrived in 1930.

Her father was the second son. That is the position, in a monarchy, of a man who will spend his life supporting someone else — and Albert, who had a severe stammer and no appetite for public performance, was well suited to it. The household was warm and comparatively private. Nobody was preparing this child for a throne.

Taught by a Governess, Never a Schoolroom

Elizabeth never went to school. She was educated entirely at home, principally by her governess Marion Crawford, known in the family as Crawfie, who joined the household in the 1930s and later broke every rule of royal service by publishing a book about it.

The specialist teaching came later and was deliberately narrow: Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton, taught her constitutional history — how the British monarchy actually functions, where its powers begin and end, and why a sovereign who oversteps causes a crisis. She also learned French from a succession of tutors.

It is an unusual curriculum, and it produced an unusual sovereign. She was not broadly educated in the way a modern head of state would be. She was, however, trained with almost surgical precision in one subject, and the discipline it taught — that the Crown’s authority survives only where it is not exercised — held for seventy years.

December 1936: The Abdication

Her uncle became King Edward VIII in January 1936 and abdicated within the year in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Elizabeth’s father, entirely unprepared and by contemporary accounts appalled, became George VI.

Elizabeth, at ten, became heir presumptive. From that point the informality was over.

The ATS, and the First Time She Was Ordinary

The Second World War gave her the only stretch of her life resembling normal service. She made her first broadcast in 1940, aged fourteen, addressing children evacuated from British cities. In 1945 she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as an honorary second subaltern and trained as a driver and mechanic — she could strip and rebuild an engine, and photographs of her in overalls did more for the monarchy’s standing than any amount of ceremony.

On VE Day she and Margaret were permitted to slip out of Buckingham Palace and join the crowds anonymously. She referred to it decades later as one of the most memorable nights of her life. It was also, more or less, the last time she was ever in a crowd rather than at the centre of one.

She married Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947, in an austerity wedding for which she saved clothing ration coupons. Charles was born in 1948, Anne in 1950.

Kenya, February 1952

She went up a tree in Kenya as a princess and came down a queen — the line is a cliché because it is essentially accurate. Elizabeth and Philip were on a Commonwealth tour, staying near Treetops lodge, when George VI died on 6 February 1952. She was 25, and thousands of miles from home.

Her coronation on 2 June 1953 was the first to be televised. Churchill’s government resisted the cameras; she pushed for them. It was the first significant judgement call of her reign and she got it right: an estimated audience in the tens of millions watched, and the monarchy acquired a mass-media presence it has never given back.

Andrew followed in 1960 and Edward in 1964.

Fifteen Prime Ministers

She appointed her first prime minister, Winston Churchill, in 1952, and her last, Liz Truss, at Balmoral on 6 September 2022 — two days before her death. Fifteen in total, from a man born in 1874 to one born in 1975.

The weekly audience with the prime minister was the actual work of the job, and it was private, unrecorded, and therefore invisible. Her political views were never established in seventy years of continuous exposure, which for a public figure is close to a world record. The Marten training held.

The reign also presided over the dismantling of an empire and its replacement by the Commonwealth — a transition she treated as her personal project, and one that would have gone considerably worse without her.

1992, and the Cost of Letting the Cameras In

The same instinct for visibility that made 1953 a success created the problem of the 1990s. The 1969 documentary Royal Family showed the household at home, and once the audience had been given intimacy it never agreed to give it back.

In November 1992 she described the year as her “annus horribilis” — three of her children’s marriages had broken down publicly and Windsor Castle had burned. Five years later Diana, Princess of Wales, died in Paris, and the Queen’s decision to remain at Balmoral with her grandsons rather than return to London produced the sharpest criticism of her reign. She came back, spoke on television on 5 September 1997, and the mood turned. It was the closest the institution came to a genuine crisis of consent.

Later decades brought her son Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and his withdrawal from public duties — a scandal she handled, characteristically, by removing him from view rather than defending him.

Balmoral, September 2022

Prince Philip died on 9 April 2021, after seventy-three years of marriage. The photograph of the Queen sitting alone at his funeral, masked and distanced under the rules her own government had set, was the defining image of the pandemic in Britain.

In June 2022 she marked her Platinum Jubilee — seventy years on the throne, the only British monarch to reach it. She was visibly frail, and her appearances were rationed.

She died at Balmoral on 8 September 2022, aged 96, and was succeeded immediately by her eldest son as King Charles III. Her state funeral on 19 September drew one of the largest television audiences ever recorded. She had reigned for over seventy years — longer than any other British sovereign.

What she left is examined in the net worth breakdown, where the crucial distinction is between what she personally owned — Balmoral, Sandringham, the racehorses, the stamp collection — and the far larger holdings she merely held in trust for the Crown, which is also what separates her from most of the richest royals elsewhere in the world.

She was, in the end, extremely good at a job she was never meant to have, largely because she treated it as a job. The uncle who walked away chose himself. She never did, and the contrast was the whole argument for her.