ENGLAND WATCH : Royal Touch

To Americans the travails of Queen Elizabeth II might seem like little more than the mother of all gossip scandals. Actually the flap is about more than that.

In Britain the queen is the historic representative of the state and human symbol of sovereignty--sort of the mystical glue that somehow helps hold that society together.

Glued or perhaps increasingly unglued, the royal family has been having a nasty time lately. It has had to endure a destructive fire at famed Windsor Castle--this in addition to an unprecedented level of fire from the take-no-prisoners British press, with its remorseless reports of divorce, separation, suicidal despair and other circulation-boosting stuff.

That press portrait is not serving the Crown well, of course. Politicians, especially from the left, are using the current turmoil to raise anew questions about whether Britain even needs the monarchy.

Of course it does: Just as America requires its written Constitution (Britain has none), Britain requires the central symbol of the royal family as a sort of state gyroscope of continuity.

But perhaps even tradition can benefit from a touch of modernization. After the castle fire, critics had called on the queen to contribute handsomely to the costly repair. Thursday the queen did them one better. It was announced that henceforth the queen, whose phenomenal wealth had been exempt from taxation, would actually start paying taxes and begin reducing crown expenses. This, it seems to us, was one magnificent, and timely, royal gesture.