LONDON (CU)_Seventy years ago this weekend, a young English princess was enjoying some downtime at Treetops, a remote lodge in Kenya, built into the limbs of a fig tree. Princess Elizabeth was in the East African nation, at the beginning of a Commonwealth Tour alongside her husband Prince Philip, when she learned of the death of her father, George VI. British hunter Jim Corbett, who was a part of the tour, wrote in the Treetops guest book: “For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen.”
Accession Day has always been a melancholy anniversary for Queen Elizabeth, since it commemorates as much about the death of her father as her own ascension to the throne. Although the death of her father was on the horizon for Her Majesty, when it came, it was still a great shock. Before his premature death at 56, King George VI has been suffering from lung cancer for several years. However, he was clearly not expected to pass away soon as he waved off his daughter and her husband at the airport, which turned out to be his last ever public appearance, mere days before he died on 6 February 1952.
He passed away at home at Sandringham, where Queen Elizabeth spent a quiet Sunday commemorating the 70th anniversary of her accession to the throne. Tributes to Her Majesty poured in from prominent figures across Britain, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson praising her for her “inspirational sense of duty and unwavering dedication to this nation.” “She [The Queen] takes her duties seriously, but she doesn’t take herself very seriously,” Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, told the BBC.
The Queen has managed to remain enduringly popular over the years, with her 76 per cent approval rating ranking No. 1 among royals, according to a poll conducted by the market research firm YouGov last year. “She has an instinctive understanding of the soul of the British people,” Vernon Bogdanor, a professor of government at King’s College London, said. Reaching this milestone puts the 95-year-old monarch in rare company, with only three monarchs, Louis XIV of France, Johann II of Liechtenstein and Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, documented to have reigned more than 70 years.
