Rain on the Queen's parade

22 June 2012

Constant rain, sullen skies and a scarcely articulate commentary did not deter the massive and sodden crowds or diminish the momentum of the Queen’s recent Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Only the bigger picture and the jaundiced eye of history could assign the event its comparative place in the great panoply of royal extravaganzas …

Certain eras somehow put their mark on those born into or growing up during them, and this process, while a part of the historical record, is also influenced by myth and anecdote.

Victorian Britain, for example, will no doubt never throw off its aura of vague gloom, narrow propriety and prissiness despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, ranging from the pleasant and pastoral to the lurid and prurient – not to mention the minatory Queen’s own fleetingly lighter moments: when assured by a cleric that ‘we cannot pray too often, nor too fervently, for the Royal Family’, she reputedly replied: ‘Too fervently, no; too often, yes.’

The ‘Edwardian Age,’ on the other hand, remains halcyon in legend and memoir. From the time of his accession at the dawn of the new century, the sybaritic Edward VII seemed to bring a sense of liberation, a release of constraints and tensions. His death in May 1910 did not apparently signal the end of ‘the age’.

His son and heir, George V, though less flamboyant and more cautious, did nothing to stall the momentum, and pleasure-seeking, celebration, fashion and high society became inextricably linked with English and particularly London life in much the same blurring, unexamined way that ‘naughtiness’ became associated with the nineties in Paris.

Unlike Queen Elizabeth II – with the 1992 fire at Windsor Castle completing what she called her annus horribilis, unforgettably translated by the Sun as ‘One’s bum year’, and then twenty years later the ordeal by water during the Jubilee – both Edward and George were favoured by a succession of stunning summers. In July 1911, the Sussex towns of Eastbourne and Hastings had the highest monthly total of sunshine (384 hours) on record and in August the country ‘enjoyed’ day after day of temperatures of more than 35 degrees centigrade.

And then there was the famous last summer before the war, the remembered perfection of which was no doubt intensified both by fond and eventually flawed recall and by the shocking starkness of its contrast with what followed. David Fromkin, in his Europe’s Last Summer, describes ‘the hot, sun-drenched,

ARTS AND CULTURE

Rain on the Queen's parade

Subscriber login