by Kitty Kelley
The Palace issued strict orders about what to wear during the ceremony. Gentlemen were required to wear dress uniforms, full decorations, and knee breeches. The Foreign Office cabled a series of instructions to embassies around the world: “If black knee breeches are worn, they should be of the same material as the evening dress coat, and should have black buttons and black buckles at the knee. Black silk stockings should be worn and plain black court shoes with bows—not buckles.” Women were told to wear head coverings—preferably a diamond tiara—or a shoulder-length veil that dropped no lower than the waist. The diplomatic cables specified: “Any colour excepting black can be used for this headdress and it should be made in a suitably light material such as tulle, chiffon, organza or lace. It can be attached by a comb, jewelled pins, flowers or ribbon bows—but not with feathers.”
Within Buckingham Palace, the livery room worked to outfit the men of the royal household in black velvet knee breeches with white silk stockings, black waistcoats, gold-braided tailcoats, lace neck ruffles, and patent-leather pumps with silver buckles. Fifteen thousand policemen were brought to London to handle the coronation crowds, and twenty thousand soldiers were assigned to line the coronation route. In accordance with ancient custom, the troops were ordered to abstain from sexual intercourse for forty-eight hours before the sacred crowning. The six young women who wore white satin gowns and carried the train of the Queen’s gown were required to be virgin daughters of earls—“unmarried and untarnished.” They were described by the London Sunday Times as the Queen’s maids of honor—“the girls the whole world envied.”
No movie star ever had a greater hold on her fans than this beloved twenty-six-year-old sovereign had on her subjects. They remembered her as a young girl “digging for victory” in her vegetable garden at Windsor during the war and recalled her as a fourteen-year-old, reassuring them sweetly over the radio “that in the end all will be well.” They believed her then, and now, as she became the sixth Queen of England* in her own right in four centuries, they gave her their hearts. One besotted subject, who stood in line all night to wave to her on coronation day, quoted:
I did but see her passing by
Yet I will love her ’til I die.
Even the elderly Prime Minister fell in love with the young Queen. “ ‘Gracious’ and ‘noble’ are words familiar to us all in courtly phrasing,” said Churchill on the eve of the coronation, “but tonight they have a new ring in them because we know they are true about the gleaming figure which Providence has brought to us in a time when the present is hard and the future veiled.” He was so enraptured with the photograph of the Queen smiling from her carriage window with her left arm raised in a wave that he ordered a large print, which he had framed. He hung the picture over his bed at his country estate, Chartwell.
The Archbishop of Canterbury also succumbed to the monarch’s considerable charm. “On Coronation Day,” he recalled, “this country and the Commonwealth were not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The London Times wrote: “The Queen represents the life of her people… as men and women, and not in their limited capacity as Lords and Commons and electors.”
To her subjects, the Queen was an exemplar of respectability and the epitome of rectitude. She and her handsome husband and their two young children personified the ideal English family with simple values and ordinary virtues. In 1953 Britons revered their sovereign as someone ordained by God. Someone entitled to devotion. Someone they would lay down their lives for without hesitation. Allegiance to the monarchy filled a basic human need to believe in a cause beyond self-interest—something grand and momentous that excited the fervor of religion and patriotism. During the darkest days of the war, the royal family had made people feel good about themselves and the sacrifices they were making. When the King and Queen drove from Windsor to London every day during the Blitz to share with their subjects the risk of being bombed, they inspired fortitude. They fulfilled the fantasy of royalty, which was to always behave splendidly. To be above mere mortals. To be as noble as the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. By meeting these grandiose expectations, the King and Queen brought reverence and respect to the House of Windsor and bestowed a magic on the monarchy that made it unassailable.
The magic of the throne, heightened by the glamour of palaces and heart-stopping pageants, was so enchanting in 1953 that hordes of foreigners swarmed into London for the coronation, hoping for a glimpse of history. Americans, especially, were drawn by the allure of shining armor, prancing horses, and gilded coaches. They flocked to London in droves, captivated by the prospect of dancing at Hampton Court or attending a tea party at Buckingham Palace. The young Queen was so well liked in America that in a U.S. popularity poll she topped President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most revered man in the country. In 1952 Time magazine named her “Woman of the Year,” an honor previously bestowed on only one other woman—Wallis Warfield Simpson in 1936.
Major American newspapers, news services, and networks sent reporters to cover the coronation. The Washington Times-Herald sent a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, whose fascination with royalty eventually revolutionized fashion in the United States.* To cover the coronation, she crossed the ocean on the SS United States and reported back to her newspaper, “The passenger list aboard this ship reads like the Mayflower in reverse.” She cited names like Freylinghusen, McLean, Reventlow, Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels, CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite, Whitelaw Reid (publisher of the New York Herald Tribune), and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Windsors were traveling with five pugs, two valets, and the Duchess’s homosexual companion, Jimmy Donahue, the thirty-seven-year-old Woolworth heir. He was accompanied by his maid, his valet, his chauffeur, and his mother.
“Passengers stare at the Duke,” reported Jacqueline Bouvier, “aware that if he had not abdicated, they would not be sailing to the coronation of his niece. Sometimes children ask him for autographs, which he gives cheerfully.”
The Duke and Duchess were among the few passengers on board not going to England for the Queen’s coronation.
“Why should he?” asked the Duchess. “He didn’t go to his own.”
The Windsors disembarked at Le Havre, France, took the train to Paris, and watched the ceremony on television at a party in the home of an American, Margaret Thompson Biddle. The Duke had received $100,000 for writing a ten-thousand-word article on the coronation for a U.S. magazine.† He also sold exclusive rights to United Press to photograph him watching the ceremony on television. At the party, he explained the long, complex ritual to the Duchess, providing historical details on the six phases of the ceremony—the recognition, the oath, the anointing, the investiture, the enthronement, and the homage. He sang all the hymns and identified the dignitaries as they moved across the screen, pointing to his friends and cursing his enemies. Seeing a close-up of the Queen, whom he affectionately called Lilibet, he complimented her regal carriage and pointed to her necklace of diamonds, which were as big as quail eggs.
“A Queen enjoys a marked advantage over a King on such an occasion,” the Duke wrote, “when a combination of humility and resplendent jewelry play so important a role. A woman can go through the motions far more naturally and gracefully than can any man.”
On the eve of the coronation, the Queen received the news that after several attempts the British had scaled Mount Everest.* She later bestowed a knighthood on Edmund Hillary of New Zealand for placing the Union Jack atop the world’s highest mountain. In 1953 this summit of 29,002 feet was the last outpost on earth unknown to man. For a kingdom reduced from empire to commonwealth, and one suffering awful deprivation, the conquest of Everest triggered a national celebration. Months before the coronation, a census disclosed that 4.5 million people in England had no bathroom plumbing, and more than 900,000 Britons had no running water. Relatively few families had a car, a refrigerator, or a television set.
Peers of the realm attend the coronation as their traditional
right to recognize, acclaim, and do homage to the new ruler. This was one of the few times when they wore their coronets and robes of rank and, for a few hours, relived times past when the power and privilege of the peerage predominated. In 1953 Great Britain was so impoverished that most of its 860 peers and peeresses could not afford to spend $600 for new coronation robes of red velvet trimmed with ermine. Some patched up old robes that had been used in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI, but most of the lords and ladies resorted to renting cotton velveteen capes stitched with shaved rabbit. The white fur trim was officially called miniver† to make it sound richer and more imposing. For the coronation parade, the country’s cavalry, which had to sell most of its horses during the war, borrowed 350 dray horses from breweries and rented 100 horses from Alexander Korda’s film company.
Coronation Day arrived under gray skies, but when the Queen left Buckingham Palace and stepped into her gold state coach,* the rain stopped briefly. The huge carriage, weighing four tons, swayed back and forth as the eight gray horses, led by one named Eisenhower,† cantered down the Mall. The Queen, who had rehearsed every detail of this day for the past year, sat next to the Duke of Edinburgh. When she saw the columns of people lining the street to honor her, she smiled. Some had camped out all night, enduring steady rain and freezing winds just to see her pass by. The Queen tilted her head from side to side, and as she had practiced, she recited the phrase devised by her courtiers to carry her through the two-hour procession to and from the Abbey so that she would look as though she were talking to her subjects.
As her coach glided past her subjects, she said, “So kind, so nice, so very, very loyal,” and she raised her arm in an elegant wave. “So very, very loyal.”
She repeated the refrain over and over as the Duke of Edinburgh, sitting by her side, smiled easily and returned the salute of soldiers standing at attention under the Admiralty Arch.
Inside the Abbey, the peers of the realm began their stately procession down the long aisle. The measured line was broken when the Prime Minister, stooped from the weight of his seventy-eight years, saw his old friend, George C. Marshall, former Chief of the U.S. General Staff in World War II and now chief of the U.S. delegation to the coronation. Marshall had been assigned the most prestigious seat in the Abbey out of respect for the rebuilding plan for Europe that bore his name and later won him the Nobel Peace prize. Churchill was so moved to see the seventy-two-year-old General that he impulsively broke ranks to clasp his hand. Flushed and happy, the Prime Minister looked like a big red tomato.
The lords and ladies took their places on their little gold chairs with tufted velvet cushions. Outside, the populace camped on the curb or sat in one of the $14 stadium seats erected to watch the Queen pass in her golden carriage, wearing her heavy crown and holding her orb, a jeweled globe, in one hand and her scepter, a jeweled rod, in the other.
Heralded by trumpets and the voices of four hundred young Westminster choirboys, the Queen made her way down the aisle of the Abbey to begin the ancient ritual of her coronation. Throughout the ceremony, the Duke of Edinburgh, sitting with the Princes of the Blood Royal, the Duke of Gloucester and the young Duke of Kent, never for one moment took his eyes off her. At times he leaned forward tensely as she went through the elaborate ceremony.
The supreme moment of the day was timed for 12:30 P.M., when the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed Her Majesty with sacred holy oil and placed the crown on her head, proclaiming her Queen Elizabeth II “by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, Sovereign of the British Orders of Knighthood, Captain General of the Royal Regiment of Artillery.”
Those words enthroned the monarch, whose blood flows from the Saxon King Egbert through Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scots, linking Elizabeth II to almost* every English sovereign since William the Conqueror. As Queen, she became Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. Her royal prerogative gave her ten powers: dismiss the government; declare war; disband the army; sell all the ships in the navy; dismiss the civil service; give territory away to a foreign power; make anyone a peer; declare a state of emergency; pardon all offenders; establish a university in any parish.
As a constitutional monarch, she reigns but does not rule. Her only rights are to be consulted, to be informed, to encourage, and to warn, and even those are more limited than they were in the days of her ancestors. Her role is mostly ceremonial, and her activities—opening Parliament, signing legislation, appointing officials, bestowing medals and titles—are ritual. In practice, her official actions are no more than mandatory approvals of her government’s wishes. Still, her symbolic power is considerable, for as “the Queen” she personifies Great Britain. The government is “Her Majesty’s Government,” not Britain’s government. British passports are issued “in the Name of Her Majesty,” not in the name of the state. Her face appears on stamps and coins. Her royal arms dominate the judiciary. Her royal insignia governs the church. Cabinet ministers are her ministers, state departments are her agencies, and those living within her realm are her subjects. There are no citizens, only subjects, in Great Britain, and the country’s armed forces and the police serve “the Queen,” not the people.
Her greatest power as Queen is the emotional hold she exerts on her people, who toast her health at every formal banquet and dinner and whose National Anthem beseeches God to protect her. As the fountainhead of such honor, she is a sacred symbol that elevates her above criticism. From this pinnacle she commands absolute fealty.
“Because of her exalted position,” wrote the Duke of Windsor in his coronation article for an American magazine, “it is possible for the monarch by the influence of example and personality to impart a character and coloring to an era in a manner that lies quite outside the day-to-day functions of government.”
After the Archbishop set the crown on her head, Prince Philip rose to be the first to pay her homage. In the full dress uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, he walked to the foot of the throne, took off his coronet, and bowed. He walked up the five steps and knelt at his wife’s feet. She took his hands in her own as he said:
I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.
He touched her crown and kissed her left cheek before returning to his chair.
“It was a gesture which had all the humility of a subject and the tenderness of a husband,” wrote a British journalist, “and for a brief moment the Queen pressed her cheek close and firm to her husband.”
That night the young Queen paid public tribute to the man she had married. In a radio address to her loyal subjects, she pledged “with all my heart” to devote her life to the service of her people. “In this resolve,” she said, “I have my husband to support me.”
The Queen entered Westminster Abbey to the shouts of “Vivat Regina!” As she departed, trumpets sounded and church bells pealed. Enraptured crowds cheered as the stately coaches of seventy-four foreign powers made their way along the coronation route. Despite the downpour, Queen Salote of Tonga rode in an open carriage, the only head of state to do so. An enormous woman, she waved her huge, fleshy arms to greet bystanders and completely overshadowed the frail little man sharing her carriage.
“What’s sitting across from her?” someone asked.
“Her lunch,” said Noel Coward.
The Sultans of Brunei, Johore, Perak, Lahej, Kelantan, Selangor, and Zanzibar passed in colorful turbans, silk saris, and extravagant plumage. The native dress of the Zulus, Arabs, Indians, Chinese, and Nepalese dazzled bystanders. To heighten the drama of the parade, BBC technicians laid microphones on the ground to magnify the thundering beat of the horses’ hooves and tape-recorded nightingales to sing continuously in Berkeley Square.
The emotion reduced s
ome men to tears. “When her carriage went past, I felt as if my heart were bursting,” said Richard Smith, a soldier on duty. “We were virtually crying as we presented arms to the Queen. We were no more than ten yards away, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything as beautiful in all my life.”
Similar feelings swept through the Abbey. “Although our preparation was intense, the one thing the rehearsals hadn’t prepared us for was the emotion of the ceremony, especially the entry of the Queen and her procession,” said a radio announcer, John Snagge. “I was overwhelmed: Handel’s ‘Music for Royal Fireworks’ on the organ, everyone standing, then Parry’s anthem—Oh, it was the most moving moment.”
The BBC engineer, who was supposed to black out close-ups of the Queen during the coronation, was so transfixed that he could not bring himself to cut the lights and censor her image.
“Gorgeous, she was,” recalled the engineer, Ben Shaw. “I thought the close-up picture of her was so beautiful that I couldn’t press the button.”
As Queen, Elizabeth became the head of two separate churches—the Church of England, which is episcopalian, and the Church of Scotland, which is presbyterian. For her assumption of authority, she took the sacraments and worshiped in both churches. In England she prayed as an Anglican, and in Scotland as a Presbyterian. Having sworn to govern all her peoples according to their respective laws and customs, she traveled north soon after her coronation in London for a second coronation in Edinburgh to receive the ancient crown of Scotland.
“This was her first visit to Scotland as Queen, and, naturally, everyone expected her to come in her coronation robes,” recalled Margaret McCormick, who attended the event. “I was in my Sunday best and was shocked when she appeared in a simple gray blue coat, because she looked so… so… so… ordinary. She should’ve honored the occasion more.”
