Thirty years later, while accompanying her ailing father George VI on an imperial tour to South Africa and Rhodesia, the then Princess Elizabeth sought to cement his attempt to recast the crumbling Empire as a benevolent and free association of self-governing nations – a worldwide commonwealth – with the monarchy as its head. The King's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, who invented the new name, also came up with a raison d'etre for the institution, writing: "We must endeavor to induce the thinking working classes, socialist and others, to regard the Crown not as a mere figurehead, but as a living power for good affecting the interests and social wellbeing of all classes." In 1917, Elizabeth's grandfather, King George V, had refashioned the monarchy as a British institution, renaming it the House of Windsor and discarding its prior appellation as the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, whose emphasis on its German roots had become untenable. The Duke of Edinburgh can be partly seen behind the gardener.ĭaily Herald Archive/National Science & Media Museum/SSPL via Getty Images Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) is shown around the gardens of Sagana Lodge, in Nyeri County, Kenya, on February 5, 1952. The Kenya Emergency, or the Mau Mau uprising, as the world would know it, would spark a savage reaction from Queen Elizabeth's government that would be completely at odds with the genteel, proper and dutiful image of Britishness she would cultivate over the next 70 years, as well as a sweeping cover up that was more at ease with it. The situation had spooked the couple, and it was actually the fear of ridicule that kept the trip on track. Since the beginning of the year, Dedan Kimathi's Kenya Land and Freedom Army had been engaged in a campaign of sabotage and assassination. The colony was in the early stages of an armed rebellion. What she lacked in power over the next 70 years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth - who died on Thursday at the age of 96 - more than made up for in international respectability and admiration.īut back in 1952, Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, had almost skipped the Kenya leg of their imperial tour. It was also a nation that was reinventing itself, and Elizabeth and her family would be critical to that enterprise. When Elizabeth II descended from a treehouse in Kenya on February 6, 1952, to learn that her father had died and she would be queen, she at once became the face of a crumbling empire and of a country still recovering from the ruins of war.
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