All Queened out? Possibly. The gorgeous ceremonies attending our Canadian Queen Elizabeth II’s 60th anniversary left many people too limp to lift a cucumber sandwich.
The republican sub-intellectuals among us, however, are always able to raise a jeer. There’s a parallel with novelist Maurice Baring’s take on contemporary reaction to Charles Dickens’ stories: “The critics groaned, but the people wept and cheered.”
You may detect a royalist lurking here. Correct. And no better time to proclaim support for the crown than what some of us forgetfully call Dominion Day weekend.
Here I pull the older-than-God card, a pleasure increasing daily: I am Canada’s only practising columnist who saw King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) on their 1939 Canadian tour.
True, a blur. I was at the corner of Main and Tisdale in beautiful Hamilton. They swept by – en route to Niagara Falls, perhaps to test Oscar Wilde’s witticism that the great honeymoon capital is a young bride’s second greatest disappointment – in one of two Canadian-built McLaughlin-Buick convertible limousines. (One is owned by Vern Bethel of Vancouver’s False Creek Automotive, justifying this item in a business magazine.)
It was a bit of a letdown for a toothy lad of four. Kings and queens wore heavy gold crowns and sat on stone thrones, of course. These didn’t. But the bond with real royalty began.
And here is royalty’s secret: The adult grows more, not less, childlike. The fairy tale strengthens. The vast scale and stunning numbers of people on streets, flooding into Buckingham Palace, watching on television by hundreds of millions, demonstrate that adults are not only entertained by spectacle and ceremony; we need them. We can take only so much rationalism and “common sense” – the first and last lair of the essentially stupid.
People literally can’t bear to live with our routine lives – the great drama of which we are too close to see. Inside even the most pedestrian, there’s a dancer Astaireing to get out. A royal party gives permission to that dancer.
The serious can turn to the heavy thinkin’ of constitutional experts. You could add John Fraser’s The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty, and The Evolving Canadian Crown, edited by Jennifer Smith and D. Michael Jackson, reviewed by Mark Lovewell in the June Literary Review of Canada, to your must-read list.
Or not. More likely your eye will be caught by yet another deplorable royal exposé, like Vancouver-based Ken McQueen’s recent Maclean’s report claiming the mentally unstable (was she?) Princess Diana seriously damaged son William. Tarted-up supermarket checkout trash, I’d say. I devoured every word.
For a pittance, I recently bought The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837-1861, three gilt-edged volumes. In 1847 Victoria wrote “my dearest uncle” – Belgium’s king – about her husband: “Really, when one thinks of the very dull life, and particularly the life of constant self-denial, which my poor, dear Albert leads, he deserves every amusement in the world. … He is very fond of shooting, but it is all with the greatest moderation. Do you know you never wished Albert joy of his birthday?”
Daft, eh? But less so than arriviste Governors-General Adrienne Clarkson and Michaelle Jean misreading a 1947 document to claim that they, not Elizabeth II, were heads of the Canadian state. Queens for a day. The essential element of royalty is the least democratic: it’s above ambition. •
