Early on a June morning when I was six years old, I watched a bit of history, although I did not begin to grasp all that was happening at that time. With a few hundred other children and adults, I sat in the auditorium of West School and watched the Coronation of the Queen of England by televison broadcast. If I remember correctly, there were two television sets, one towards each end of the stage, and I sat at the front of the left side. I don't know whether I knew what England was, or a Queen, but television was a new magic. The only one I had seen before belonged to my grandparents, and they treated it with a great deal of awe and ceremony, But their set showed no programs early in the morning, and the broadcasts it did receive, from about three in the afternoon until ten or ten thirty in the evening, were from New York via Memphis, not from London. I could hardly see the screen, and I'm not sure if I even heard any of the music. I have a vague memory that an Elgar march that had been played at my promotion ceremony a week or so before was also played for the Queen, but that might be some sort of Mandela effect.
This morning, I slept until a comfortable hour, made coffee, and watched the Coronation of a King of England on a tablet computer on my desk. I did not get up at five, but just scrolled back to the beginning of the BBC broadcast. I had no trouble seeing. I could zoom in on details, and ask Google to identify the music playing. Such an experience, which I would not have imagined seventy years ago, is something we now can do anywhere at any time.
It has become commonplace to describe the many changes that have happened during the Second Elizabethan Era, so commonplace that I suspect a six-year-old watching the Coronation this morning might have found no magic in it at all. But I want to focus on the continuity of the Coronation, of the Monarchy, a continuity which in many ways was both illustrated and orchestrated by Elizabeth, and which will become increasingly hard to maintain during the reign of her son, who one must admit is pretty brave to keep the name of Charles. In our lust for the next new thing, for what we so blithely call 'real change', we often overlook the value of continuity. It is continuity which allows the changes of our lives to merely batter and confuse us rather than destroy us entirely.
Let me share with you my view of the current era. I suggest that we are still living in the long tail of World War I. To simplify the situation, consider that at the beginning of that War, there were three great empires whose heads were grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
By the Armistice of that war--which was certainly not its end--the Czar of Russia was dead, the Kaiser of Germany was under garden arrest in Belgium, and only the King of England still had a head with a crown. I would further suggest that it is the odd, rather unplanned, usually rather messy, British Constitution which allowed that survival. I need hardly relate the various governmental atrocities which have followed in Russia and in Germany.
Shortly after the Second Act of the Great War, as the Empire seemed to be crumbling, a young woman became the Queen, and I and millions of other people who were young in 1953 watched her career as one of the few continuous acts of our lives. U. S. presidents came and went, the French put on their seasonal riots, Russia seemed to rise out of the ashes of the USSR to try to become an empire again, and Germany, well, at least the fat lady hasn't sung yet. Perhaps the most amazing development is that the British Empire has been the Commonwealth, to which the Queen was deeply devoted. Think for a moment what a rare way of viewing the world the Commonwealth is. It is an optimistic sort of realism that recognizes that we are all in this together, that our wealth, our health, is indeed common.
Consider for amoment the array of flags lining the Mall upon which the marble statue of Victoria cast its stoney eyes as her great-great-grandson was crowned. The sun never sets on the British Commonwealth, and it is, in my humble estimation, an achievement far greater than any previous empire or secret treaty organization.
And yet, there are many who want to abolish the Crown. It's a new century, a new time, a new day. Well, of course it is. Every day is a new day, as they always have been. It is easy to fall into the gloom of Macbeth, and say that 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, /Creeps in this petty pace from dy to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time, /And all our yesterdays have lighted fools /The way to dusty death.'
And yet, among the mortal fools that so often strut upon the stage, it seems a better tale at least to strive for something more like Camelot, fleeting as that is. It is reported by the polls and the tabloids that the young are mostly the ones calling for the disolution of the monarchy. As an old man who was once young, perhaps my greatest wisdom is the recognition that what seemed to me wise as a youth was foolish, and that should I live long enough, what seems wise to me now will probably seem foolish. I am grateful that my parents and their generation, confused as they were by the maestrom of change in which they found themselves, tried to pass on some continuity to me and my generation, that they in a sometimes small way were serving the future. That even as they encouraged me in the freedom to explore the new, the changes, they also tried to provide some sort of rootedness in not just the time of the moment but in a continuis stream into which we are dropped, much as Joyce describes, a 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's,' so that we might enjoy the 'swerve of shore to bend of bay' so that it may bring us by a commodius vicius of recirculation back', if not to Howth Castle, at least to some familiar shore, one that perhaps we shall know for the first time.
So I was encouraged by the beginning of the second Coronation, when the King is challenged by a fourteen-year-old boy who says, more or less, what are you doing here, old man?, and the old man answers, I have come to serve you. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, and I certainly recognize that the ceremony today in Westminster Abbey was a carefully orchestrated advertisement for Himself, but there was a recognition of what continuity is for and why we need it more than we need change. Or perhaps it is that we need to struggle to maintain continuity, because change seems to be self-generating.
