ABSTRACT
The accession of the second Elizabeth in 1952 produced much talk of a renewed national greatness; in the jargon of the time a ‘new Elizabethan age’ approached. Britain exploded her own nuclear bomb in October of that year and the conquest of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hilary in the year of the coronation seemed a fitting symbol of renewed greatness. It was to be ‘A new Elizabethan age’, but not in the sense anticipated. Britain, under Elizabeth II, was to return to being what she had been in the sixteenth century, an island off the Continent of Europe, a middle-ranked power of local influence. In 1985 she was, for the first time since the first Elizabeth's reign, to become a net importer of manufactured goods. If her navies did not now ‘melt away’, as Kipling had foreseen in 1897, at least they retreated, by the 1980s, to guarding their island home as in the 1580s. The worldwide Empire had disintegrated. Victorian imperial greatness was to be a fading memory. Empire Day itself was forgotten. The pattern of trade was to return increasingly to what it had been in the sixteenth century; West Germany and the rest of Europe, not India or America, were to be the key commercial partners. Eastern England was to thrive, Liverpool to decline. Perhaps in one sense it was a return to even earlier in the sixteenth century, for not since the reign of Mary had Britain been so dependent and so tied in to the needs of another power. Just as the England of Mary Tudor was an honorary part of the Habsburg Empire so under the second Elizabeth Britain was a key component of the American Empire, her countryside covered with US bases even in peace-time. Britain, it seemed, could no longer defend herself. There was a retreat in 1973 to a position not seen since 1534. In that year the Act of Supremacy had cut England off from Rome, sundering her from the ghostly Roman imperium of papal power. In 1973 Britain's accession to the Treaty of Rome marked an end to that absolute national sovereignty proclaimed by Henry VIII. Christendom and a new Roman Empire were being re-created in the shape of the European Economic Community and some would say the province of Britannia replaced the sovereign British state of the United Kingdom. Both her dependence on America and her growing integration into Europe eroded national sovereignty, but balancing between the two developments helped to preserve the illusion of independence and even greatness.
