Pomp, Pageantry — and Monarchy

The Royal Wedding in London two months ago makes me chuckle a little bit, not least because Britain used to be quite horrible at royal pageantry. In 1817, at the funeral of Princess Charlotte, the undertakers were drunk. At Queen Victoria’s unrehearsed coronation in 1838,  two train-bearers talked all through the ceremony, the clergy lost their place in the Order of Service and the ring was too small for Victoria’s finger. After the funeral of Prince Albert at Windsor in 1861, the special train back to London was so crowded that Disraeli had to sit on his wife’s lap.

The same year, watching the Queen open Parliament, Lord Robert Cecil bemoaned, that while many nations had a gift for this sort of thing, England did not: “We can afford to be more splendid than most nations; but some malignant spell broods over all our most solemn ceremonials and inserts into them some feature which makes them all ridiculous … Something always breaks down, somebody contrives to escape doing his part, or some bye-motive is suffered to interfere and ruin it all.” However, other monarchies that ‘had a gift’ — France, Germany, Russia and Austria (whose capital cities were better adapted to processions than London) — simply dropped out of monarchic race, leaving the Britons alone in the field.

On the other end of this pomp and circumstance are bicycling monarchies — more informal and modest personal styles of the royal families in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. One of the most famous exemplars of a bicycling monarchy was that of Olav V of Normay, known as “People’s King.” An accomplished skier who won an Olympic gold medal, Olav skied with no entourage but his dog. He also drove himself, and would drive in the regular highway lanes though he was allowed to drive in the public transportation lane. During the energy crisis in the 1970s, when Norway banned driving on certain weekends, the king would take a tram to go skiing — a practice he continued even after the crisis ended. In above photo, Olav tried to pay for his tickets, as the conductor told him that his adjutant further back had already paid for him.

— via Gisle from Norway

The Hesse Gathering

Victoria came to the British Throne in 1837, largely thanks to her profligate yet legitimately childless uncles, but she nonetheless became the longest reigning British monarch in history. Crowned as the Kaiserin-I-Hind (Empress of India), the Widow of Buckingham–as she was jokingly being called after the death of her husband Albert–ruled over the Empire in which the Sun never set for 64 years.

Victoria presided over what will become known as the Victoria Era, the age of great industrial, intellectual and social developments. She had ten prime ministers in total during her long reign and a rambunctious family, which would break out into petty quarrels and disastrous wars as soon as Victoria was gone.

She was the metaphorical Grandmother of Europe. All her sons and daughters married into nearly all other ruling houses of Europe in dynastic marriages which not only created unlikely alliances in that Age of Empires, but also hemophilia. When Victoria died, her funeral was attended by eleven crowned heads of Europe – all related to her – including the Kaiser of Germany and the Tsar of Russia.

The above photo taken was taken in April 1894 at the Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt; the occasion was the marriage of Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh, the Queen’s granddaughter, to Ernst, the Grandduke of Hesse.  Kaiser Wilhem was seated to the extreme right of the Queen and standing between them were Ernst’s younger sister Alix, whose long delayed engagment to Grandduke Nicholai Alexandrovitch Romanov, the Tsarevitch of Russia, was also announced at this wedding. Nicholai’s father, Alexander III, wanted his son to marry a princess of the House of Oreleans to cement the Franco-Russian Alliance, and only agreed to his betrothal on his deadbed. This meant that Nicholai would ascend to the Russian throne within six months after this picture was taken.

(For biographical details on people photographed, click here).