1896 On this day Victoria outlasted George III as the longest-reigning monarch in English history. A diamond jubilee was in prospect. It was held on 22 September 1897, to commemorate the queen’s coronation some 60 years earlier (the precise date of that event was 28 June 1837). The whole British empire, then at its furthest reach across the globe, was instructed to rejoice, and given a public holiday for the occasion. There was a Naval Review and a regal procession through London, to cheering crowds, the queen escorted by soldiers from all her many domains. Royalty flooded in from those quarters of the globe not already under Victoria’s dominion.
Shortly after ten o’clock, with a loyal Indian servant in close attendance, the queen and empress descended the stairs at Buckingham Palace and pressed an electric button that (courtesy of Associated Press) flashed across the world the message: ‘From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them.’
The poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, composed a celebratory verse. His first idea was an early version of the poem later known as ‘The White Man’s Burden’. This, however, was held back for two years and dedicated to America, then (in 1899) embroiled in its bloody campaign of suppression in the Philippine Islands. Its theme (that the US must now assume the weary burden of racial superiority and the bloodletting that goes with it) would not have been entirely suitable for the earlier event:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child
Kipling offered as his jubilee tribute instead the poem ‘Recessional’ (dated 22 June 1897). It too expresses a sombre conviction that the high-point of imperial greatness, like all the greatnesses before it, has passed.
Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
Kipling’s gloom rings truer than the cheers in Pall Mall that June, with the Boer War looming. The inexorable shrinkage of the British empire would continue for the next 60 years until the last winds of change, in the 1950s, blew it away for ever.