In February, the English cricket team — virtual demigods in their country after defeating Australia last summer — were attending a reception amid the Rembrandts and Rubenses in the Picture Gallery of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth had just pinned medals on the athletes’ chests signifying their new status as Members of the Order of the British Empire, and was strolling among them, chatting and laughing with their proud families. She was the star of the show, making people grin — indeed, sometimes erupt with laughter — her own face switching between that studied placidity that is her trademark and a really dazzling smile. After the Queen moved on to another clutch of guests, Ashley Giles, one of the cricketers, appeared starstruck. He is 33, used to the pressure of top-level sports and the adulation of crowds. Yet he was visibly moved. “Just coming to Buckingham Palace in itself is an incredible honor for me,” he said, shaking his head. “But meeting the Queen makes this one of the most memorable days of my life.” Really? That grandmotherly figure who always carries a handbag and never says anything controversial? “She is a living link with our history, which is very important to me. She’s also very sharp. I think she does a fantastic job.” Then he added, slowly and with feeling: “And she is the most … beautiful … woman!”
Chalk one up for the enduring enigma of royalty. Long ago, mystery added to the authority of Kings; now, the idea of monarchy is self-evidently nonsensical. How can one person picked by the lottery of birth possibly embody a whole nation?
What can a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II, prohibited from exercising any real power, actually do to justify her country’s steady devotion — the crowds who line up to cheer when she passes, her face on each coin and bill and postage stamp, a national anthem that beseeches God to save her? What does she really do to earn something for which respect is way too small a word?
The Queen is 80 on April 21, and in the run-up to her birthday, TIME has been exploring how the institution of the British Crown retains meaning by watching the Queen at work. At her direction, the palace also granted unusual and exclusive access to her senior aides and her son Andrew. But in keeping with her lifelong custom, she granted no interview; she prefers to be observed rather than questioned.
The Queen is acutely aware that the continued success of the monarchy depends on the careful nurturing of popular consent — and that a peculiar danger of being the best-known woman in the world for over half a century is becoming background noise, ubiquitous but forgotten. Her press secretary, Penny Russell-Smith, says that the last 15 years of coverage, focused mostly on the misadventures of the younger royals, has created “a generation of readers and viewers who aren’t aware of what the Queen’s work is all about.” The antidote is more exposure. So not for the Queen a quiet retirement: she plans to keep working, and for people to see her working, as long as she can manage.
What, precisely, is the Queen’s job? There is not much she can do entirely at her own whim. Technically, she could dissolve Parliament to get rid of a Prime Minister she disliked, but it would provoke an unthinkable constitutional crisis if she tried. The great 19th-century journalist and constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot said the monarch had the prerogative “to be consulted, to encourage and to warn” the government of the day, but it is one Elizabeth II never exercises in public . Yet she still derives power from her twin roles as head of state — the one who opens and dissolves Parliament, makes splashy visits abroad and hosts dinners for foreign leaders — and head of nation, a focus for British unity and identity, rewarder of excellence, a visible oasis of continuity in an accelerating world, even as Prime Ministers
