A Queen who reigned over a remarkable new Elizabethan age

The life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II came to an end yesterday afternoon, bringing down the curtain on an astonishing era.

Until now ‘Elizabethan’ referred to another remarkable and long period in history, that of Elizabeth I, when Britain went from being in the 1550s almost a backwater to, at the start of the 1600s, a global power.

From today Elizabethan will refer to a similarly memorable period in history, from the start of the late Queen’s tenure on the throne, when Britain was still an imperial power, until 2022, by when empire was long gone but the UK was a transformed country, overwhelmingly for the better.

Now it is a modern economy and a cultural powerhouse, with a political class that is as ethnically diverse as in any first world nation on the planet. The Queen presided over this immense change yet was herself an unchanging figure at the head of the country. However turbulent things got economically or politically or indeed at times of war, it was reassuring to be reminded that such a monarch was in place.

The Queen treated Northern Ireland as the part of the UK that it is and was all through her reign, and visited here in her very first year on the throne, and would have still been visiting almost 70 years later in the 2020s, to attend the centenary service in Armagh, if she had not been too ill to travel over.

The Queen’s visit to Ulster in 1977, only a few years after the peak of the terrorist onslaught, was a manifestation of that normalising approach to Northern Ireland.

Her Majesty’s dedication to NI was a subset of her dedication to her role as sovereign. The Queen really did think that this was a God-given duty, and implied as much in strikingly religious passages in her annual Christmas messages.

This was why she never behaved in a selfish way, never alienated her subjects by expressing her personal views, and never discarded a punishing schedule of public engagements, even when she was decades into retirement age.

In NI and around the world, people will, in this period from now until funeral, be remembering this extraordinary life.