By Alan Cowell
Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee celebration in 2012, commemorating the 60th anniversary of her ascending the throne, elicited an outpouring of public enthusiasm in British society.Credit...Pool photo by Eddie Mullholland
A Dazzling Parade
On Sept. 9, 2015, Elizabeth surpassed Queen Victoria as her country’s longest-serving monarch, and after the death of Thailand’s king on Oct. 13, 2016, she became the modern world’s longest reigning. Even in her older years, her subjects saw her as unusually robust and at ease with the pageantry of her office, as she was during a four-day celebration in June 2012 commemorating the 60th anniversary of her attaining the crown.
The only other British monarch to celebrate a diamond jubilee was Queen Victoria, Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, whose reign lasted 63 years and seven months before her death in 1901.
Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, which included a dazzling pageant of 1,000 vessels on the River Thames through London, coaxed forth an outpouring of public enthusiasm that seemed likely to cement the royal family’s place in British society, despite questions about the monarchy’s future. Although Prince Charles, Elizabeth’s eldest son, was her direct heir, many Britons seemed more drawn to Charles’s own son Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, who married a commoner, Kate Middleton, in April 2011, to much public acclaim.
The only departure from the tight choreography of the jubilee events was the illness of Prince Philip, who was 90 at the time. He was taken to a hospital with a bladder infection during the celebrations after spending hours in the biting cold atop the royal barge.
There had been concerns about the queen’s health ever since she missed church services on Christmas Day in 2016 and on New Year’s Day in 2017 because of what Buckingham Palace described as a “heavy cold.” Those absences were the first time in about 30 years that she had missed a holiday service.
