Queen's Sixty Years of Service Will Never Be Forgotten

The Diamond Jubilee, the Queen wrote, was “a never-to-be-forgotten day”. She seemed surprised by the enthusiasm of the crowds, which was “truly marvellous and deeply touching”. That was Queen Victoria, of course, in 1897. For all the superficial similarities between that day and this – the tabards and the trumpets, the copes and the carriages, the choirs and the cheers – nothing could be more mistaken than to suppose the 60th anniversary of Victoria’s accession was anything like this week’s Jubilee celebration. We have, it is true, learnt, since the shallow sneers of Lytton Strachey’s generation, to value Victoria for her personality: her love for dogs and children, her odd antipathy to bishops, her visceral rejection of racialism, her habitual anxiety lest something should go wrong (a fire, a stampede) and make her people suffer. But Victoria ruled; our Queen reigns. It is a different world.