By ALAN COWELL Published: March 26, 2012
LONDON — She wore an outfit in the shades of a buttercup and sat upon a gilded throne, as she often has during her 60-year reign. Liveried guards in scarlet tunics looked on, expressionless. Her husband, flinty of face, occupied a separate throne set a little behind her. Lawmakers from both houses of Parliament perched like rows of plump birds, almost literally at her feet below a flight of red-carpeted steps, enfolded in what one onlooker called “Flummeryworld, that theme park where the British are so happy and at ease.”
Only one other British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II observed in a speech below the high, stone vaultings of Westminster Hall last week, had ruled for longer than her six decades. Or, as she put it, eschewing unseemly boastfulness, “I am reassured that I am merely the second sovereign to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee.” (Cue uncertain frissons of amusement from her audience.)
It is arguable that that other monarch, Queen Victoria, who gave her name to an era stretching from 1837 to 1901, had an easier time of it: Buoyed by the Industrial Revolution, her subjects busily built an empire on which the sun never set in an era when other empires did not fare so well. (She is also widely remembered, possibly apocryphally, as the origin of the regal expression “We are not amused.”)
For her part, Elizabeth has presided over the shrinkage of the realm, virtually to a core. Since she became queen at the age of 25, she has, in her words, “treated” with 12 prime ministers who have guided — or misguided — the land from the postwar days of rationing, austerity and deference to a modern state of dwindling prosperity, austerity and nostalgia for global influence that has long been supplanted by that of the United States.
But, as she readies herself for months of Diamond Jubilee celebrations — competing with the London Olympics as a source of public fascination and disruption — there is an unmistakable subplot, evident from her pledge at Westminster Hall to “rededicate myself to the service of our great country and its people now and in the years to come.”
A few years ago, continued tenure might have seemed less assured. When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in Paris in 1997, many Britons turned against the queen, seeing in her initial aloof reaction to the death of a troublesome — and troubled — former daughter-in-law a gesture of indifference, an emblem of the disconnect between a dysfunctional royal household and its subjects.
The moment endured as a lingering reproach, an ominous reminder of a misstep that threatened the bond of public acquiescence that allows modern monarchs to retain their gilded lives with the tacit consent of citizens never formally required to voice their approval.
But, since her grandson Prince William married the former commoner Kate Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge) last year, Diana’s specter has receded, replaced by a new contender for the place in the national myth once defined by Tony Blair as the “people’s princess.”
When the queen embarked this month on the first of a series of Diamond Jubilee tours of Britain’s provinces — not quite the distant outposts of empire of Victoria’s day — she took with her the newly minted duchess as if to finally lay to rest Diana’s ghost.
There the two were, in Leicester in the English Midlands, side by side, smiling for the crowds: the stocky, 85-year-old Queen and her chic, stick-thin, 30-year-old granddaughter-in-law. And when, last week, Kate undertook her first solo appearance at a children’s hospice, the questions and responses were the same as they had been for the young Diana — was her slender frame a sign of an eating disorder? Was her compassion that of a modern saint?
“The desire to find a new Diana was palpable,” said Rosalind Coward, a biographer of Diana.
The royal family has not survived in the way it has, of course, without learning lessons, often belatedly and laboriously, like a large ocean liner ensuring that the slightest change of course does not discomfit its occupants or detract from its appearance of stately invulnerability. (In this year of Titanic centennials, the metaphor might be extended to avoiding icebergs of public scorn or republicanism.)
“There’s no immediate danger of Kate going off like a loose cannon,” Ms. Coward wrote in The Guardian. “Unlike Diana, this is a woman well-briefed and carefully supervised.
“In this diamond jubilee year, the queen is reaping the benefits of longevity. Just by surviving this long, she is now revered. She is also benefiting from the amnesia that has settled upon a carefully managed nation, who have forgotten their anger at the treatment of Diana.”
As the pageantry at Westminster Hall showed, the royal family has long strived for excellence in its public choreography, offering totems of continuity and tradition to bolster its claim to tenure. “There are those who like to call it Ruritanian,” Simon Carr wrote in The Independent. “But there are many little girls in modern Britain who have a princess inside them — the symbolism transcends politics.”
Yet subjects, even the most exalted, do not always share the royal talent for deft messages delivered with chivalrous understatement.
The speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, for instance, offered his own speech to the queen, resembling the kind of praise poem usual for Zulu monarchs and not unknown to British ones, too.
He called her a “kaleidoscope queen in a kaleidoscope country” — a reference to the diversity that has blossomed during her reign. More shockingly to courtly ears, he spoke of Britain as a land where “your people are respected, regardless of how they live, how they look or how they love.”
Like Queen Victoria before her, the monarch gave no discernible indication of being amused.
