IT was to have been the crowning moment of her 50-year reign, but instead the Golden Jubilee has become yet another annus horribilis for the Queen.

Yesterday, as the year drew towards a close, tears ran down her cheeks in an uncharacteristic display of public emotion. The Queen wept openly at a remembrance service at Westminster Abbey, where she took on a role that the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had performed dutifully for more than 50 years. While the Queen has shown her emotions on a number of recent occasions, including her mother’s funeral and at a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral for the victims of the September 11 attacks, it is thought to be the first time she has cried openly in public for many years.

While no doubt thinking of her mother, and of her late sister, Princess Margaret, many of those present assumed that she was also showing the strain of recent days. After the trial of Paul Burrell collapsed last week following the Queen’s intervention, she has been forced to endure days of highly embarrassing allegations from Diana, the Princess of Wales’s former butler. The Queen began blinking back tears during a minute’s silence after planting a small wooden cross bearing a scarlet poppy in the Field of Remembrance.

“The Queen looked very fragile and emotional as she laid the cross,” one of those at the service said. “It is something the Queen Mother used to do every year, and this is the first time that she has done it.”

The Queen was accompanied by Sara Jones, widow of Falklands war hero Colonel H Jones, who was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Prayers were said for world peace at the brief ceremony, held in the presence of hundreds of war veterans from both world wars, from Korea and the Gulf.

The Queen then planted her own Cross of Remembrance, and she inspected some of the 19,000 crosses that paid tribute to the fallen. Last November, the Queen Mother had braved rain to plant a cross at the ceremony.

While the Golden Jubilee year has held many moments of joy for the Queen, including concerts at Buckingham Palace and a year-long tour of the country, the lows have outnumbered the highs.

Last night St James’s Palace denied that it had attempted to cover-up allegations that a male member of Prince Charles’s staff had raped another. It said there was no proof that the Princess of Wales had secretly taped a conversation with the alleged victim.

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