A Queen who personified continuity and stability leaves at a perilous moment for the world

(CNN)- "God Save the King."

With four words, Liz Truss -- charged with the gravest of tasks as a British prime minister of only two days standing -- marked the end of the second Elizabethan era.

Her statement -- a coda to a short speech marking the passing of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday -- was so jarring not simply because only Britons well into their seventies remembered hearing the phrase in public before.

But it also bookended an epoch in which the Queen became a global icon of leadership even though, and perhaps because, she was not a politician. In many ways, her influence was rooted simply in the fact that year after year, decade after decade, she was there -- always.

And now she is gone.

During her 70-year reign, wars came and went, as did crises and tragedies and political scandals, pandemics and recessions.

She ascended a throne wobbling on the tremors of a crumbling Empire. She died with the kingdom that she kept together itself at risk of splintering as she slipped away in Scotland, where independence fervor is rising.

Elizabeth presided -- distant, dutiful but ever present -- over a turbulent age of women's liberation, expanding gay and lesbian rights, de-industrialization and immigration that changed the face of her country. Spanning the Cold War and Northern Ireland's civil war, Britain's entry and acrimonious exit from the European Union and the disorientating spasms of a globalizing economy, the Queen was unmoved -- a last link with a national heroic mythology forged during World War II.

From the days of black-and-white television to the technicolor and the internet ages to a time of ubiquitous mobile devices with which mourners snapped selfies outside Buckingham Palace after she died, the Queen was a constant presence.

Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, John F. Kennedy, Mao Zedong, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II all ruled and passed into history during the Queen's long reign.

Almost everything about the world changed unrecognizably since the day in 1952 that she learned in Kenya that her father George VI was dead and she was queen. But Elizabeth, stoic and formal, was always there and always the same.

Her death, quiet and somehow sudden despite the fact she was 96, removed that bastion of constancy and steadiness -- just at a moment when Britain and the world seem more disoriented and volatile than in decades.

King Charles III inherits a nation that is divided, economically on the ropes and bracing for an awful winter as high energy prices and inflation brought on by its showdown with Russia, as part of the new Cold War over Ukraine, exact a heavy cost. A second superpower conflict with China is brewing. And the extreme heat that scorched Britain in the Queen's final, platinum jubilee summer, heralds a building climate disaster that could be especially perilous for her island nation.

Charles, who like President Joe Biden in a slightly different context, waited most of his lifetime to claim his head of state role, faces an impossible task in quickly restoring the leadership and stability that his mother provided over seven decades. He often seemed unfulfilled after long years of waiting, and the acrimonious collapse of his marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales, his sometimes pointed political jabs and a slightly quirky character mean he's not yet as beloved as the Queen.