Stephen W. Sears - The British Empire

At midday on Tuesday, June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria of England, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, ruler of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, arrived at St. Paul s Cathedral to thank God for the existence of the greatest Empire ever known.

The representatives of an imperial caste awaited her there. Bishops of the Church of England fluttered hymn sheets and remembered half a century of Christian effort - the suppression of slavery, the conversion of heathen tribes, mission stations from Labrador to Niger . Generals and admirals blazed with medals and remembered half a century of satisfactory campaigning in Egypt or India , against Ashanti tribesmen or Maori chiefs, up Burmese backwaters or Manitoba creeks. There were aged proconsuls of Empire, bronzed or emaciated by tropical lifetimes and attended by faded wives in lacy hats. There were scholars in the gowns of Cambridge and Oxford, the twin powerhouses of British ideology. There were poets, musicians, and propagandists, whose transcendental theme of the day was the splendor of imperial Britain.

Two celebrated soldiers commanded the guards of honor. On the south side of the cathedral steps, upon a brown charger, was Field-Marshal Lord Garnet Wolseley , commander-in-chief of the British Army, hero of the Red River expedition in Canada, the Ashanti War in the colony of Gold Coast on the Gulf of Guinea, Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt, and many another imperial wars, looking after forty-five years of more or less constant campaigning, a fairly melancholy sixty-four. On the north side, upon the gray Arabian that had carried him victoriously to the relief of Kandahar in 1880, was Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts , veteran of two Afghan Wars , the Indian Mutiny , and the Abyssinian expedition , whose sweet, simple nature and unfailing courage made him the idol of the private soldier.

Behind these allegorical marshals, soldiers from every part of the Empire honored the royal presence. The Chinese from Hong Kong wore wide coolie hats. The Zaptiehs, Turkish military policemen from Cyprus, wore fezzes. The Jamaicans wore white gaiters and gold-embroidered jackets. There were Dyaks from Borneo and Sikhs from India, Canadian Hussars and Sierra Leone gunners, Australian cavalrymen and British Guiana police, Maltese and South Africans, and a troop of jangling Bengal Lancers. One of the Maori riflemen weighed 392 pounds. One of the Dyaks had taken, in his former occupation, thirteen human heads. The officers of the Indian Imperial Service Corps were all princes. The cavalrymen from New South Wales were all giants, with an average height of five feet ten and a half inches and an average chest of thirty-eight inches. A captain Ames of the 2nd Life Guards - at six foot eight inches the tallest man in the British Army - was the princeliest and most gigantic of all, mounted on his charger and wearing his monstrous plumed helmet of burnished steel.

Satraps from many parts of the queens dominions had converged upon London that day: tributary bigwigs of every color, religion, costume, and deportment, prime ministers of the self-governing colonies, maharajahs and nawabs and hereditary chiefs, governors of distant possessions, military leaders from far commands. There were representatives from other respectful powers: the dowager empress of Germany (the queens eldest daughter); Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary (whose assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 was to begin the Great War); twenty-three assorted princesses, a scattering of grand dukes and duchesses, and forty Indian potentates; Monsignor Cesare Sambucetti, the Papal Nuncio, improbably sharing a carriage with Chang Yen Huan, the Chinese ambassador; General Nelson A. Miles , commander-in-chief of the United States Army; Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin , inventor and builder of the rigid airship.

Since the firing of the celebratory guns in Hyde Park that morning, all London had waited in grand expectancy - the greatest of capitals on a climactic day in its history. The excuse for this grandiloquent jamboree was the Queens Diamond Jubilee - sixty years upon the throne - but its theme was the splendor of Empire. The British Empire had reached its high noon, and on this day of days the people waved their Jubilee flags as exuberantly in imperial fervor as in royalist devotion.