Making sense of six decades on the throne

Celebrations will cross the Commonwealth

It may not yet have fully impinged upon the collective public consciousness, but we are well into the season of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee.

The Queen has received addresses from both houses of parliament at a ceremony in Westminster Hall; she's already driven through the streets of London to widespread popular acclaim; and other members of the royal family have begun their visits, on her behalf, to the countries of the Commonwealth.

The climax of these celebrations will be the thanksgiving service, to be held at St Paul's Cathedral on 5 June, in conscious replication of that held for Queen Victoria when she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in the summer of 1897.

It's undeniably true that in some ways such royal jubilees are a relatively recent invention, but their historic origins do go back to the very distant past.

In ancient Egypt, pharaohs who reigned for 30 years celebrated jubilees, in the hope that the accompanying festivities would help regenerate their strength and restore their stamina. And according to the Old Testament, there should be jubilees after seven cycles of seven sabbatical years, as explained in the Book of Leviticus: "Consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

Despite these early precedents, it's certainly true that diamond jubilees, marking 60 years on the throne, are very much an invention of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, both in terms of the grandiose ceremonials accompanying them, and also in terms of the narratives that have invariably been constructed to make some sort of sense of the six decades that are being commemorated.

One way of seeing the present queen's reign is that it has successfully witnessed the downsizing of the British nation and the British monarchy. The Empire has gone, Britannia no longer rules the waves, the great industries based on coal and steel have all but disappeared, the royal yacht has been decommissioned and even Buckingham Palace is now open to the public during the summer months.

From this perspective, the Queen has presided over 60 recessional years of deimperialisation, deindustrialisation, and de-Victorianisation. But put more positively, this also means that during the past 60 years, and notwithstanding the current economic downturn, Britain has become a more open, a more diverse, a more liberal, a more mobile, a more tolerant and a more prosperous society. Although Queen Elizabeth herself may not have had all that much to do with these developments, this is surely cause for some form of thanksgiving in her Diamond Jubilee year.

And for the Queen herself, there is another, very different, story to tell about her reign. Despite the ending of the British Empire, she remains the only monarch whose range and reach are authentically global, as head of state in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries, and also as head of the Commonwealth.

The other great-power monarchies may have vanished, but Elizabeth II still commands an unrivalled worldwide allegiance. Her Diamond Jubilee will be in many ways a post-imperial anniversary, there will also be some faint echoes of those far-off celebrations of 1897.

Perhaps, like Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth will confide her thoughts to her diary once the thanksgiving service at St Paul's is over. Perhaps she will resolve to reign longer than her great grandmother's 64 years. Perhaps, indeed, she has already set her sights on the Platinum Jubilee which she may celebrate in 2022. Unless the King of Thailand gets there first, it will be an occasion utterly without precedent, and once this Diamond Jubilee is over, the people who plan such royal events at Buckingham Palace might want to start preparing for it.