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PART of London’s charm lies in its permanence, its immutability. One can still retrace one’s way through its streets and return unaided to the years of one’s student-hood.
For a post-Midnight’s Children generation, that continuity is personified by the British monarch Queen Elizabeth II, who this year has celebrated her 90th birthday and 64 years on the throne. It is no mean achievement. Only one other contemporary ruler has exceeded her longevity: King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand.
Younger in age than Elizabeth, he became king earlier, in 1946, six years before her accession. But there the comparison ends, for while the Thai king is rarely seen in public anymore, Queen Elizabeth continues to perform official engagements with an energy and élan that puts her grandchildren to shame.
The Thai king must envy the energy of his British counterpart, as well as her ability to remain (outwardly at least) impervious to the pinpricks of an inquisitive and persistent press. No modern head of state has been the victim of such continuous scrutiny by the media. For Elizabeth, there has never been a moment in her official life when she has not been at the centre, in the iris of the public’s eye.
The Thai king must envy the energy of his British counterpart.
In her 64-year-long reign, she has opened more schools than many developing countries could boast of. She has unveiled enough plaques to build another Hadrian’s wall. She has launched more ships than the Armada that once threatened her namesake Queen Elizabeth I in1588. The children she spoke to at the beginning of her reign now greet her as old-age pensioners. And the latest of her prime ministers — David Cameron — continues to consult her with unfailing punctuality every Tuesday. He was born in 1966, a year after her first prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, died.
Yet, despite the unrelenting exposure, the queen remains an essentially shy person. Unlike her late younger sister Margaret, she is not an extrovert. She very rarely (if ever) allows her true persona to be revealed. She keeps it cloaked under a mantle of consummate, ineffable grace and dignity.
At her coronation in 1953, she was anointed with holy oil poured from the golden ampulla which is one of the few pieces of the ancient crown jewels to have survived Oliver Cromwell’s depredations.
On that solemn occasion, she also took an oath derived from the Coronation Act of 1688. It bound her to the ‘Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon’. It is an oath she has taken seriously, even after any of these countries became independent republics.
This explains why, as queen, she has no intention of watching her United Kingdom become a melting glacier of ethnic breakaways. She has no time for cynics who would dismiss the Commonwealth as ‘the severed, still twitching tail of the British Empire’. To her, the Commonwealth is a reality just as Britain’s absorption into the European Union may seem inevitable.
If she ever revealed her personal choice (which she will not), she would probably prefer to remain head of an increasingly ceremonial Commonwealth than become one of already too many democrat monarchs riding bicycles within the European Union.
She has not forgotten that, to escape from Nazi Germany, the queen of Holland and other European royalty, not to mention the French leader Gen de Gaulle, sought refuge in Britain. She must recall with an earned pride that the British royal family — her family — did not flee their home even after the UK Channel Islands were overrun by the Germans in June 1940.
Today, there are millions of Britons who admire her. They have never known any other monarch in Buckingham Palace. Similarly, there are billions of citizens in Commonwealth countries who have known no head other than Queen Elizabeth. Like many dual passport holders, the latter can be both staunch republicans and also loyal royalists, when it comes to the Queen’s person.
Can her heir Prince Charles expect to inherit that loyalty? Quite possibly. Recently, he had occasion to demonstrate his qualifications. He visited our recuperating prime minister Nawaz Sharif, with a message from the queen and a pot of honey from his country home Highgrove House.
Was the choice of a honeypot the product of busy bees in his country home of Highgrove, or was it from the honeycomb of wisdom accumulated by equally industrious bureaucrats in the Foreign Office? Whichever mandarin was responsible, no selection could have been more appropriate. Someone in Whitehall has discovered a public secret. The way to the heart of the Sharifs is through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. For doesn’t the slogan of Sino-Pak relations end with the climax: ‘stronger than iron, sweeter than honey’?
The writer is an art historian.
Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2016
