Given that most empires in history were pretty darn cruel, you might have to justify the idea that the British Empire was extraordinarily cruel, especially given that the Queen only reigned in its last years and that many of the former members of the Empire chose to stay on as part of the Commonwealth. Also the British Empire is unique (AFAIK?) in having wound itself up more or less peacefully at the end, rather than needing to be destroyed by a massive rebellion or war - the usual way empires usually die (well, except for the pesky Americas of course... but that was a bit before Liz's time!)
> former members of the Empire chose to stay on as part of the Commonwealth
Being in the Commonwealth doesn't mean "staying on" the British Empire - it just means belonging to a very, very loose trade block on which Britain temporarily exercised an outsized influence. Recent developments (like the inability of subsequent UK governments to replace Commonwealth leadership) have shown that even that influence has now gone. At this point the Commonwealth is little more than an administrative construct for trade-related issues.
The Queen was not responsible for the acts of her children once they became adults, whatever they may be, no more than any mother is. As for comments about what she was like in private, who can really say?
But perhaps more to the point - does it matter? The Queen was The Queen and not Elizabeth Windsor because of the exceptionally strict and rigorous separation she kept between her private life and her public role. She had a very long life, yet rarely if ever did it become known what her personal or political views actually were. Undoubtably she had help in this from an establishment that tacitly agreed to uphold these conventions, but ultimately it was down to her. The Queen was, in some very real sense, not an individual with a personality and all the complexities individuals bring but an abstraction, a constitutional icon, that was created and maintained by a woman named Elizabeth Windsor through sheer force of will.
This is easier to see when you contrast it with King Charles III of course, whose personal views and personal life is well documented. A big question mark is whether he will now adopt the conventions that his mother sustained and become that abstraction, or whether he will be a monarch of opinions.
W.R.T. the Empire, this is probably not the thread for it, but it slowly became the Commonwealth over the period of Elizabeth's reign and it did so in a unique and largely peaceful manner. She was born just after World War 1, into a world that had been torn apart by war between empires. She died in a world where empires had long ago ceased to exist. Where there were exceptions to that peaceful transition, it wasn't because the Queen sent in her army to capture or recapture territory as it was for most of history. That's the reason she was the Queen and not merely a Queen: it's that legacy of peaceful transition that left her the notional reigning monarch over large parts of the world, even decades after the British Empire had ceased to exist. Even if that's a mere historical convention and not political reality, what other empires had such good relations with its old territories like that? Not many, and the Queen deserves a lot of credit for that outcome.
