Magical Monarchy
Fifty years ago Wednesday, a 25-year-old woman was awakened in a hunting lodge -- a posh treehouse, actually -- in Kenya and told that her father had died. Therefore she was immediately Elizabeth II, sovereign.</br></br>Tony Blair, the 10th prime minister of Elizabeth II's reign, was not yet born when she ascended to the throne. Winston Churchill was then the first among her ministers. How much has changed since her June 1953 coronation? The decision to televise it was deeply controversial. Most television sets were in pubs, where, it was feared, decorum among the lower orders might lapse during the ceremony.</br></br>Since then, the House of Windsor, including some of its much-too- merry wives, has often resembled a soap opera. But, then, sovereignty has never been a shield from life's vicissitudes: The longest- surviving child of Queen Anne's (1702-14) 18 pregnancies died at age 11.</br></br>Elizabeth II's coronation coincided with Edmund Hillary's conquest of Everest (and, almost as inspiriting, with the end of tea rationing, a relic of the war), which stirred hopes of a "New Elizabethan Age." Instead, there was the continuing loss of empire, a diminishing world role, watery socialism and worsening economic anemia. By the mid-1970s Britain was reduced to the status of the sick man of Europe. Then came revival, but the woman who authored it was named not Elizabeth but Margaret -- Thatcher.</br></br>Once upon a time, in mankind's political immaturity, monarchy was the best available answer to the problems of sovereignty and succession as nation-states evolved. And being a monarch was risky. Richard III (1483-85) was the last English king to die in battle and George II (1727-60) was the last to fight alongside British troops.