Pennies for the Poor

"Bloody Mary" was the first female sovereign to perform the ancient ceremony. She did the job thoroughly, crawling the whole length of Westminster Abbey on her knees. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, introduced a fastidious innovation. She made sure that the yeomen of the royal laundry had washed the paupers' feet thoroughly and doused them with sweet herbs against infection before she herself laid hand or lips to them. By last week, when Elizabeth II (in her first official public appearance since the funeral of her father) performed the traditional Maundy Thursday rites, the paupers' footwashing had been reduced to the merest symbolism: white linen aprons worn by her yeomen bodyguards. In the Abbey ceremony, however, the Queen followed faithfully the custom of her ancestors in distributing white purses of maundy money (26 pence worth of specially minted silver coins) to 26 men and 26 women (one for each year of her age), all carefully chosen and suitably aged and indigent.

Elizabeth II last week made clear her intention of leaving a more recent family tradition (her surname) well enough alone. The Queen announced officially "her will and pleasure that she and her children shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor." That put at rest the rumor that Prince Charles might become the first of a new line, the Mountbattens, after his father, who took the name Mountbatten from his mother's family, although he himself properly belongs to the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderbourg-Glucksbourg.

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