LONDON // Queen Elizabeth II reached a major milestone on Wednesday when she became the longest-reigning monarch in Britain’s history.
Britain paid heartfelt tribute to the queen with cheering, flag-waving crowds on the street and solemn messages in parliament as she sealed a special place in the country’s history.
At about 8.30pm UAE time, Queen Elizabeth, surpassed the 63 years, 7 months, 2 days, 16 hours and 23 minutes that her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria spent on the throne.
Now 89, she is also the nation’s oldest ever monarch.
“Over the last 63 years, Her Majesty has been a rock of stability in a world of constant change and her selfless sense of service and duty has earned admiration not only in Britain, but right across the globe,” prime minister David Cameron told parliament in London.
“The Queen is our Queen and we could not be more proud of her. She has served this country with unfailing grace, dignity and decency and long may she continue to do so,” he said. Lawmakers cheered at the end of his tribute.
In central London, the BT Tower flashed “Long may she reign” around its screens nearly 200 metres above the capital.
Buckingham Palace marked the event by releasing an official photograph of the queen taken by Mary McCartney, a photographer who is the daughter of former Beatle Paul McCartney.
Those close to the queen say she is fairly blase about the milestone, believing it represented little more than the fact she has lived for a long time and that her father, King George VI, died early.
Initially she did not even intend to mark the event publicly, but she bowed to public pressure and undertook an official engagement in Scotland, where she traditionally spends her summer holiday.
Crowds greeted her arrival accompanied by husband Prince Philip, who has been at her side throughout her reign, at Edinburgh’s Waverley station before she began a journey on a steam train to mark the opening of the longest railway to be built in Britain for more than 100 years.
“It’s brilliant,” said May Marshall, 58, wearing a jacket and hat covered in Britain’s Union Jack flags. “No one else will ever do it. It’s testimony to her stamina.”
Queen Elizabeth smiled broadly as she boarded the train.
“It’s inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you, a successor to the kings and queens of history,” she had said in her first televised Christmas broadcast in 1957.
“I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice. But I can do something else. I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”
As a young princess, Elizabeth had not expected to become monarch as George VI only took the crown when his elder brother Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
She was 25 when she ascended to the throne on February 6, 1952, following her father King George’s death.
Since becoming queen, she has seen 12 prime ministers, starting with Winston Churchill, and there have been 12 US presidents, from Harry S Truman to Barack Obama.
However, despite the torrent of tribute, not everyone was impressed.
Republicans said her silence on political matters was her finest achievement, and well-known British historian David Starkey remarked that she had never said or done anything memorable in all her years on the throne.
“She will not give her name to her age. Or, I suspect, to anything else,” Starkey wrote in the Radio Times magazine.
* Reuters and Associated Press
