The girl should not have become a queen because her father should not have become a king. The crown of the British Empire belonged to her uncle Edward VIII in 1936, according to the succession law. But he had a romance that ended up in a marriage with a divorced American woman of no noble descent. To remain with his beloved bride, the king abdicated in favor of his younger brother. Ten-year-old Elizabeth became heir to the throne and moved in with her parents to Buckingham Palace. When she was twenty-one years old, she married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten or, put another way, Prince Philip of Greece, and was given the title of Duchess of Edinburgh.

Philip would remain the Duke of Edinburgh but his wife had lost this title five years later. Her father died, and on June 2 1953 Elizabeth was crowned. The then UK prime minister remarked in a conversation with the foreign secretary that the worst turn of events was hard to imagine. The politician with such a diverse experience happened to be wrong – Elizabeth turned out to be a worthy monarch. The same Winston Churchill and the Anglican church objected to the TV broadcast of the coronation ceremony. Their resistance had been overcome as the coronation was broadcast in color by all three American channels and the BBC. And the British themselves rushed to buy TVs, and in this sense Elizabeth’s coronation advanced progress in science and technology.