Fifty Years On: As Elizabeth II approaches her Golden Jubilee, Michael M. Thomas utters a heartfelt "God save the Queen!"

Women's Quarterly, Autumn, 2001 by Michael M. Thomas

IN THE VERY SMALL HOURS of November 20, 1947, our Scots governess, Miss Cameron, awakened my brother and me in the Park Avenue apartment where we lived with our father. Quietly, so as not to disturb anyone else in the apartment, Miss Cameron tuned our radio to CBS, which was broadcasting--in conjunction with a BBC feed--the wedding in Westminster Abbey of Princess Elizabeth to Lt. Philip Mountbatten, RN.

I can hear it again now, almost fifty-five years later, as if it were yesterday: the squawks and crackles that characterized overseas broadcasts back then, the distinctive Bond Street voice of David Dimbleby, the BBC's man of choice for sovereign occasions, the faint background roar of the crowds lining the processional route, the florid descriptions of the splendid get-up of the attendant lords and ladies, this being the first time since the war that the British aristocracy had turned out in full fig, in tiaras and ermines--and above all I remember the bride's voice, very small and very English as she repeated the vows spoken by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was odd and disheartening to hear. Like most boys with an over-gorged romantic bent, an aching yearning centered largely on the girl of my pubescent dreams, Princess Ozma of Oz, the thought that "my" Princess Elizabeth, almost to the day exactly ten years older than myself, was going off with this dashing officer, with his sharpened Leslie Howard good looks, was hardly bearable. I may even have shed a tear. Miss Cameron, loyalest of subjects, did.

Four years and some months later, "as she sat on the platform of the Tree Tops Hotel [in Kenya] in the branches of a giant wild fig tree watching and photographing the animals at the saltlick," in the words of her biographer, Sarah Bradford, Princess Elizabeth was disturbed in her wildlife contemplation by her husband with the news that her father, King George VI, had died at Sandringham, the royal vacation home in Norfolk, and that she was now, by the grace of God, of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, and ruler of Dominions and Possessions beyond the seas.

In February she will mark her fiftieth year on the throne. She will not be the first queen of England to celebrate such a Jubilee, a consideration that brings to my mind verses that--like Her Majesty--also date well back in my personal remembrance of things past. The romantic urge that nearly convulsed me when I listened to the princess's wedding never really died out--to this day it hasn't--and so I was a ready and willing victim when, at about the age of sixteen, I was introduced at prep school to the manly, combative sentimentality of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad.

Thanks to Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, Housman is once again cultural news, but few people, I imagine, still read him closely enough to recall the ironic yet patriotic anthem to Queen Victoria with which he begins A Shropshire Lad, the book of poems that is his purchase on immortality. I'm going to repeat it in full here, because it seems to me to provide much, much to think about as another glorious queen approaches her Golden Jubilee:

From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,

The shires have seen it plain,

From north and south the sign returns

And beacons burn again.

Look left, look right, the hills are bright,

The dales are light between,

Because 'tis fifty years tonight

That God has saved the Queen.

Now, when the flame they watch not towers

About the soil they trod,

Lads, we'll remember friends of ours

Who shared the work with God

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,

To fields that bred them brave,

The saviours come not home tonight:

Themselves they could not save.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead.

We pledge in peace by farm and town

The Queen they served in war,

And fire the beacons up and down

The land they perished for.

"God save the queen" we living sing,

From height to height 'tis heard;

And with the rest your voices ring,

Lads of the Fifty-third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not:

Be you the men you've been,

Get you the sons your fathers got,

And God will save the Queen.

When Housman wrote the foregoing, the empire was at its zenith. Queen Victoria--then a mere girl of sixty-eight--would rule another fourteen years, to be succeeded in 1901 by her fifty-nine-year-old son Edward VII, whose own disgraceful antics as Prince of Wales bear comparison with any of the goings-on of his great-great-grandchildren of the present time. For more than a century; royal princes and princesses have on the whole behaved foolishly, but the throne survives, no thanks to the heirs of the occupant.

Why this should be is as great a mystery to some people as is, to me, the riddle of what is in that pocketbook that Queen Elizabeth II is never seen without, that hangs by its strap from her left arm. It is a talisman, perhaps? Does it contain a loaded revolver against the time when her patience finally snaps and she blows away her husband or one or another of her erring children?