BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

229
rule.
The most notable events included the Golden (1887) and Diamond
(1897) Jubilees honoring Queen Victoria's long years of service, her
funeral procession (1901), as well as the coronation (1902) and funeral
(1911) of Edward VII and the coronation and durbar (1912) of George V. 1
These pageants inaugurated a tradition of elaborate monarchical
cermonies performed before a receptive mass audience.2
They in turn
helped to instill a popular, nationwide devotion to the rituals of pomp
and circumstance, bolstering support for the royal
family and the
aristocracy in an age which, based on economic considerations alone,
would seemed to have prohibited the exaltation of bygone splendors.3
The causes underlying the public's endorsement of grand stately
functions are not difficult to fathom.
The nation's position as the
predominant world power was increasingly threatened
in the course of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by mounting economic,
military, and
imperial drives from European and American competitors.
The country was internally beset by changes altering the character of
1
David Cannadine, "The Context, Performance and Meaning of
Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition,'" The
Invention of Tradition eds. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 138, 108, 133-34.
2 Although, as Lant has shown, the development of royal
processions during this period was not without its confusions and
setbacks. Jeffrey L. Lant, Insubstantial Pageant (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1979), pp. ix, 15, 17-18, 24, 138, 149, 151-53, 167.
3 Edward Shi 1s and Michael Young, "The Meaning of the
Coronation," Sociological Review vol. 1, no. 2 (December, 1953), pp.
63-64, 67. For two twentieth century accounts of the public enthusiasm
accorded the monarchy, see Richard Rose's and Dennis Kavanagh's, "The
Monarchy in Contemporary Political Culture," Comparative Politics
(July, 1976), pp. 548-76 and Philip Ziegler's, Crown and People, (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978).