Britain does well under an old queen. Our greatest monarchs have been women: Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II. Children, trying to recall hazy history, or horrible history, might remember Richard the Lionheart, or Henries V and VIII, but they all know something about the three queens whose faces are stamped on to the body of the nation.
Those long-lived and long-reigning female monarchs each ascended to the throne very young in life and carried time with them. They outlived their subjects, their favourites, their enemies and younger family members. In the cases of Elizabeth I and Victoria, alive at a time when life expectancy was far shorter than it is now, they must have seemed sustained by a magical or divine presence. The first Elizabeth’s quasi-goddess mystique in later life, England’s Gloriana, owed much to her astonishing longevity. She was the Virgin Queen eternally renewed.
