Of the world's 56 million square miles of land, one-fourth lies under the scepter of Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. In this great domain, nine times vaster than Rome's, live 603 million people.
They are blacks and whites, browns and yellows, dukes and Dyaks, cannibals and countesses, Klondike trappers and Scottish Trappists, Royal Lancers and Fijian dancers. They worship many gods, among them Allah, Buddha, the Christian Trinity, Lutembe the Crocodile of Uganda, and, in some cases, Mammon. They make their homes where birth or the spirit of adventure placed them—on an entire continent, on great islands and pinprick islets, in obscure deserts, tropical jungles, foam-flecked northern fishing villages, places with exotic names like Zanzibar, edible-sounding names like the Cameroons or Tortola, improbable names like Gozo or Piddlehinton, famous ones like St. Helena or Piccadilly. No man among them can fluently speak the tongues of all—Urdu and Sanskrit, Dutch and French, Hottentot, Greek, Turkish, Cockney, Twi, Gaelic.
There are, in all, eight free and sovereign nations, 65 colonies, protectorates and trust territories (the smallest of them: Pitcairn Island, two square miles in the Pacific; the largest, Tanganyika, 362,688 square miles in East Africa). All are bound together into one geopolitical phenomenon called the Commonwealth.
It is not so tightly knit, nor is the Crown so powerful, as the Empire that Disraeli proclaimed for Victoria, adding the jewel of India to her crown. Ireland and Burma have broken completely free. The countries formerly called dominions today prefer to be called by the less-subservient name "realm." Six of them (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan, Ceylon and South Africa) recognize Elizabeth as their own individual Queen as well as Queen of the Commonwealth, but three of these (Ceylon, Pakistan and South Africa) do not accept her as Defender of the Faith. The seventh realm, India, is a republic, and does not recognize Elizabeth as Queen at all; it ingeniously combines republicanism and monarchy by acknowledging the Crown as "the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations, and as such, the Head of the Commonwealth.*"
Over all of the realms, Elizabeth II will reign but not govern; as a constitutional monarch, her political rights were classically defined by Political Scientist Walter Bagehot in 1867, as three: "to be consulted, to encourage, to warn." In addition, as Sir Winston Churchill remarked, "she is also heir to all our united strength and loyalty . . . Thus we go forward, moving together in freedom and hope, spread across the oceans and under every sky and climate though we be."
*So delicate are the relationships, in fact, that today the U.S. is NATO-treaty-bound to defend Britain if she is attacked, while all Commonwealth nations but Canada (which also belongs to NATO) are free to do as they choose. It is a source of great pride to the British that all the dominions did come to the Crown's aid in 1939.