The Second Elizabethan Age Has Ended
The first Elizabethan era ended on March 24, 1603, when 69-year-old Queen Elizabeth I died in her sleep at Richmond Palace. “This morning, about three o’clock, her Majesty departed from this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree,” the lawyer John Manningham wrote in his diary. Elizabeth I’s 45-year reign was a “golden age,” a course of events that no one would have predicted at her birth. She had survived her mother’s execution, her half-sister’s jealousy, her cousin Mary’s plotting, and the antagonism of Europe’s great Catholic powers.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II today ends the second Elizabethan era. The past 70 years might not feel golden, but they were an age. She steered the monarchy from the world of aristocracy and deference in which she was born, through the social liberation of the swinging 1960s and the bitter divisions of the ’80s and onward into a new millennium; past a Scottish-independence referendum that would have broken apart 300 years of the union; past Brexit, which sundered her kingdom from the European Union; to her final days in a world of smartphones and Instagram. Even as the world changed around her, she remained in place. Like the North Star in the night sky, she was a fixed point, something by which to orient yourself.
[Read: Looking back on Queen Elizabeth’s 90 years]
The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley—all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and .She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic are older than 95 in this country. She reigned so long that even her changed: The aristocratic vowels of the early 20th century—“lawst” for “lost,” “femileh” for “family”—gave way to a softer, less ostentatious accent. During the pandemic, she took to fulfilling royal engagements over Zoom.
