CULTURE: Happy and Glorious
What one million people knew without even thinking about it
A million people – it's a satisfying sort of number, its sheer roundness instantly conveying scale with a demotic ease that no more accurate estimate could hope to match. A million – it's the sort of number that even the innumerate can remember, that passes instantly into journalistic convention and thereafter into folklore. So, a million people it was, then, and thus history will record it. But what, exactly, did it take to bring a million people out onto the streets of central London?
Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to see the answer at first hand. My vantage-point was the tiny courtyard of a City of London guild church. I was perched precariously atop a wooden bench that we had carried out from the vestry, and I was holding onto the courtyard's cast-iron fence, leaning out as far as I could towards Temple Bar. To the left and the right, all along Fleet Street, crowds were lining the way, five or six deep. As the contemporary political cliche would have it, these crowds 'looked like Britain' – not the keyed-up and strident Britain of Big Brother where everyone is aged 22, either very thin or consciously not very thin at all, and can only communicate by shouting, but the real and unremarkable Britain of the suburbs and provincial towns, of young families and retired people, of T-shirts and tweed jackets and sensible jumpers, of thermos-flasks and folded newspapers and railway timetables.
We consulted the newspapers, trying to work out what would happen and when it would occur. Meanwhile Royal Marine bandsmen played an odd succession of marches co-mingled with show tunes. Various City dignitaries passed and re-passed, some of them in open carriages, the men resplendent in their fur-lined robes, their wives beaming and waving furiously. Police milled about, chatting with the crowds and with each other – vigilant, often officious but invariably good-humoured.
Then, all of a sudden, things got underway. The television in the vestry revealed that the Queen had left the Palace. We waited. The first cheers went up as more open carriages passed. Then there they were, right in front of us –- those well-known faces, made strangely thrilling by their absolute familiarity. We saw the Duke of York and Prince Harry. Most of all, we saw Prince William, who has inherited his mother's gift for making every public glance and wave seem heart-wrenchingly personal and intimate. When he smiled at me I felt briefly certain that his smile was just for me and no one else – as, I expect, did thousands of other women. The Royals waved and we waved back. We cheered and brandished our little flags. Everyone seemed more than a little star-struck. Even the Earl and Countess of Wessex received polite applause.
Then came the clatter of hooves on tarmac and the jingle of traces, bursts of sunlight glinting off the flanks of marvellously well-groomed mounts, and a bewildering succession of uniforms. The crowd's good humour had transmuted into real excitement. There was the flash of gleaming silver kettle-drums, the glow of the Heralds' golden tabards, the Blues and Royals reining in their prancing horses, and that distinctive jingling as the King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery passed by – a strange sound, sadly familiar from Royal funerals but sounding uncomplicatedly festive on an increasingly bright late spring morning.
'She's coming!' said someone, and craning out towards Fleet Street, towards Temple Bar, I caught a glimpse of something large and golden. A half-troop of Life Guards approached. Their horses, handsome light things, seemed almost too excited. There was an odd, clattering sound as one of the mounts lost its footing on the hard road-surface and went down, throwing its rider. The crowd gasped and tried to figure out what was happening, but within seconds the guardsman – who was later driven away, sore and grim-faced but apparently unharmed – had been tidied to the roadside, the horse re-captured, and not a second had been lost from the intricate timing of the procession.
Almost by the time we had taken any of this in, however, it had been swept away by what came next – the sight we had all been waiting all morning to see.
The State Coach is enormous, and very golden, and obviously extremely heavy. Eight huge horses strained to pull it forward. It is a handsome thing, replete with Baroque fantasy, and doubtless deserved more scrutiny than it received. Because, as we all knew, the Coach was hardly the point. We craned and cheered and waved our flags.
And then, after all the waiting, there she was – the Queen. She is tiny, and was wearing a bright blue suit ornamented with some typically well-chosen jewellery, and was seated next to the Duke of Edinburgh. She looked out at us in a matter-of-fact way – more with friendly curiosity than anything else – and waved. Her ordinariness seemed, in the midst of all the spectacle – after the build-up over recent days and weeks – almost the most extraordinary thing of all. We cheered and clapped and felt strangely electrified by what we were seeing. Several people shouted 'God save the Queen!' Many simply watched. And then she was gone, off to St Paul's. We wandered inside, watched the service on television in the vestry, and eventually settled down to a light lunch.
It was only later, listening to some of the more witless television commentary, that it occurred to me to wonder why we had all been there. Not just those of us at St Dunstan's-in-the-West, either, but the crowds that lined the processional route all the way from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's, and indeed the people who had stood outside the Palace on Saturday and Monday nights, and who had filled Green Park and St James's Park – I mean those, as well as the people, thousands at a time, who had attended Jubilee events over the past few months – and even the many millions who had watched these events on television. Because, of course, the 'one million people' phrase, although convenient shorthand, hardly begins to include everyone who, each in his or her own way, has taken part in the celebrations of Her Majesty's Golden Jubilee. But for anyone who lives in central London, the London crowd made an unforgettable impact. On Monday night there were a million people on the streets of central London, and yet the police report making only three arrests. If there were mountains of rubbish lying around afterwards, it was only because the police had quite reasonably removed the rubbish-bins. What had brought these people onto the streets, to wait and to cheer and to wave? What is it that so many of us evidently hoped to find, here and nowhere else?
The answer, whatever else it might be, is not a simple one. I doubt that asking people why they were there would have revealed much. We have, after all, long ago internalised the stock remarks, self-effacing and modest, appropriate to such occasions: 'wonderful pageantry' ... 'a part of history' ... 'something to tell the grandchildren about' .... even 'I just wanted to say thanks', because among other things, the sad departure of Elizabeth the Queen Mother from the nation's life earlier this year has reminded us all that we cannot take these familiar figures for granted. But then it is famously difficult to articulate some of our most profound emotions, as anyone who has ever loved or mourned knows all too well. And this, I think, is one reason why media pundits will always be uneasy about the chord that the monarchy sometimes strikes and which the people unerringly hear and echo – the ultimately mysterious nature of the bond that connects sovereign and subject.
I doubt that the overwhelming public response to the Jubilee celebrations had much to do with the personal qualities of Queen Elizabeth II. Of course her personal qualities are beyond debate. Can anyone think of a modern head of state – elected or otherwise – who has shown such unerring, unflagging, undemanding and yet wholehearted devotion to her people? Year in, year out, the Queen has patiently got on with the arduous job which first birth and then sacramental oath imposed upon her, and if some of the younger Royals have received criticism for failing to live up to this standard of service, it has more than a little to do with the way in which the Queen has made something so difficult look so remarkably easy. Most of us could learn a great deal from the Queen's example in this respect, as we could from her mother's ability to transmute personal tragedy (the early deaths first of close family members and then a beloved husband) through an alchemic combination of iron resolution and charm. But, as I implied earlier, I think we take this for granted about the Queen to such an extent that it cannot have been the thing we were celebrating. We have forgotten George IV and Edward VII, cannot really envision a monarch who lived for himself, rather than for us, and don't really value the sacrifices involved because we can hardly imagine them. The Queen's personal qualities are largely incidental to the way in which the monarchy per se is regarded, however much long and happy reigns may blind us to this fact.
Nor is it, as some have suggested, simply a matter of good presentation, of 're-branding' the Royals to make us fond of them, as if the Queen were some unloved M&S clothing range. The Royal Family are right to take an interest, as we all must, in the way in which they appear to the world. Some of them – Prince William, for instance – seem to have been born with the double-edged gift of charisma. Some of them are uncharismatic and unlucky. Some of them have seen the wheel of fortune turn and turn again. The Prince of Wales has been loved for his youth and glamour, teased about his ears and his chats with plants and his fogeyish views on architecture, turned into some sort of archetype (for good or for ill) in his relationship with the Princess of Wales, is now saluted as a wonderful father and as a pioneering exponent of organic farming and sensitive urban environments, and is indeed warmly loved by his people, as anyone who was standing in the Mall on Monday night can hardly deny. If his use of the word 'Mummy' prompted a few hundred thousand loud cheers and dampened another few hundred thousand pairs of eyes, this had less to do with PR advisors than with something far more basic – something that goes right to the heart of why our monarchy has the instinctive rightness it so obviously does – a rightness that unfailingly takes media pundits by surprise, but which rarely fails to strike a chord with the British people.
The answer lies in the theological concept of embodiment – the instantiation of one thing in another. Monarchy, very obviously, is all about embodiment. Specifically, at the moment, it embodies Great Britain – all its magnificent history, its past power and glory, its present complexity and richness, its future – in the short, dignified person of a silver-haired grandmother who clutches a handbag, wears her mother's pearls, and presides over a large and occasionally disaster-prone family to which we can all, at some level, relate. For that is the nature of embodiment, mingling the ordinary with the numinous. Christianity's central experience is grounded in it, but so, too, is our experience of the monarchy, whether we realise it at a conscious level or not.
Politicians continually try to make their world 'accessible' and 'relevant', but at the end of the day, they are necessarily exceptional people who spend their days worrying about policy, imagining that EDMs and three-line whips are important – two-dimensional figures addressing a three-dimensional world. Whereas the Royal Family are real people. The Queen is my mother's age; I am slightly younger than Diana would have been; who can fail to think of the Royal Family in these terms? They are silly, like us – silly, and variable, and hemmed in by the imperatives of birth, copulation and death. We know their stories, laugh at their indiscretions, keep an eye on what they are wearing – and then, when something happens like Diana's death, or the Queen Mother's death, or the happy occasion of the Queen's Golden Jubilee, we somehow discover in their lives a channel through which to express a million things too silly or embarrassing or important to express in our own. I have always thought that the millions who cried over Diana's demise were mourning everything that circumstances had, for some reason, prevented them from mourning in their own lives. Filing past the Queen Mother's catafalque in Westminster Hall, curtseying before the coffin, one was aware of saluting something much greater than a single individual, no matter how much-loved and much-missed that individual surely was.
And in the same way, when we went out onto the streets of London over the weekend, seeking some sort of real and immediate contact with our sovereign, we were paying tribute not to a person, or to a certain sort of constitutional settlement, but to something almost mystical in nature. There are, after all, some things in life that cannot be explained in everyday terms, because they are not everyday things. We are constantly told that we live in a world which has been disenchanted – that religion and magic have been driven away by empirical observation and reason. Well, just try reasoning away love, or bereavement, or patriotism.
People are, I think, bored of being told, day in and day out, that man is the measure of man – that we are all just the same, that everything is relative, that nothing can be out of the ordinary. It seems intuitively wrong. It does not match what we know in our hearts. This, I think, is why we wanted to come out onto the streets and see for ourselves. And when we did, the answer was clear. Actually the Prince of Wales still gets cheers that Sir Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton could only envy – actually the sight of the Queen still sends something through us that no elected official could hope to match.
So it remains a mystery. Yet it's a stunningly powerful one. The idea that one small woman, one single family can instantiate our own histories, our own context, our own future is a difficult one to grasp consciously. At the same time, its visceral appeal is instant and compelling, and transcends anything that modern political structures could ever hope to provide.
Politicians demurred, and even the Palace had its doubts. We, on the other hand, knew in our hearts what we meant, even if we lacked the words to express it. So I can only hope that, at the end of Tuesday afternoon, as she looked down the Mall at the sea of waving flags and delighted faces, and as she heard that roar swelling up towards her – 'send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us' – our Queen had some sense of how passionately and yet how literally those traditional words were meant.
Drusilla Breckinridge lives in central London; when she isn't writing for ERO, she spends her time looking after her animals and tending her garden.
Drusilla Breckinridge, June 6, 2002 01:16 PM