knew.
The ceremonies had been shortened because of the King’s recent illness. Everybody agreed that Edward bore up handsomely under the strain, although the old Archbishop of Canterbury was wobbly throughout and had to be prompted in his lines. He got the King’s crown on back to front and managed to anoint the Queen’s nose, rather than the Royal forehead, with holy oil. But finally the ceremony was over and the Royal party returned to their coaches. They were cheered enthusiastically by the multitudes of loyal subjects along the route back to Buckingham Palace, where the Royal chef had managed to keep in cold storage some of the quail and mutton that had been destined for the earlier celebration, and there was enough champagne and fine wines, as one guest put it, to float an entire fleet of the Empire’s battleships.
Kate and Charles, however, did not attend this gala banquet. Shedding their heavy robes and uncomfortable coronets, they climbed into Charles’s Panhard and motored down to their home in Essex, where Kate put on a cotton smock and a pair of corduroy trousers and went straight out to dig in her garden.
Not everyone witnessed the parade or the ceremonies, of course. Many sensible people (among them Socialists, Democrats, and Laborites) rejected the revels, taking advantage of the holiday to escape to the countryside for a breath of fresher air. A multitude of others, less privileged, remained at their posts, performing their usual duties—cooking and cleaning, sweeping streets, carting coal, manning fire brigades, unloading ships in the docks along the Thames—scarcely mindful of the glories being paraded through their city. And there were those, particularly among the homeless who had flooded into the City desperate for work, who were too drained by lack of food and sleep to care about the festivities, however grand. As Jack London observed when he wrote about the scene in People of the Abyss, almost the whole of the East End stayed in the East End and got colossally drunk, the public houses awash in ale and thunderous waves of song:
Oh, on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We’ll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout Hip, hip, hooray.
For we’ll all be merry, drinking whiskey, wine, and sherry,
We’ll all be merrily drunk on Coronation Day.
Walking through Green Park, London came across an old man on a bench and asked him how he had liked the procession.
“’Ow did I like it?” the old man replied scornfully. “A bloody good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I turned into the corner there, along wi’ fifty others. But I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there ’ungry an’ thinkin’ ’ow I’d worked all the years o’ my life an’ now ’ad no plyce to rest my ’ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers an’ cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to blow out the brains o’ the Lord Chamberlain.”
There were others who planned to attend the pageant and were, for various reasons, prevented. Perhaps the most notable of these was a certain Yuri Messenko, a tall, well-built young man, slightly stooped, with a fair complexion, a blond beard and moustache, and fervent eyes. Wearing an old black woolen overcoat with a frayed velvet collar and carrying a satchel, he was striding swiftly through Hyde Park in the direction of Hyde Park Corner, beyond which lay Buckingham Palace, where crowds awaited the return of their newly-crowned King.
Hyde Park occupies 615 acres taken by Henry VIII from Westminster Abbey, to use as his hunting grounds. It was opened to the public in the seventeenth century, and it quickly became a popular site for horse-racing, duels, games, and fairs. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was also the site of gatherings of dissenters of various stripes, with as many as 150,000 people thronging the Park to protest such things as the Sunday Trading Bill, the high price of food, and the violation of
The ceremonies had been shortened because of the King’s recent illness. Everybody agreed that Edward bore up handsomely under the strain, although the old Archbishop of Canterbury was wobbly throughout and had to be prompted in his lines. He got the King’s crown on back to front and managed to anoint the Queen’s nose, rather than the Royal forehead, with holy oil. But finally the ceremony was over and the Royal party returned to their coaches. They were cheered enthusiastically by the multitudes of loyal subjects along the route back to Buckingham Palace, where the Royal chef had managed to keep in cold storage some of the quail and mutton that had been destined for the earlier celebration, and there was enough champagne and fine wines, as one guest put it, to float an entire fleet of the Empire’s battleships.
Kate and Charles, however, did not attend this gala banquet. Shedding their heavy robes and uncomfortable coronets, they climbed into Charles’s Panhard and motored down to their home in Essex, where Kate put on a cotton smock and a pair of corduroy trousers and went straight out to dig in her garden.
Not everyone witnessed the parade or the ceremonies, of course. Many sensible people (among them Socialists, Democrats, and Laborites) rejected the revels, taking advantage of the holiday to escape to the countryside for a breath of fresher air. A multitude of others, less privileged, remained at their posts, performing their usual duties—cooking and cleaning, sweeping streets, carting coal, manning fire brigades, unloading ships in the docks along the Thames—scarcely mindful of the glories being paraded through their city. And there were those, particularly among the homeless who had flooded into the City desperate for work, who were too drained by lack of food and sleep to care about the festivities, however grand. As Jack London observed when he wrote about the scene in People of the Abyss, almost the whole of the East End stayed in the East End and got colossally drunk, the public houses awash in ale and thunderous waves of song:
Oh, on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We’ll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout Hip, hip, hooray.
For we’ll all be merry, drinking whiskey, wine, and sherry,
We’ll all be merrily drunk on Coronation Day.
Walking through Green Park, London came across an old man on a bench and asked him how he had liked the procession.
“’Ow did I like it?” the old man replied scornfully. “A bloody good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I turned into the corner there, along wi’ fifty others. But I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there ’ungry an’ thinkin’ ’ow I’d worked all the years o’ my life an’ now ’ad no plyce to rest my ’ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers an’ cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to blow out the brains o’ the Lord Chamberlain.”
There were others who planned to attend the pageant and were, for various reasons, prevented. Perhaps the most notable of these was a certain Yuri Messenko, a tall, well-built young man, slightly stooped, with a fair complexion, a blond beard and moustache, and fervent eyes. Wearing an old black woolen overcoat with a frayed velvet collar and carrying a satchel, he was striding swiftly through Hyde Park in the direction of Hyde Park Corner, beyond which lay Buckingham Palace, where crowds awaited the return of their newly-crowned King.
Hyde Park occupies 615 acres taken by Henry VIII from Westminster Abbey, to use as his hunting grounds. It was opened to the public in the seventeenth century, and it quickly became a popular site for horse-racing, duels, games, and fairs. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was also the site of gatherings of dissenters of various stripes, with as many as 150,000 people thronging the Park to protest such things as the Sunday Trading Bill, the high price of food, and the violation of
Similar Books
Dancing With A Devil
Julie Johnstone
Resisting the Moon: A Royal Shifters Novel
L.P. Dover
17 A Wanted Man
Lee Child
Bay Hideaway
Beth Loughner
Through the Storm (The Montclair Brothers)
Terri Marie
The Broken World Book One - Children of Another God
T C Southwell
Humber Boy B
Ruth Dugdall
Quartz
Rabia Gale
Michael Fassbender
Jim Maloney