One of the highlights of my mother’s life was when she saw Queen Elizabeth serenely glide by in her royal carriage, gloved hand awave, in the heart of London. I was standing right next to her, having joined her after hitchhiking through Scotland for a couple of weeks. Mom took one look at me in my Levi 501s and combat boots (how else would a UC Berkeley student have been dressed back in 1969?) and took me straightaway to Harrod’s, from which I emerged in a dress and platform heels that probably jacked me up close to six feet.
As we stood among thousands of cheering flag-waving Brits along the Queen’s motor route I remember wondering how my mom could possibly have so passionately desired to stand on the sidewalk for hours in the chill London damp to watch this pompous anachronistic holdover from the days of Empire. Isn’t this is what we shed our blood to get rid of? That’s how I saw it back then, and how I still see it today.
It didn’t look like the monarchy’s popularity had suffered much during King Charles’s coronation, however, where viewers around the world freely indulged their enduring fascination with the royals – including here at home. Years ago a British colleague, who referred to the U.S. as “that troublesome colony,” asked me why Americans are so obsessed with the royal family’s goings-on and dirty laundry, which is increasingly public today courtesy of social media and electronic snooping. I think what it boiled down to for Mom was that Queen Elizabeth was her contemporary during the Second World War years when she was a teenager in a tiny impoverished town in Clackamas County, Oregon. Her four older brothers served overseas, the first time any of my uncles had even travelled outside of the State. It was a patriotic time; my mom told me that the only law her Norwegian father ever broke was to provide his sons with extra gasoline over their ration limits when they were home on leave. It was a time when one in five American families displayed at least one blue star on their living room windows. Grandma had four such stars on her window – one for each son fighting in the war. The fact that Americans and Brits fought side-by-side, a bond strengthened through two world wars and a common language, sheds light on the “then,” but what about the “now?” What’s up with all the young folk huddled beneath broad umbrellas on the cold, wet lawns along the coronation parade route, enthusiastically shooting their selfies?
Perhaps it’s as simple as the pageantry. Even big-bucks movie producers couldn’t afford the cast of thousands that make up the real thing. It’s spectacle on an unimaginably humongous scale, seasoned with juicy gossip, including the hot question of whether outcast Prince Harry or accused rapist Prince Andrew would join the rest of the clan for the much-ballyhooed balcony shot before everyone decamped for a private lunch. King George looked like he needed a nap after a trying day of walking between official stations on the thick stone floors of Westminster Abbey, faithfully marking the ancient coronation process that in King George III’s case included acceptance of a spur worn by King Charles II, dubbed the Merry Monarch back in the mid-1600s. King Charles I was beheaded; he was tried, convicted, and executed for high treason in the same century. Or maybe it’s just comforting in our volatile world to witness a living tradition that’s been around for over a thousand years, hundreds of years before acquisitive white settlers even arrived in North America.
I’ve always kinda liked the low-key egghead Charles, student of history, promoter of environmental protections, dutiful yet apparently capable of standing up when faced with something really important to him. He did, after all, marry the love of his life, who was judged inappropriate for a future king.
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