Britain’s ‘Big Gun’: Queen Elizabeth II and the Anglo-American Special Relationship

Abstract There have been few people more famous and instantly recognisable than Queen Elizabeth II, who served as Britain’s longest-reigning monarch from 1952 until her death in 2022. Yet her role within Anglo-American relations has been largely under-explored. This is strange on many levels, not least because her life progressed in tandem with the birth, evolution and maturation of what is commonly termed the modern Anglo-American special relationship. We argue that Queen Elizabeth II’s importance to Anglo-American relations progressively increased as a result especially of developments in media and its consumption, the growing significance of soft power and Britain’s relative decline. The Queen enjoyed exceptional reach within American audiences, as well as offering a compensatory source of continuity with a bygone age and maintaining an image at least of the United Kingdom and United States as familial equals. This argument is developed in three sections. We begin by investigating how expanding media coverage, changes in the monarchy’s public relations strategy and royal visits to the United States enhanced American affinity for the British monarchy, and how this in turn led the American and British governments to understand and exploit the Queen’s influence. We then use the royal visit during the American Bicentennial to demonstrate how the Queen’s role in Anglo-American relations matured at a crucial juncture in the mid-1970s and helped the special relationship’s transition from experiential memory to received memory. Finally, we illustrate how the Queen, as well as the tactics and messaging embraced by the American and British governments during the Bicentennial, served subsequently in Anglo-American diplomatic pageantry.