The Queen, aged 27, sits in dappled light that catches the blue of her eyes. She looks a little sad, but full of youthful vigour. On her head is a high and heavy crown. That is how the official artist of the Coronation, Terence Cuneo, saw her in Westminster Abbey, that morning 60 years ago today.
The Coronation was the beginning of something. It was thus more like a wedding than a birthday celebration. The monarch was wedded to her people. In 1953, the experience of monarchy was a grateful one. George VI had been a good king in hard times: courageous in the unknowable hazards of war and in the exhausted years of post-war austerity.
The Queen, his daughter, and the nation set off together on a new road. She was, on her accession, 18 years younger than Kennedy would be at the beginning of his presidency. In the 16 months of her reign before the Coronation, Britain had begun to know her, and liked what it found. We were all to be New Elizabethans. The New Elizabethan age was not to be distinguished by verse drama like that of Christopher Fry or by inventions like Christopher Cockerell’s hovercraft. It was, to be sure, transformed by technology, and by nothing so much as by television, on which 20 million people witnessed the crowning of their Queen. But it was growth in prosperity that was to characterise the reign, with all the unsuspected difficulties that prosperity brought.
The Coronation was the beginning of something. It was thus more like a wedding than a birthday celebration. The monarch was wedded to her people. In 1953, the experience of monarchy was a grateful one. George VI had been a good king in hard times: courageous in the unknowable hazards of war and in the exhausted years of post-war austerity.
The Queen, his daughter, and the nation set off together on a new road. She was, on her accession, 18 years younger than Kennedy would be at the beginning of his presidency. In the 16 months of her reign before the Coronation, Britain had begun to know her, and liked what it found. We were all to be New Elizabethans. The New Elizabethan age was not to be distinguished by verse drama like that of Christopher Fry or by inventions like Christopher Cockerell’s hovercraft. It was, to be sure, transformed by technology, and by nothing so much as by television, on which 20 million people witnessed the crowning of their Queen. But it was growth in prosperity that was to characterise the reign, with all the unsuspected difficulties that prosperity brought.
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