A right royal progress

Coronation mug 1953

Princess Elizabeth was proclaimed queen after her father, George VI, died early on 6th February 1952. I was only three at the time, living in the then Crown Colony of Hong Kong, so the occasion will have passed me by or, if communicated to me, instantly forgotten. I continued listening to child star Ann Stephens singing They’re Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace on my wind-up gramophone, oblivious to what it was all about.

A year later we were back in Blighty for my parents to buy a house in the West Country, and in early June we joined the crowds on The Mall in London to mark Coronation Day. “Where is she going?” I asked my mother after the young queen’s golden coach rapidly passed us en route from Buckingham Palace towards Admiralty Arch and Westminster Abbey. “Around the roundabout and back again,” was the reply, leading me to expect the sovereign’s speedy return.

What I wasn’t told was that the “roundabout” would in fact be the Abbey, that the coronation service, beginning at 11.15am, would last almost three hours, and that then her return journey was routed around central London, taking from 2.50 to 4.30pm. It was a long wait — around six hours — for a four year old, even one who was nearly five, and thoroughly confusing: why was the coach taking so long to get round the roundabout? Nobody told me.

Coronation procession 1953 (credit National Archives here)

I won’t say if this was the first step on my road to republicanism but, Her Maj aside, I have to say that the institution that is the Royal Family has been increasingly showing its inherent weaknesses in recent years, what with salacious scandals, for example, and stories about undue influence on government.

Naturally enough my childhood was filled with fairytales featuring royal personages and stories of the knights of King Arthur so I knew that royalty was supposed to be a “good thing”. And I enjoy a good novel about blue blood as much as a nonfiction critique or study: in fact I have A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett on a 2022 to-be-read list (yes, I know she isn’t a bona fide princess) along with The Prince, Machiavelli’s study of medieval realpolitik.

But I also know the old adage that Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Though the United Kingdom now has a constitutional monarchy the institution has had imperial pretentions since the time of that petulant tyrant Henry VIII (his Ecclesiastical Appeals Act of 1532 declared that England was “an empire” and therefore its head could do what he liked).

Those pretensions continued via the Stuarts’ notion of the Divine Right of Kings and the partial curbs of the Glorious Revolution well into the 20th century, as I discussed in a post about the Delhi Durbar of 1903. Benighted souls in today’s UK retain a nostalgic glint in their eye for when Britain had an empire on which the sun never set, an empire founded on the sole principle that Might is Right. I don’t hold with that at all.

The upshot of this meandering discussion is this: I’m not a royalist, and though I have respect for the Queen’s sense of duty in and her commitment as Head of the Commonwealth, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the whipped-up patriotic fervour focused on celebrations of Elizabeth II’s many anniversaries. So today’s Platinum Jubilee will not be marked by any flag-waving from me — even though I probably waved one nearly 69 years ago when the golden coach swept by and left me confused and bemused in its wake.

Sunset of empire. Photo: C A Lovegrove