A Happy Breed

Here was the perseverance of Nyree Kindred, who has cerebral palsy but still swims for her country; the cheerfulness of Sir Steve Redgrave, who helped propel the ceremonial gondola Gloriana to nine knots in practice, for the hell of it; and the adventurous spirit of Neil Heritage, who lost both legs in Afghanistan, then rowed the Atlantic for charity. They preceded the Queen as a 21st-century guard of honour in sports kit and baseball caps. Twenty thousand more subjects followed her, among them 64 members of the Shree Muktajeevan Pipe Band, who cherish their Indian heritage as much as they do the Queen and hail, every one of them, from Golders Green. Gathered from across the country to quieter but no less dramatic effect were the Dunkirk Little Ships, carrying Vic Viner, 95, the last survivor of the original rescue fleet, and Harry Kidney, 92, plucked from the beach to survive the war and at least the first 60 years of his new Queen’s reign.

The beaches and embankments thronged with 1.2 million wellwishers, police said — 200,000 more than they expected. They stood ten deep in places, invited and uninvited, under mile upon mile of bunting that positively crackled in the wind. At Westminster, MPs toasted the sovereign whose power their forebears long since usurped, knowing that polls now show voters place vastly more trust in her than in them. On the South Bank, staff of the National Theatre waved a giant war horse from the production of the same name, and cheered a spectacular reminder that their employer is in fact the Royal National Theatre.

At the Tower, to which the last Queen Elizabeth was brought in her coffin at dead of night by this same river, tourists craned through pop-up periscopes for a glimpse of her successor, then watched on Jumbotron screens as six operatic sopranos sang Rule Britannia in a deluge. Was there space in all this for the homeless man who sits, day in, day out on the southern steps of Tower Bridge? Only if he kept his space through a night of downpours, but at least he was not hungry. On the eve of the pageant, a passer-by bought and carefully unpacked for him a bag of food from a nearby convenience store.

To adapt Wordsworth, the beauty of yesterday was raucous and teeming. Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lay open to the clouds and to the sky. For all the rain, Earth had not anything to show more fair.

It was a great coming together. Water soaked those who came without a brolly or a motor cruiser, but it also connected the pageant, literally, to Plymouth Rock and Stornoway, to every port and fishing village in between, and to every ship, on whatever ocean, whose name begins with HMS. Consciously and unconsciously, it was a show of unity — but what sort of unity can truly be celebrated as much of Scotland yearns for independence and the spectre of class war returns to Westminster? The answer: a complicated sort of unity, not made much simpler for being embodied by our Kings and Queens.

Few institutions have proved as adept at reinventing themselves and their history as the British monarchy. As a result, that history is long. The coronation ceremony of 1953 dated from the 7th century. Since then British monarchs have stumbled and fallen when no longer aligned in the public mind with the public good. More often, they have adapted and laboured to retain the trust and even the love of their subjects, and none has done so more triumphantly than Queen Elizabeth II.

She cannot travel incognito and no one knows much about her baking skills. Yet even without the burnishing effect of time, her concern for her subjects’ wellbeing is as evident as King Alfred’s in the legend of the burnt cakes. If forced to choose between King John and Robin Hood, we know intuitively that she would side with Sherwood Forest’s merry band against avarice and injustice. She has not been tested as Henry V was by an Agincourt, but her steadiness, her humour and her sense of duty have made her as worthy a repository of our patriotism.

The Queen is heir to centuries of strategic compromise, written down in Magna Carta, hammered out in the great reform bills of the 19th century and brought to a durable conclusion by the monarchy’s withdrawal from political management under Queen Victoria. By then the monarchy had long since learnt how to cede the stage and share the glory of conquest with Britain’s martial heroes, and to endure alongside them. In the process the country avoided every major European revolutionary upheaval. This placidity has been ascribed to a mysterious national aversion to political violence. Yet Britain was never immune from revolution, and our evolving monarchy has been central to its avoidance.

Since the Victorian age, though stripped of political power, the Queen’s father was thrust into a role of real leadership at a time of existential peril for the country. Like the Little Ships on the Thames yesterday, he rose to the occasion, and our Queen has lived by his example.

Modern Britain has shown it can unite without its Royal Family, but seldom. The country mourned Churchill as one when Havengore — part of yesterday’s Royal Squadron — carried his body upstream to Waterloo for its final journey to Oxfordshire in 1965. Most Englishmen over 55 (though not so many Scots or women) can say where they were for the 1966 World Cup Final. And a good proportion of Britons under 45 remember Live Aid. Each grand royal celebration of the same era — the Queen’s previous jubilees, her children’s and her grandson’s weddings — easily stands comparison with other landmarks in our national life, and not just as telegenic sound and light shows. Beneath the glitz, they have served as surprisingly nuanced expressions of Britishness. We love gaudiness, in moderation. We revel as much as visitors from overseas do in what makes our country unique. We do self-parody, but not to the point of self-abasement. We may not weep or clasp our chests during the National Anthem, but occasionally the lump in our collective throat makes singing hard. So we lay on a barge carrying an orchestra instead. It plays music composed centuries ago, by an anglophile German immigrant, to accompany royal fireworks and another royal riverborne pageant, and we can simply listen, knowing George Friedrich Handel would have been proud.

Historians have marked the Diamond Jubilee with extravagant assertions about a British crisis of identity; a crisis that the Queen has helped us through thus far, even if it has yet to run its course. But how simple does a national identity have to be? Simplicity is brutal. It was the dream of the fascists whom the veterans of Dunkirk, the Queen’s parents and the antique aircraft whose flypast yesterday was wiped out by the weather, all helped to defeat.

Civilisation, by contrast, is complicated; a juggling act, a constant mis-en-scène, and to mark the Queen’s extraordinary longevity, British civilisation is staging a three-day party. The £10 million required for its first instalment yesterday came entirely from private donors, in stark contrast to the £11 billion required for the Olympics. The organisation was entrusted to 7,000 police, the Queen’s Bargemaster, 24 Royal Watermen, a shipping tycoon (Lord Sterling, the former chairman of P & O) and an hereditary aristocrat (Lord Salisbury, whose ancestors include the first Queen Elizabeth’s counsellor, William Cecil). It was hugely complex, and a security nightmare. The river’s flow had to be slowed by the Thames Barrier. Even then, an unexplained delay a few yards downstream of Battersea Bridge caused a flotilla of sea cadets from every country in the Commonwealth to start slaloming to avoid a pile-up. Disaster could have struck at any moment, and meteorologically it did. At times it was a muddle to behold, but it was always an exuberant one, and British to the core.

In the country as a whole, Britons strung 2,000 miles of bunting, drank two million bottles of champagne and served lunch to two million of their compatriots on trestle tables set up in town squares and down village high streets. Manchester alone expected to host 500 street parties last night. We love an excuse for a party, but the Queen is unique in providing such an excuse for so many of us. She appeared tired by the end of the pageant, after 90 minutes and seven miles on the river and nearly as long beside it, watching her vast fleet of admirers pass under Tower Bridge. Yet again, and surely not for the last time, she had repaid the affection of her subjects with her serious attention. Given a little warmth, there might have been more smiles, too.

Today the weather forecasters say the sun might actually shine for limited periods on day two of the celebrations, when an altogether less formal Britain — the Britain of rock and roll and every beat dreamt up since then — will rub shoulders with the royals directly in front of Buckingham Palace. If so, this sceptred isle might actually resemble the demi-paradise of Shakespeare’s unmatched imagination, at least for one summer evening. Whatever happens, we can hope Britain will always be home to a happy breed of men, and women; a little world comfortable in the larger one that it once ruled — a precious stone, set in a silver sea.