April 21, 2006
The Queen’s Birthday Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST The great-great-great-great granddaughter of the last king of the 13 colonies that threw him out and created the United States turns 80 today, with all the royal hoopla one could wish for—artillery salutes, birthday cards by the tens of thousands, congratulations from countries around the world and on and on. She has reigned for 54 years, longer than all but three of her predecessors, and she is quickly closing in on Henry III’s 56-year reign. If she were to live as long as her mother, who died at 101, she would sit on the throne for 75 years, longer than any monarch in European history. That the birthday of a woman with hardly any political power should cause such a worldwide fuss is a testament to the extraordinary, atavistic hold that royalty has on the imagination of ordinary people. Can you imagine anyone outside of Germany—or within it, for that matter—caring about the birthday of the president of Germany? Come to think of it, I haven’t the faintest idea when George W. Bush’s birthday is, and he’s the most politically powerful person on earth right now, not to mention President of the country of which I am a citizen. But just the fact that Elizabeth II is Queen of England makes her, ex officio, one of the most famous people on the planet, able to command instant attention. As she joked to President Bush when he visited Britain a few years ago, “You are term-limited. I am not.” This irreplaceable royal power to command attention is an enormous asset to Britain and is exactly why the idea of abolishing the monarchy is, to paraphrase George Orwell, an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it. Perhaps no country is as devoted to its republican form of government as the United States, and yet we are no more immune to the power of royalty, especially British royalty, than anywhere else. The first visit of British royalty to these shores did not come at a good moment in Anglo-American relations. It was in September 1781, five years after independence had been declared and just as the noose was tightening on General Cornwallis, besieged at Yorktown. Prince William, third son of King George III (he was later created Duke of Clarence and much later, to his surprise and delight, became King William IV), was then a midshipman in the Royal Navy, and he came to New York that month. New York had been under British occupation since 1776 and was filled with loyalists who had fled to the city for refuge, so it is not surprising that the prince was greeted with great warmth. Things had much improved by the next royal visit, when the young Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, visited New York in 1860. The place, quite simply, went nuts. The Duke of Newcastle, accompanying the prince, wrote that he had “never ventured to hope for anything approaching the scene which occurred here three days ago—such a scene as probably was never witnessed before—the enthusiasm of much more than half a million people, worked up almost to madness.” For the quality folk, a grand ball was put on at the Academy of Music, the city’s opera house, with a floor laid over the orchestra seats. Three thousand were invited, five thousand showed up; the floor collapsed and had to be hastily repaired. It was, in sort, a shambles. Regardless, the prince, famously sociable—far too sociable to suit his parents, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria—had a grand time. But it would be 1939 before a reigning British monarch came to the United States, when President Roosevelt hosted George VI and Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, in Washington and Hyde Park—where they were famously served hot dogs, which they managed with the aplomb expected of royalty.
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