DESPITE being a constitutional monarch and a product of ancestral inheritance, Queen Elizabeth II was more popular globally than any other politician or head of state.
The monarch, the only one most people in the United Kingdom have ever known, was a symbol of stability and continuity of Britain's imperial family.
Few would have anticipated in 1952 how drastically she would transform the monarchy due to her persona. In fact, this transformation started from the day of her coronation.
Unlike her father — who was crowned as King George VI of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India" — she was proclaimed Queen Elizabeth II, "Queen of this Realm and of all Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith".
The change in the queen's title was the starting point of the emergence of two queens: global queen and national queen. Throughout her 70-year-long reign, Queen Elizabeth remained divided into two blocs.
Imperial retreat, which also coincided with the shrinking of the British Empire, was embedded in this title change. Britain had been incorporated into a multinational configuration that it no longer led.
In Britain, Elizabeth would be Queen of the United Kingdom, but elsewhere, she would be given different titles by different countries, for example, queen of Australia and queen of Canada.
By the time Queen Elizabeth was crowned, the British Empire was no more a single empire with a single sovereign.
Queen Elizabeth had sensed this emerging thinking pattern of the British Commonwealth and she did a wonderful job in adjusting herself and her institution to the new realities.
Great Britain was shrinking, and she knew it that she could keep the British Commonwealth intact only by projecting herself more as global queen, or queen of the commonwealth, rather than queen of Britain.
In her first royal tour of the Commonwealth, in 1953 to 1954, she toured 13 countries, including Bermuda, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand, covering more than 64,373km in six months.
During her historic visit to Australia, almost seven million people turned out to see her, which was 75 per cent of the country's population at that time.
However, the bitter realities of the post-imperial world — which was witnessing an astounding shift in the status of Great Britain, from the biggest empire on the planet to a shrunken country desperate for the patronage of the United States to remain relevant in the global power fabric — impacted the thoughts of Queen Elizabeth.
Queen Elizabeth accepted the reality that she had to be Britain's queen and global queen simultaneously.
But in playing this double role, she was subjected to severe criticism at home, particularly from far-right nationalists, but she never retracted her stance.
A supporter of recognition of African nationalism, in 1960, she supported then British prime minister Harold Macmillan's plan of decolonisation of Africa.
She deserves a huge credit, along with Macmillan, for the fast-track decolonisation of east, west and central Africa.
There was an underlying hazard in creating a romantic fiction of the British Commonwealth — the queen could lose the support of her people at home by appearing to have divided loyalties.
The imperial monarchy, the queen's much-adored notion, appeared to be threatening the national monarchy.
These tensions began to emerge when Margaret Thatcher assumed control of the Conservative Party.
Thatcher had never been enthusiastic about the Commonwealth.
Philip Murphy, in his book "Monarchy and the End of Empire", said Thatcher and her closest advisers joked that the acronym CHOGM, for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, stood for "Compulsory Hand-Outs for Greedy Mendicants".
The Thatcherite narrative, which was enveloped by a Cold War mentality, was disliked by Queen Elizabeth.
The relations between the two hit the lowest point when in 1986, many countries threatened to boycott the Commonwealth Games in protest of Thatcher's opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Britain had been almost isolated on this issue, with the queen avoiding taking Britain's side. The fact is that the queen's intervention saved the event.
Queen Elizabeth had assumed the role of a flag-bearer of global multiculturalism at home and abroad, and, by that account, she turned into a modern monarch.
She stands taller than all British monarchs, but on the other hand, she was the one who "facilitated" the massive contraction of the monarch's power, prestige and influence.
It is also a fact that generations have known no one else but the queen. There is no comparable public personality who will be mourned deeply in Britain and whose death could incite a greater reckoning with the identity and future of the country.
An air of permanence surrounded her persona due to the longevity of her stint. Over her seven-decade reign, Queen Elizabeth had seen many ups and downs. Family idiosyncrasies were endless.
From the abdication of her uncle, Edward, to marry his American lover, Wallis Simpson, which sculpted the course of events that put her on the throne, to the fissure between her grandson, Prince Harry, and the rest of the royal family after his marriage to Meghan Markle, she had to endure unsavoury and painful episodes.
She kept the House of Windsor stable despite many upheavals.
With the exception of her misstep in 1997, when she secluded herself for days at Balmoral Castle in Scotland to avoid the nation's mourning over Princess Diana's death in a road accident, Queen Elizabeth had always displayed dignity, grace and sense of duty that put her in the pantheon of royal greats.
She was perhaps the most experienced head of state till the time of her death. She interacted with 13 United States presidents and worked with 15 British prime ministers.
After the queen's death, the monarchy will likely face a further erosion of its influence and charisma at home and abroad.
However, this depends on how King Charles III carries himself and aligns his thinking with the evolving relationship between the monarchy and Britons.
The writer, writing from Pakistan, used to write for publications in Asia