One constant good: Semper eadem

The Queen in March 2015. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0As a child, I remember reading in my treasured 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of Records about the longest serving monarchs. Back then, the book was a scholarly work, and amongst the detail, it gave the date, a quarter of a century in the future, when the Queen would take that record.

Today, that day has finally come. Much has been said of how the Queen has been a beacon of stability as the world changed around her. This has long been recognised. At the time of Her Majesty’s silver jubilee in 1977, Philip Larkin wrote:

In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
She did not change.

This idea of constancy in a rapidly changing world reminds me of the motto semper eadem: “always the same”. This was actually the motto of the first Queen Elizabeth, and has since been adopted by the city of Leicester. By all accounts of both Queens’ lives, it would seem far better suited to our present Queen Elizabeth than to her earlier namesake.

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