Royal celebrations for Queen's 60th wedding anniversary

UK, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary Monday with a moving thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey, the church where they married 60 years ago.

The pomp and splendour of the traditional ceremony came a day before the anniversary itself, which the couple are to mark Tuesday with a trip to Malta to relive their newlywed days on the Mediterranean island.

The queen, the first British monarch to celebrate six decades of marriage on the throne, wore a white suit alongside her black-clad consort for the service attended by a 2,000-strong congregation. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was among the ranks of great and good invited, while the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon praising the royal couple's resilience in the public gaze of the modern age.

While the ceremony was broadcast live on the BBC, coverage was relatively low-key and the anniversary had little of the sense of a state occasion, in line with recent years when the role of the royal family has been increasingly questioned. "Today we celebrate not only a marriage but the relationship between monarch and people of which also that marriage is a symbol," said the archbishop, Rowan Williams.

"So before we complain too loudly about a world of disposable relationships and short-term policies, a world of fracturing and insecure international bonds and the decline of trust, we should remember today that we have cause for thanksgiving."

London, Tuesday, AFP