Some time in the early evening of Wednesday London time Queen Elizabeth II broke a record: she became the longest-serving monarch in British history, beating her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s reign of 63 years and 216 days. She is also, at 89, by a solid stretch the longest-lived British monarch.

And still busy at work, with hundreds of public appearances every year, reading official papers in red boxes every day, and meeting with the prime minister every week. The sovereign, as Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution some 150 years ago, has “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn.”