There is an old saying in Britain that the queen is iron, and the prime minister is water. This phrase no longer applies after the death of Queen Elizabeth. She was the longest-lived monarch in British history and the last iron-clad queen. At the end of her life, she also insisted on appointing a new prime minister, and three days before her death, approved her as the queen's last prime minister.
The fate of the Prime Minister is even more tragic than that of the Queen, especially Crown Prince Charles. He is the eldest son of the Queen and the legal heir. In 1958, at the age of 10, he was named Prince of Wales and officially became the Crown Prince of the United Kingdom. Unexpectedly, he waited for 64 years, from the little prince to the old prince, and he is 73 years old this year before he finally ascended the throne.
Even worse is Princess Diana, who is Charles's ex-wife and mother of two princes. She married Charles in 1981, but she didn't wait for the day she became queen, she and Charles divorced in 1996, and died in a mysterious car accident the following year.
There are many rumors about Princess Diana's death, all of which have some ulterior ties to the queen. This reflects the Queen's strength and legend. In a sense, she has become an icon of Britain.
On April 21, 1926, Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of King George VI, was born. This is the ** era of Britain, Britain's colonies are all over the world, and where there is the sun, there is a British flag, so Britain is called the empire on which the sun never sets, at least nominally, is the first in the world.
The background of this era made the queen represent the image of Britain as soon as she was born, standing at the top of the world.
In the world of 1926, China was still warlords, the Soviet Union was industrializing, Germany was repaying the war reparations of World War I, and the United States was enjoying Coolidge prosperity. Britain is preparing for a general strike that will shake the world.
Queen Elizabeth's birth, which coincided with the last glory of the British Empire, spent her childhood in the afterglow of the empire on which the sun never sets.
When the Queen was 3 years old, a financial crisis that changed the Western world erupted, after which the entire Western world fell into the Great Depression of the century. Wall Street, which had been a big buyer of German government bonds, had to sell German bonds in a hurry to recoup the funds. The German bond issuance failed, unable to obtain sufficient financing to develop the economy and repay the reparations.
Little did the 3-year-old queen know that this crisis would end all the glory of the British Empire.
The financial crisis in the United States, which began in 1929, eventually affected all Western countries, and Germany was particularly hard hit, and had to turn on the money printing machine to print money frantically to get through the difficulties, but in the end it led to runaway inflation. Germans were angry and depressed about the heavy war reparations, and with the Great Depression and Great Inflation, discontent grew.
This planted the seeds of history for the subsequent rise of the far right. And the fate of Britain will also change dramatically. All this when the queen was 13 years old, with the outbreak of World War II and the declaration of war by Britain and France on Germany, the fate of the queen and Britain officially entered the most magnificent period.
In 1945, at the age of 18, the Queen refused to flee to Canada, but instead joined the army to serve her country, joining the British Army as an honorary second lieutenant and becoming a truck driver and mechanic. Although he is just a car mechanic, this kind of behavior of leading by example and the image of serving the country by his own body have been tightly tied to the fate of Britain since this time.
After the end of World War II, although Britain was one of the main victors, in the war, this nominal number one in the world could no longer maintain its position, and was surpassed by the United States, which was the last to join the war.
The end of World War II was the end of the British era. The post-World War II international system also officially began to be dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, and Britain still played an important role in this process, which will be discussed in more detail later. But there is no doubt that this was the beginning of Britain's gradual withdrawal from the center of the world stage.
After World War II, the world set off a fervent colonial independence movement, and the British Empire gradually changed from the so-called empire on which the sun never sets, to the British Isles. In this period of gradual decline of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth officially ascended the throne on February 6, 1952, opening the queen era of the declining United Kingdom.
From 1952 to the present, it is exactly 70 years, and if we look at the changes in the world pattern and the international order, there is no doubt that 1991 can be used as a dividing point. At the end of the year, the day after Christmas, the Soviet Union officially collapsed.
The end of the Cold War has turned a new page in the world.
Before this page, during the Queen's forty years in power, the world was divided into two camps, and the Queen's Britain was the core of the NATO camp, but it had some vague relations with the Soviet Union. This has always been a certain political tradition in Britain, which likes to build momentum, but after the momentum is achieved, it likes to hide to one side and seek profit on both sides.
After this page, the queen began the last thirty years of her reign, during which the mainstream of the world was global economic integration dominated by international capital.