This quote from Gab effectively summarized my opinion on the second Elizabethan era:
“The worst Queen of England in history. The day she took the throne England was 99.7% White English. She leaves this world with White English a minority of the population in London.”
Queen Elizabeth II cannot be blamed for the winding-up of the British Empire, as that was already inevitable and well underway at the time she succeeded to the throne. But she can, and she should, be held responsible for her embrace of the Commonwealth, which proved to be the locus of the invasion of Great Britain by its former subjects.
In addition to her failure to protect her nation from invasion and loss of sovereignty, she also presided over the feminization and homosexualization of the Anglican Church, of which she was the head.
Of her three primary responsibilities, she completely failed two of them. She left both her nation and her Church worse off than she found them, and in dire straits. But she did succeed in a queen’s most important task; she secured the succession and has secured it for at least two more generations to come. Therefore, she cannot be described as a complete failure, merely a comprehensive one.
The decline of England on her watch wasn’t all her fault, of course. She was a constitutional monarch, not an absolute one. But it must be noted that not only did she do nothing to stop the decline, the very little that she did do made matters worse, such as when she intervened to convince a reluctant Margaret Thatcher to have Britain join the anti-apartheid sanctions regime against her own Commonwealth subjects in South Africa.
As a national figurehead, she did her duty remarkably well. Her personal comportment was admirable and she carried the weight of her public role with incredible grace and dignity. Her work ethic was unparalleled. But, as the new British Prime Minister said, “she was the rock on which modern Britain was founded,” and that is damning praise indeed.
