Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s Bastion of Stability, Dies
The death of Queen Elizabeth II, which Buckingham Palace announced on Thursday, is a watershed moment for Britain, at once incomparable and incalculable.
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It marks both the loss of a revered monarch — the only one most Britons have ever known —
and the end of a figure who served as a living link to the glories of World War II Britain,
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presided over its fitful adjustment to a post-colonial, post-imperial era and saw it through its bitter divorce from the European Union.
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There is no analogous public figure who will have been mourned as deeply in Britain — Winston Churchill might come closest —
or whose death could provoke a greater reckoning with the identity and future of the country.
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Elizabeth’s extraordinary longevity lent her an air of permanence that makes her death, even at an advanced age, somehow shocking.
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The ups and downs of the queen’s seven-decade reign were many, a tapestry of events that traces the history of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
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Britain and 15 other Commonwealth realms over which she presided are a shadow of the empire-in-decline she inherited in 1952.
How many of those countries will continue to recognize the British monarch as their head of state is an open question.
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Queen Elizabeth II, who reigned over the U.K. for 70 years, dies at 96
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