Everything has changed, apart from the spirit of o

[FetchingHag]

[WilliamDaily] Everything has changed, apart from the spirit of our Queen



Everything has changed, apart from the spirit of our Queen

Coronation Day, June 2, 1953, and the England of the early 1950s seem
almost as remote from today as the Renaissance court of Lucrezia
Borgia, which I have recently researched. Yet the impressions of that
day remain powerfully stamped on my memory. I was there in London,
where my father had somehow got us seats in a stand advantageously
sited in front of the hideous concrete bunker at the bottom of the
Mall next to Admiralty Arch.

I say advantageously because there was a traffic jam as the carriages
of the great had to pass through the arch, giving us time for a good
view of their contents. My abiding personal memory was of Winston
Churchill peering out of the window of his carriage, clearly
irritated by the hold-up and looking like a cross pink baby. Then
there was the open landau containing the huge Queen Salote of Tonga
and "her lunch" as Noel Coward dubbed the tiny Sultan of Kelantan. It
was an unremittingly grey, drizzling English day, lit by the flags of
the crowds and the uniforms riding down the Mall. The excitement was
palpable and patriotism reigned supreme, boosted by the news of what
then seemed an almost superhuman feat, the climbing of Everest by
Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing.

We had no television at home and in those days there were no giant
screens retailing pictures of the ceremony, so most of us saw it
later in that magical film - magical for the ritual, the glitter of
the jewels and, above all, the beauty and solemnity of the young
Queen. Even then it seemed dreamlike and remote, the medieval rite
affirming the Queen's consecration as a being apart. The next time I
saw her in the flesh was on her Coronation tour when we lined the
streets of Gillingham in Dorset, let out for the day from our nearby
convent school. I remember us all thinking how much prettier she was
with her astounding skin and porcelain complexion than she appeared
in photographs. Still, even in day clothes, she had an aura.

I am told that we looked then upon the Coronation as marking the
beginning of a new Elizabethan age, or rather that was what was put
out by the government and the media. As it turned out it was true,
but not in the sense they meant and not for another decade. The
England of the 1950s carried on, seemingly immutable, almost
indistinguishable from the two decades preceding it. The food was
still awful, the accents clipped, the music unchanged until Elvis
came along. The "New Elizabethans" did not fit the image projected in
1953 by Churchill and the pundits of the day, and were certainly not
in the mould of Shakespeare and Drake.

In terms of the adulation she received, the 1950s were the apogee of
the Queen's reign, the era when John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham, was
punched on the nose by an Empire loyalist outside the BBC just for
criticising her "schoolgirl" voice. Worship of the monarch was, as he
memorably wrote, "akin to Shintoism".

The same could certainly not be said today. In the irreverent 1960s
Malcolm Muggeridge declared that the British were "bored" with their
monarchy. Reacting, in what was to prove a dangerous step, royal
advisers attempted to engage with the media on their own terms with
the television film documentary The Royal Family in 1969. The public,
having been invited into the drawing-room, inevitably then wanted to
see the bedroom as well, a process which culminated in 1992 with the
publication of Andrew Morton's book on the failure of the Waleses'
marriage. Diana turned the monarchy on its head and the Royal Family
endured the worst press since the days of George IV.

The unquestioning faith and loyalty with which the Queen was viewed
in the 1950s is no longer an equation in the relationship between
monarch and people. The concept of the Divine Right of Kings implicit
in her coronation rite has not in reality been accepted since the
Civil War failed to enforce it. Yet the succeeding
Commonwealth/Republic barely outlasted its creator, Cromwell.

The Queen's reign has turned out to be unimaginably different and
more difficult than anyone could have envisaged on June 2, 1953. You
have to wonder whether if, on that morning, she had been presented
with a vision of the future and been asked whether she would go ahead
with it, she might have cancelled the Coronation. Fifty years on we
have the answer. The Queen has dreamed of retiring but that is all it
has ever been for her, a dream. She believes that what she does has
been worthwhile and that what she represents has validity. The point
about Elizabeth II is that she would always have accepted her destiny.