Every morning that she wakes up, Elizabeth Windsor, elderly widow of the late Philip Mountbatten, sets a record as the longest-reigning monarch in the history of England. At 96, she gets around only with considerable pain, we’re told — or as her palace press office puts it, “discomfort”. Stiff upper lip, eh?
The discomfort was enough to keep her away from the formal Church of England celebration of her Platinum Jubilee. The sequence of jubilees begins with silver, marking 25 years on the throne. What with all the wars and murderous intrigues and dissolute living in royal history, a relative few of the monarchs who reigned before her survived even that long. At 50 years on the job, she had a golden jubilee and at 60 years came the diamond.
Then she broke her great-great-grandmother Victoria’s record and has been breaking her own mark every day since. What comes after platinum, the 70-year celebration that belongs to her alone? Elizabeth II will find out, if anyone can.
No amount of discomfort could keep the queen from rising on June 2 to have her halo of white curls perfectly coiffed and her face modestly but flawlessly made up; a robin’s-egg suit trimmed in white awaited her, with matching hat and snug white gloves. No pain showed through her beaming (but not raucous — heaven’s, no!) grin as she greeted her subjects from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. This is her job: to be queenly, regal; to be an elegant blank book on which other people, millions of them, write their own feelings.
Because this grandest of dames somehow defies time, we instead read the calendar in the person of her eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales. On Thursday, he stood next to his mother just as he did in 1953, when she greeted the huge crowd that hailed her coronation. He was a small boy then; now, he is a gray-haired old man. He has the look of a slightly dotty fellow who might collect twine or speak to the wisteria. The bright red uniform he wore, laden with medals for god knows what and crossed with a sash, did not dispel the air of eccentricity. Indeed, the fact that his oldest son, William, Duke of Cambridge, wore a nearly identical get-up made both men seem a bit daft.
You can count the years of his mother’s reign in the wrinkles and crags of Charles’s face, or the wispy hairs of his gray head. But all those years are, when you come right down to it, the best measure of the queen’s achievement. With coolheaded strategy, sphinx-like silence and inestimable self-control, Elizabeth has kept her odd family business going into a future that seemingly has no place for it.
Why was it suddenly plausible — more than that, why did it seem to make sense — that the aging man in the red, festooned suit would wear the crown after waiting a lifetime? In this age of diversity, equity and inclusion, why were millions cheerfully celebrating the permanence of a monarch whose crown will next pass from one red-suited man to another, and thence to the handsome boy also standing there, a lad of 8, who looked positively normal in his smart little suit and tie?
Elizabeth has so managed and adapted to changing times that it seems she has actually saved the monarchy, despite everything. The British Empire is gone. The aristocracy is largely gone. But the Windsor family business goes on, thanks to her.
It is as though a maker of hoop skirts or milkmaid pails had refreshed the enterprise for the 21st century. Royalty belongs to another era — and, thanks to Elizabeth, still belongs to Britain and the Commonwealth. She has achieved this in part by efficiency. All the extra kids found themselves on the periphery of photos, or not in the picture at all. Only the most dedicated fans of the Windsors can easily recall the names and faces of Charles’s three siblings, much less their children.
She has done it by accommodating some scandals — the unavoidable ones, such as Charles’s marriage to his longtime mistress — and punishing others, such as Prince Andrew’s ill-considered friendship with the free-spending sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Most of all, she has done it by lasting so long and serving so reliably that she remade the monarchy into something contemporary. She is a brand, a sort of living trademark, a variety of intellectual property. The New Yorker magazine had a recurring headline for many years: “There will always be an England”. It ran above charming anecdotes of barminess and quirk that suggested the human condition is survivable.
There will always be an England, and Elizabeth will always be her queen.
David Von Drehle writes a twice-weekly column for The Post. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including "Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year" and "Triangle: The Fire That Changed America".