Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhoodGreenwood, Grace
History
Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood
Greenwood, Grace
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 1819-1901
She had a great deal to go through with that day. She must have rehearsed
well, or she would have been confused by the multiform ceremonials of
that grand spectacular performance. The scene, as she entered Westminster
Abbey, might well have startled her out of her serene calm, but it
didn't. On each side of the nave, reaching from the western door to the
organ screen, were the galleries, erected for the spectators. These were
all covered with crimson cloth fringed with gold. Underneath them were
lines of foot-guards, very martial-looking, fellows. The old stone floor,
worn with the tread of Kings' coronations and funeral processions, was
covered with matting, and purple and crimson cloth. Immediately under the
central tower of the Abbey, inside the choir, five steps from the floor,
on a carpet of purple and gold, was a platform covered with cloth of
gold, and on it was the golden "Chair of Homage." Within the chancel,
near the altar, stood the stiff, quaint old chair in I which all the
sovereigns of England since Edward the Confessor have been crowned. Cloth
of gold quite concealed the "chunk of old red sandstone," called the
"stone of Scone," on which the ancient Scottish Kings were crowned, and
which the English seem to keep and use for luck. There were galleries on
galleries upholstered in crimson cloth, and splendid tapestries, wherein
sat members of Parliament and foreign Princes and Embassadors. In the
organ loft were singers in white, and instrumental performers in scarlet
--all looking very fine and festive; and up very high was a band of
trumpeters, whose music, pealing over the heads of the people, produced,
at times, a wonderful effect.
Fashionable people had got up early for once. Many were at the Abbey
doors long before 5 o'clock, and when the Queen arrived at 11:30,
hundreds of delicate ladies in full evening-dress, had been waiting for
her for seven long hours. The foreign Princes and Embassadors were in
gorgeous costumes; and there was the Lord Mayor in all his glory,
blinding to behold. His most formidable rival was Prince Esterhazy, who
sparkled with costly jewels from his head down to his boots-looking as
though he had been snowed upon with pearls, and had also been caught out
in a rain of diamonds, and had come in dripping. All these grand
personages and the Peers and Peeresses were so placed as to have a
perfect view of the part of the minster in which the coronation took
place-called, in the programme, "the Theatre."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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