Some excerpts from Artemisia's
Mail Online link regarding the coronation of King George VI in 1937...
"I thought it very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did too.
The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so."
- Princess Elizabeth, on her father's coronation
It is almost impossible to believe that, this weekend, 75 years have passed since the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, witnessed her father King George VI leave Westminster Abbey wearing that same [Imperial State] Crown following his Coronation in the Abbey on May 12, 1937.
The ceremony took place a mere five months after the abdication of King Edward VIII in December 1936. Princess Elizabeth went to Westminster Abbey wearing a long dress and train and carrying her coronet. She processed to the Royal Box. There Princess Margaret wriggled back into her chair and was tempted to swing her legs, but Princess Elizabeth glared at her severely.
The wife of the Bishop of Chichester observed Queen Elizabeth entering, ‘looking very grave, her little smooth brown head, unadorned, a contrast to all the tiaras’ and how as she passed to her seat, she and her ladies bowed to the Altar ‘and then came a gleam of a smile across her serious face as she saw the two eager little faces looking out at her from the Royal Box’.
Princess Elizabeth wrote an account of the day, describing the ‘jolty’ ride in the coach with her sister, Princess Margaret, and her aunt Mary, the Princess Royal. Of the crowning she wrote: ‘I thought it very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.’
The Princess saw the Archbishop of Canterbury fumbling with the crown, George VI not at all sure if it had been put on the right way round. She may well have heard her father complain that one of the supporting bishops had stood on his robes and how he had to tell him sharpish to get off. Aesthete Sir Osbert Sitwell thought the King looked like ‘a medieval missal, grave, white and lean, and went through his duties with the simplicity of movement and gesture of a great actor’, while Cecil Beaton noted that since the King had taken up his duties with such devotion, he had acquired ‘an added beauty and nobility. It is the same metamorphosis that comes to a cinema star. As with his beauty, so his speech. The technical difficulties have been overcome and his voice is solemn, deep and emotional.’Princess Elizabeth no doubt noticed that her grandmother Queen Mary was so moved during the anointing that she wept. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Norfolk (the Earl Marshal) edited this out of the final film shown in cinemas. The Duke cited this as a reason to exclude television cameras from the Queen’s Coronation in 1953, though eventually he was overruled by popular opinion and the ceremony was televised.
Perhaps the most astonishing claim was made by the 10th Duke of Argyll, whose ducal status afforded him a front-row seat behind the Royal Dukes. Niall Argyll was a sober witness to the proceedings, his mind dwelling on such matters as why the Archbishop of Canterbury did not wear a mitre, or how, as server, the same prelate failed to start the chant of the Veni Creator: ‘I really doubt if he even knows how to chant at all. Then he only bowed his head at the Incarnatus and did not kneel.’ He told a friend that the Duke of Atholl had told him at the enthronement: ‘And just to think how you and I were all about to take up our pens and refuse to attend Edward’s crowning had he not abdicated.’ Atholl asserted that not even 30 would have attended out of the 700 or so peers.
This may have been post-abdication bravado, but it is indicative of the mood that welcomed George VI. The dereliction of duty by Edward VIII in favour of the perceived path of happiness with Wallis Simpson, and the stress that this imposed on her father, considerably influenced the way the Queen has conducted her reign. Duty has always been her watchword.
Behind the scenes there was considerable drama, much of which would have escaped the young Princess at the time. The Lord Chancellor’s Office considered the thorny question as to whether bankrupt peers should be summoned. The most notable was the Marquess of Winchester who, under normal circumstances would have done homage as representative Marquess. He and other peers were not summoned. The 2nd Baron Sinha was not recognised as eligible to sit in the House of Lords – despite being the rightful heir of his father and a peer since 1928. The 7th Marquess Townshend, born on May 13, 1916, a minor peer since 1921, did not come of age until midnight so he was not allowed to take his place among the peers.
On Coronation Day, the Dean of Westminster, Dr Christopher Foxley-Norris, fell down some steps while carrying St Edward’s Crown, which only survived due to some ribbons attached to the cushion. The Duke of Somerset described the Dean as ‘like a half awake bat bewildered and incompetent, slow in all his actions’. He put the regalia in the wrong order on the High Altar and twice handed the wrong sceptre to the wrong peer. When he gave the Queen’s crown to the Duke of Portland, he got it tangled up in the Duke’s Garter collar.
Prince Arthur of Connaught’s page, Lord Richard Percy, was constantly swept aside as priests came in with the regalia and the choir of the Chapel Royal passed. Cascades of chocolates and lozenges fell out of the Duke of Marlborough’s coronet. The Marquess of Donegall, who wrote a column in The Sunday Dispatch, was frequently asleep. The Duke of Argyll commented: ‘His description in the Papers will be all the more vivid of all that he had not seen!’
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