The Second Elizabethan Age

Elizabeth exemplified the special relationship with America. This goes back to the meeting of John Adams and her third great grandfather, George III.

National Archives via Wikimedia Commons
President Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on June 8, 1982. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons

The end of the Second Elizabethan Age, which is reached today with the death of Elizabeth II, is a moment of reflection for all of us who cherish the friendship and example of Britain. The first Elizabethan Age gave us such giants as Shakespeare and saw Britain stake its future on the Protestant Reformation. Neither Elizabeth I, though, nor Victoria, another great queen, was any more admirable a monarch than ERII.

Elizabeth II’s great task was to steady Britain as it entered the modern age, shed most of its colonial empire while keeping the Commonwealth, and protect the monarchy itself from the temptations of republicanism. One signal danger to Britain, in our view, was the enticement of Europe, into which Britain was led by idealistic but short-sighted figures and from which, via Brexit, it emerged by the skin of its teeth.

Throughout this period Elizabeth exemplified the special relationship with America. This goes back to the meeting of John Adams and her third great grandfather, George III. It is memorably depicted in the TV miniseries “John Adams.” The future president was assigned as minister to Britain. He had to learn how to bow and scrape upon entering the “Closet,” where the King, whom America had just defeated, stood beside his throne.

There, Adams later wrote in a famous letter to John Jay, our man in London found himself alone with the King and his state secretary. After presenting his credentials, Adams conveyed to the King the sentiments of the United States, and “their unanimous Disposition and desire,” as he put it, “to cultivate the most friendly and liberal Intercourse, between your Majesty’s Subjects and their Citizens.” 

Adams said his ambition was to restore “an entire esteem, Confidence and Affection, or in better Words, ‘the old good Nature and the old good Humor’” between America and the Mother Country. After all, Adams told the king, the populace of the former colonies and Great Britain were “People who, tho Separated by an Ocean and under different Governments have the Same Language, a Similar Religion and kindred Blood.” 

King George seemed “much affected,” Adams said, and explained he was “the last to consent to the Separation” of Britain and America, “but the Separation having been made,” he was prepared to “be the first to meet the Friendship of the United States as an independent Power.” The King added he was eager to see a bond between the two nations, letting “the Circumstances of Language, Religion and blood, have their natural and full Effect.” 

Having clarified the ties of Anglo-American friendship, the King asked Adams if he had visited France, noting rumors that Adams was “not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France.” Replied Adams: “I must avow to your Majesty, I have no Attachments but to my own Country.” At which point George III replied, “as quick as lightning,” that “an honest Man will never have any other.” So the friendship began.

It was the convergence of national interests — a shared commitment to representative government, the rule of law, the free enterprise system, and a global network of open trade — that drew Britain and America toward one another in the 20th century. It became known as the special relationship. If the seeds of this bond were sown between George III and John Adams, it reached its apogee under Elizabeth II.

In a way, Elizabeth, though she resisted the siren of politics, as Britain’s unwritten Constitution requires, disproved Lord Palmerston’s line about how Britain had “no eternal allies.” That wisdom is often taken to mean that great powers have no friends, only interests. It has been the good fortune of Britain and America to be friends, as well as allies united by shared interests. It was a hallmark of the Second Elizabethan age that we were lucky to share.


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