In the recent history of British royalty, strained relations between monarch and heir to the throne have been the norm.

The sons of the three Georges suffered at the hands of their fathers;

Queen Victoria suffered from her mother;

her son Edward VII resented his parents' disapproval;

his second son George V. resented his father's short temper and easy-going lifestyle;

and his son George VI.

in turn feared the military rigor of his father, who had also inherited Edward VII's excitable temperament.

Elizabeth II is the exception in this series.

Not only did she idolize her father, George VI, but also her grandfather, whom she called "Grandpa England".

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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This affection was fundamental to her perception of her role, especially as she came with an overly conventional mind that wanted to keep everything as it was, as if the line "same procedure as every year" had been picked up from "Dinner for One". they have been coined.

Even as a child she had never shown the slightest sign of defiance of parental authority, never questioned the values ​​of the older generation.

Winston Churchill, who saw her as a two-year-old girl visiting Balmoral, reported to his wife that she exuded an amazing authority for a child.

A close relative of the Queen even said she was born with a stiff upper lip.

Symbolic of her strong sense of tradition was that the young Queen had her first Christmas speeches recorded at the same desk in Sandringham where her grandfather and father had sat when, using the new medium of radio as a link, she addressed her subjects judged all over the world.

Along with the reference to one's own family as representative of all families, the value of the traditional is a leitmotif of her Christmas speeches.

When she was persuaded in 1957 to move this tradition, introduced in 1932, from radio to television for the first time, she sought to reassure viewers who might find this innovation alien as yet another sign of the speed of change.

The queen said she wasn't surprised

when people feel disoriented by these changes and don't know what to hold on to or what to discard.

The difficulty, however, does not lie in the new inventions, but in the "thoughtless people who carelessly clear out timeless ideals like old and worn-out machines."

connection with customs

Sixty-four years later, at Christmas last year, the same motif resonated in a celebration of the festival's many joyful traditions.

“We see our own children and their families embracing the roles, traditions and values ​​that mean so much to us, as passed down from one generation to the next and occasionally adapted as the times change.” With a small one Pointing at new settings of familiar Christmas carols, the Queen not only let her dry humor shine through, but also her attachment to the customs that bind people together.

Her description of the festive rituals spoke of the conservative view of the "successor of the kings and queens of history", as she called herself at the beginning of her reign.

The private tutor that George VI.

hired for his daughter to instruct her in the history of the constitution, on the one hand drummed into her the history of the monarchy and on the other hand pointed out how it had survived through its adaptability.

The seventy years of Elizabeth II on the throne are also characterized by this tension between tradition and modernity, between the conservative nature of the incumbent, her striving for stability and the changing requirements of the time.