The longest reign

Liveried footmen stand at attention beside huge gilded doors in The White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace. There is absolute silence, cossetted away from the world in this beautiful room of ebony-veneered cabinets, plump sofas of golden fabric and a chandelier the size of a small ship. Suddenly, the doors open, and in walks Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. She is smaller than one imagines, and rounder, her hair a silver nimbus, a cozy-looking grandmother in a crisp blue suit. She smiles. She has very nice teeth.

"It is quite a shock," she says, when the formalities of greeting are finished, and we settle in for a chat. On Wednesday, Sept. 9, the Queen sets a record for the longest reign of a British monarch, surpassing that of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who ruled for 63 years, 7 months and 2 days. "I haven't given it much thought, actually, but I'm so pleased that people in Canada care," she says before taking a sip of tea.

Oh, alright, fine, I'm making it up. The Queen has never granted an interview. But who can blame someone for imagining what it would be like to interview the world's most consistent, most revered, most world-renowned and yet most inscrutable celebrity?

Also: Seven things to know about our longest-reigning monarch

In light of her record-breaking reign (that part was not made up), historians and royal biographers are falling all over themselves to pin down her character and the significance of her legacy.

But the Queen reigns with a shrewd power of silence. And that may be, unwittingly, her greatest decision of all. The proliferation of media has been one of the greatest changes during her reign. It helped usher in the age of hyper celebrity. By not succumbing to requests from people who want to understand her, she achieves a rare status as someone who is simultaneously highly visible and inaccessible. One feels both a sense of estrangement from her – she is more icon than human – and also of belonging through the ubiquity of her image. It is what we might understand as celebrity star power. We know that face. We love that face, even. But we are kept at a distance despite our feeling of closeness.

"I have to be seen to be believed," she has reportedly said when security issues raise concerns about her safety. Early on, Prince Phillip was progressive in suggesting the power of television as a visual medium. And that visual image of her – the hairstyle, the purse, the boxy suits – has been remarkably consistent through the years. You could practically recognize her by her hairstyle alone, the only alteration to which has been its loss of colour.

Talk about good branding. In fact, that other queen, Queen Bey, has recently cottoned on to the media tactic. In this month's issue of Vogue magazine, Beyonce graces the cover but doesn't deign to grant an interview, leaving the writer to produce a "think piece" or essay about her star power. Queen Bey has "not answered any direct questions for more than a year," one of her minions explained recently to the New York Times.

Image is easier to control, of course. And silent icons are so much easier to fantasize about, allowing us the freedom to write anything we want onto their blank canvases. "The dominance of celebrity culture is the long triumphal march of image over substance," wrote Stephen Marche in an essay on celebrity in Lapham's Quarterly, citing France's Louis XIV – "the original king of poses" – as the first modern-era monarch to recognize the power of image.

But if the Queen has excelled at a certain amount of inscrutability – other members of the royal family, including the heir apparent, Prince Charles, have granted interviews – she did so out of habit and upbringing rather than a sense of deliberate media manipulation.

"She has reigned very much in the image of her father… From the start of the reign, she had a very dutiful and straightforward style," comments Robert Hardman, columnist for the Daily Mail and author of Our Queen, in a phone interview from London, England. "Her father never gave interviews. And the Queen Mother gave one brief interview when she got engaged."

In order to get a good portrait of the Queen, biographers are left with what one called "a daisy chain" of contacts who shed light on her personality. "She is cozy, she is funny, she's a great mimic," offers Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth The Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, in an interview. Those observations are so frequent, they're practically cliché. And of course, they're incomplete, in need of clever stitching to make a whole.

We know she dislikes insincerity. She once struck out the word "very" from a scripted speech saying, "I am very glad to be back in Birmingham." She was glad. Not very glad. A companion on a trip to Scotland once observed Her Majesty sitting on a box on a beach, singing. She fusses with her tiaras before state banquets apparently. But all this assembling feels a bit like how a child grapples with a sense of his parent – a stranger, essentially, an omnipresent character, whom you've loved all your life but can never fully know.

At least now with the perspective of her record reign and direct comparisons to Queen Victoria, a clearer analysis of the Queen's contributions – the mark of the second Elizabethan Age – is emerging. Last week, British historian David Starkey suggested that she "has done and said nothing that anybody will remember," causing an uproar. To many, Queen Victoria is a bigger, more noteworthy, character.

"We probably don't understand [Queen Elizabeth II] as much as Victoria," Hardman acknowledges. "Victoria's journals have been out there. Victoria wrote her own books and was a best-selling author in her own lifetime." One of her books, More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands, 1862-1882, published in 1884, included details on surviving a carriage accident and her thoughts on tasting haggis for the first time.

But the two monarchs were different in significant ways. "Victoria was argumentative and confrontational and the Queen is much more measured," Hardman says. "She has done masses of small acts of kindness. She is a quiet doer. Victoria did very little… What the Queen has done is to be out there, be seen and take the monarchy to places it had never been before. No reigning [British] monarch had ever set foot in Australia or New Zealand let alone a number of much smaller places. Sure, the jet engine has helped… But one of [Queen Elizabeth II's] big legacies is to have managed that transition from a sort of dying empire to a partnership of 53 countries, and to hold that together. And that wasn't just her hanging around, smiling. There was a lot of deft statesmanship going on there."

When she dies, and more of her private papers and her journals become available, there will be surprises, her biographers concede. We may find out what she thinks of some of her 12 prime ministers. We may get her views on female priests. We may read about her joy over the births of Prince George and Princess Charlotte. And we may understand what she really felt about Princess Diana.

But whatever emerges is unlikely to change opinion about what she powerfully represents - consistency in a turbulent world.