The pearl sword and other significant symbols in yesterday's celebrations.

An item on the pearl sword which was yesterday held aloft in St Paul's Cathedral by the Lord Mayor of London, dating from 2008 is here, on John Lackland (Jean sans terre, King John) here, the the City Livery Companies who hosted the lunch for the Queen in Westminster Great Hall from here and finally some nice shots from the Guildhall where the TV cameras were rightly excluded from a blog here.

Altogether a day of interesting insights into the real historical governing structures of England, which it would appear are soon to resume more of their ancient significance.

Biblical deluge swamps 60th coronation celebrations of our Sold-out Sovereign!

At least the Queen avoided following a barge of pealing bells in a rowed and gilded barge called 'Gloriana'. She also shunned the plush red thrones, on the more aptly named Churchillian,"Spirit of Chartwell", povided for the Royal pair, although later in the seemingly endless procession of ever more boringly decorated and shabbily presented boats, she may well have wished they had been positioned to look abeam! Their stamina was the afternoon's highlight.

Earlier  throngs of betrayed Britons lined the river banks and bridges to snatch a momentary shred of hope that their rulers really did know either best, or what they were about, and that the reality of the growing European nightmare could somehow be delayed, or even made to disappear in memories of earlier occasions of less misplaced pomp and circumstance. The elements  were to offer them a brief opportunity for such escapism, before at the climax then conspiring to deliver the most telling apparent idictment that nature could have arranged on the rule to date of Queen Elizabeth II.

The pretentious pomposity of the London Philarmonic orchestra's 'Last night of the Proms Jingoism', complete with sea shanties, Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia, were literally washed out, with the sound often proving impossible to convey to the television audience for whom it was all presumably intentioned.

As the senior male members of the Saxe Coburg and Gotha dynasty, dressed as Admirals of Britain's once proud senior service, must surely have been mildly amazed as the very fireworks themselves were practically extinguished before they could depart the top of Tower Bridge, the multi-coloured jets planned from fire boats abandoned as pointless and the flying pilots of the Fleet Air Arm spared the ignominy of a fly past in the remaining remnants of their service so recently brutalised by the warped priorities of our grotesque coalition government.

For the Queen herself, however, the greatest challenge now almost certainly lies ahead.

In two weeks time the Greeks will deliver their own message to the EU, on the same day as the French nation will elect those who will serve in their parliament in the period that will cover some of the bloodiest anniversaries of the brutal invasion of their country by power-crazed Germans, through Belgium, one hundred years ago.

Those anniversaries will also soon be painfully remembered and the sacrifices recalled in nearly every family in Britain, across the Commonwealth and eventually all around the world.

How Germany reacts to the offer of Spain's sovereignty to Germany, effectively given by Spanish PM Rajoy over this same past weekend, will very much determine the true nature of the challenge that Her Majesty now faces!

If she reviews the generally lamentable BBC TV coverage of yesterday's river pageant events, she will see an interview with the skipper (and his mother) of a white rose decorated coal barge from Goole (for me the highlight of yesterday's events,) watching that she will be reminded that the spirit of the people of her country remains unchanged.

What curious times we are living through. Could such weather have been co-incidental?

The Second Elizabethan Age and the Demise of Britain.

News of the death of King George VI, arrived in the dining hall of Copplestone House School, Budleigh Salterton in Devonshire by word of mouth of a young pupil who had sneaked home at lunchtime to feed her cat. It was transmitted from the rear of the hall to the top table where dined the staff, by word of mouth, its progress being traceable by each recipient's tears.

The announcement when made by the Headmistress to the still uninformed majority of the almost entirely female school body,was met by a cacophony of wailing that left me with a confused grasp of what had occurred, believing only that the unfortunate girl's cat had died.

It was not until I returned home that evening that I learnt the King was dead. The immediate subsequent effect on my life as I recall was practically zero, mainly centred upon the need to remember to sing "Queen" instead of "King" during the national anthem, with which I had only recently become familiar, in those days through fairly frequent association and repetition.

Later I attended the Queen's Coronation, and much later still, stood with my daughter on the route for the Golden Jubilee procession, returning to London from Switzerland especially so to do.

The second Elizabethan age has figured large in my life. Few can surely doubt that the Britain into which I was born, no longer exists. Are we today still a parliamentary democracy ruled through parliament in a constitutional democracy? Much of the apparent control seems to come from abroad, with little input from those we assume to be in charge! Has this been a consequence of the deliberate mendacity of successive leaders of different political parties in recent years or something more contrived?

The noted historian Professor Norman Davies, in his recent book "Vanished Kingdoms", illustrates the combining of the houses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha with that of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg accomplished by the marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth with the man we have come to know as Prince Philip.

The couple were in attendance at church in Sandringham yesterday, both clearly in robust health. Curiously it has today been decided that they will visit the Kontor at King's Lynn to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Her Majesty's accession to the throne of England, Scotland and various Commonwealth countries.

On 12th January this year I blogged on Orphans of Liberty here, and on Ironies Too, here, (with more illustrations and links) on the New Hansa.

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Hanseatic Warehouse

Hanseatic Warehouse

Located on St Margaret's Lane, the Hanseatic Warehouse (52.7512°N 0.3946°E) is the only surviving Hansa building in England. It was constructed in 1475 as part of the Treaty of Utrecht allowing Hansa to establish a trading depot in Lynn for the first time. It was used as such until 1751, by which time the river had receded. It was then sold to Lynn merchant Edward Everard for £800. He added the Georgian town house at the East side of the building which is now known as St. Margaret's House (and Grade I listed^[28]), after the nearby church.
In 1971 it was renovated as part of a preservation project and converted into offices by the Norfolk County Council. It is currently used by the council for various functions, including weddings, as it houses Lynn's register office.
The building is also known as the Kontor.^[29]

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The plaque pictured below (also taken from Wikipedia) is at Cannon Street Station, also highlights some little known facts about the original Hansa's role in the City of London:

Link to a readable version on Wikipedia:

Inter alia it reads "To celebrate sixty years of peace between the peoples of Britain and Germany.
TO COMMEMERATE six hundred years during which some 400 Hanseatic merchants inhabited peaceably in the City of London from the XIII the to the XIX th centuries a German self-governing enclave on this site known as the Steelyard, Stilliarde or "Stalhof"
 

This posting was first published to Orphans of Liberty