As the blockbuster pageant of Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee year gets underway, it’s looking like much of the show will have to depend on the understudies, not the principal star, the queen herself.
It wasn’t intended to be this way when this year-long spectacular to celebrate the queen’s unprecedented 70-year reign was being planned. That was way before the death of Prince Philip and the subsequent decline in the monarch’s health.
As an indicator of her strength, the queen’s inability to attend this week’s Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey was a far bigger deal than it might appear. She withdrew at the last minute—the order of service with her name on it had already been printed.
ADVERTISEMENT
Make no mistake: If there is one thing that she would name as the greatest achievement of her reign it would be the British Commonwealth. The queen has devoted more than half a century to nurturing and holding together this assembly of 53 former colonies, particularly in Africa. The fact that what was once the world’s largest empire was dismantled in a relatively bloodless way owes more to her influence than anyone’s.
Prince Charles and Camilla were at the Abbey, together with Will and Kate, and the queen did address the Abbey ceremony remotely, but this was meant to be her culminating moment when her appearance in person would have demonstrated her singular and irreplaceable diplomatic talent for finding common ground between otherwise diverse and, in some cases, incompatible regimes. In effect, to all of them she was the emollient mother figure, whatever the stresses of the day.
There is another bond involved here, too: with Westminster Abbey itself. From the time of her coronation there in 1953, the Abbey has served as the symbolic bedrock of her faith as the head of the Anglican church—her title, dating from Henry VIII, is “Defender of the Faith and Governor of the Church of England.”
Her coronation, the first to be televised, showed a young queen passing through a sacred medieval ritual (at the time, many of her subjects thought she was actually chosen by God) in which the right to rule and her faith were consecrated in one body—hers.
(Her heir does not have same narrow channel of beliefs. Robert Runcie, who as the Archbishop of Canterbury counseled Prince Charles on religion at the time of his marriage to Princess Diana, recalled in his memoir that Charles had “given up” on the Anglican church and was exploring other religions, like Hinduism, and when he became Charles III would be “defender of faith” not the faith.)
There are many illustrious corpses at rest under the time-worn stones of the Abbey—among them, 16 kings and queens. None of them are Windsors, but it’s significant that the queen chose the Abbey as the place to hold a service of thanksgiving for the life of her husband, Prince Philip, on March 29. Will she be able to attend? If not, that will surely be a huge admission of her frailty. She has not made a formal public appearance since Oct. 19 last year.
The queen will be 96 on April 21. Of course, it is not unusual for someone of that age to have problems of mobility and, apart from that, the monarch appears to be totally together. So the problem is not so much physical as one of self-perception, a kind of vanity peculiar to her because of the way she wants to seem resolute in public, to live up to the exacting standards she set for her day job.
According to the Mail on Sunday, the queen has ruled out using a wheelchair. For years she resisted even using a walking stick, while most normal mortals understand that foregoing a stick for reasons of vanity is to risk a fall that could be fatal. Perhaps she has an aversion to the photos of the aging Queen Victoria being wheeled around in a contraption called a bathchair—although by then Victoria was a lot less healthy than Elizabeth is now.
Whatever the discussions between the queen’s doctors and her advisers about attending the service for Philip, the demands on her for the primetime jubilee weekend early in June are formidable and would tax most people half her age.
They will begin on June 2 with one of the most Busby Berkeley-style spectaculars of traditional royal choreography, the trooping of the colors, where a parade of 1400 elite troops, together with 200 more mounted on horses and 400 musicians will perform before the queen on Horse Guards’ Parade. For many years the queen herself took the salute herself while on horseback and younger members of the family are scheduled to do the same this year. The most likely outcome is that, if well enough, the queen will appear in a horse-drawn carriage.
The next day there will be a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. The queen’s attendance there has never been confirmed, but on Saturday, June 4 she is due to appear at an event that always gets her full attention because it reflects one of her personal passions, the horse racing at Epsom Downs, south of London. That is followed in the evening by the biggest bash of them all, the Platinum Party at Buckingham Palace, where some of the world’s top music stars will perform in front of an audience of 10,000 ticket holders—and the whole royal family.
According to a palace source quoted by the Mail on Sunday, “Unlike at other jubilees, the queen won’t be at every event, but she will be at the signature moments.” What those moments will be, and how the queen herself will be seen, nobody can yet tell—not even the queen. And that points up the uncomfortable truth about these critical months for the House of Windsor: When there is only one superstar in a show of this scale the understudies, however hard they try, are really no substitute.
