It is the Queen’s birthday today. I don’t mean Queen Elizabeth the Second, much praise to her for the incredibly successful visit to Ireland, where she really and genuinely apologized for past actions by the British. Long may she reign, especially given what is waiting in the wings. I don’t mean Queen Elizabeth the First, Good Queen Bess, without a doubt the greatest of all the British monarchs, the person who steered such a careful and firm line between the Catholics who wanted to bring back the oppression of the Pope and those grim Protestants, who after waiting out the rule of Bloody Mary (Queen Mary, not Mary Queen of Scots) in Geneva, came back with all sorts of plans for making England as appallingly Calvinist as John Knox too successfully made Scotland. She also helped to see off the Spanish and their Armada:
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It is the Queen’s birthday today. I don’t mean Queen Elizabeth the Second, much praise to her for the incredibly successful visit to Ireland, where she really and genuinely apologized for past actions by the British. Long may she reign, especially given what is waiting in the wings. I don’t mean Queen Elizabeth the First, Good Queen Bess, without a doubt the greatest of all the British monarchs, the person who steered such a careful and firm line between the Catholics who wanted to bring back the oppression of the Pope and those grim Protestants, who after waiting out the rule of Bloody Mary (Queen Mary, not Mary Queen of Scots) in Geneva, came back with all sorts of plans for making England as appallingly Calvinist as John Knox too successfully made Scotland. She also helped to see off the Spanish and their Armada:
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; the which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.
Her father, King Henry the Eighth, had her mother’s head chopped off that he could remarry and sire a son. Little did he know that Anne Boleyn had given him the greatest of all successors.
The person I am talking about is Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and (later in life) Empress of India. When I was a child, back in the middle of the last century, the Victorian era was still too close for praise or appreciation. We still had more than remnants of those over-filled, dark houses, with their horse-hair-stuffed sofas and the antimacassars to keep the oil from men’s hair off the furniture, and aspidistras everywhere—especially in the front parlor. Everything about the Victorians was considered ugly and crude, boastful when not repressed. Given their attitudes toward sex, how they ever produced children was a mystery. And the obsession with death! The black horses with their plumes, the professional mourners, the grotesquely overly ornamented graves. Thank God that was a time now gone.
Fortunately, as time has passed, we can now get a much clearer picture and appreciation. An appreciation of what a robust and full culture it was back then. Even the once-despised architecture is now valued and loved. I have written before of my passion for St. Pancras Station, now being restored to its full former glory. It is true that there were terrible slums and poverty, failures to meet crises—Ireland in the 1840s was the worst but by no means unique—but balancing this were the earnest efforts of the reformers, Thomas Henry Huxley in science, Florence Nightingale in medicine, Joseph Bazalgette in civil engineering—he built the sewers in answer to the Great Stink of 1858, when the Thames became literally one gigantic cesspool from bank to bank—and many others.
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And then there was the Empire. Now, I am not about to write in defense of this. I am not sure that anything much good can be said about the British in Africa. The Raj is more complex. I could wish that we had never gone to India and express relief that we have now left. But as the great novelists (Kipling above all) tell you, the full story was complex and not completely one-sided. I had many relatives who were born, lived and died in India, who loved the country and its people and who—as teachers or ministers or non-commissioned officers—served and did their duty. My great grandmother was certainly part Indian as were other relatives. I am not defending the system or the British presence, but saying that—as with the good burghers of Bourges about whom I wrote last time—one must be careful not to judge entirely by modern standards, or to think that there was no lasting good from something that we are now glad to see gone. (That is not a plea for ethical relativism.)
I would judge Canada, Australia, and New Zealand great successes. There are black marks to be sure, especially with respect to native people—although Americans should not give way to hypocrisy on this score—but the societies produced by the earnest efforts of the British (especially those Scots, so perhaps there is something to be said for John Knox after all), seem to me to be great testaments to human nature and labor. I lived for nearly forty years in Canada, I am glad and proud to have done so, and I think of the country with great affection. (And had they not still had compulsory retirement, I would still be there.) These dominions (as they have been called) owe their being to the Victorians, who settled them and who molded them and who set them on the path to the present.
In Canada, the Queen’s birthday is still celebrated with a holiday. And so on Victoria Day (actually the holiday is celebrated on the Monday on or before the 24th of May, so this year it was celebrated yesterday), I raise a glass to the memory of Victoria and the society over which she reigned for so very long (63 years and 7 months). I am glad now to be an American, but I am very proud of my British heritage.