The Coronation of Elizabeth II

A monarchy is rarely defined by a single morning's ceremony at the close of the year-and-a-half mourning-period for the predecessor. The King George VI had died of coronary thrombosis at Sandringham on the sixth of February 1952 in his fifty-seventh year; his twenty-five-year-old eldest daughter Princess Elizabeth, then on the royal-Commonwealth-tour of Kenya with the Duke of Edinburgh, had acceded to the Crown at the moment of his death (the formal-accession-news reached her at the Treetops Hotel on the Aberdare-Mountain-game-reserve at the five-thirty in the afternoon of the sixth of February 1952), had returned to London on the eighth of February 1952, and had observed the traditional sixteen-month-mourning-period before the Coronation date set for the second of June 1953.

THE WINDSOR HOUSEHOLD

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born at 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, on the twenty-first of April 1926, elder of the two daughters of Albert, Duke of York (the second son of King George V and the future King George VI) and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. She was raised in the 1920s-and-1930s royal-household at 145 Piccadilly and at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, was tutored at home in the royal-household home-schooling arrangement under the maternal-household-tutor Marion Crawford (Crawfie) and from her sixteenth year on the constitutional-history private-tutorials of Sir Henry Marten of Eton, and on the abdication of her uncle King Edward VIII in December 1936 became the heir-presumptive to the British throne at her tenth year on her father's accession as King George VI.

She served as a Subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service from the 1945-final-months-of-the-Second-World-War (the only British monarch in history to have served in uniform in the armed forces), and on the twentieth of November 1947 in her twenty-second year married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of the Royal Navy at Westminster Abbey in the first major royal-wedding of the post-war period.

THE ACCESSION AND THE PREPARATION

She acceded to the British Crown on the sixth of February 1952 at the thirty-five-thousand-feet altitude of the Treetops Hotel in Kenya, returned to London on the eighth of February, took the Accession Council oath at St James's Palace on the morning of the seventh of February in the traditional Accession-Council-protocol, observed the royal funeral of her father at Windsor on the fifteenth of February, and from late February 1952 to early June 1953 worked through the sixteen-month Coronation-preparation period under the Earl Marshal Bernard Marmaduke FitzAlan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk (the hereditary holder of the Earl-Marshalship-of-England, whose Office-of-Earl-Marshal had been the responsible-organising-Office for English-monarchical-coronations continuously since the Norman-era 12th century).

The Coronation preparation included the Coronation Commission deliberations (the 1952 Cabinet-and-Privy-Council-and-Commonwealth-Realm Joint-Coronation-Commission that the Churchill ministry had convened to plan the constitutional-and-ceremonial details of the first post-war Coronation), the historic decision to admit television-cameras into the Coronation ceremony itself (a decision taken at the Queen's-personal-insistence over the Cabinet-and-Archbishop-of-Canterbury initial-opposition, on the popular-democratic principle that the Coronation should be witnessed by the popular-television audience of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth), the design-and-manufacture of the Coronation-Robe (the Norman-Hartnell-designed Coronation Robe of white satin embroidered with the floral-emblems of the United Kingdom and the eleven Commonwealth realms), and the assembly of the 8,251-guest Westminster-Abbey-Coronation-congregation.

THE SECOND OF JUNE

The Coronation morning of the second of June 1953 opened with the cold-and-wet weather that the popular London-newspapers would universally remember (the Coronation-rain). The Queen left the Buckingham Palace forecourt at the 10:26 AM in the Gold State Coach drawn by the eight Windsor Grey horses, processed along the Mall-to-Trafalgar-Square-to-the-Strand-to-Whitehall-to-the-Westminster-Abbey route across the 49-minute procession, and entered the Westminster Abbey West Door at the 11:15 AM under the Coronation Canopy held by the Knights of the Garter.

The Coronation ceremony ran approximately three hours from the 11:15 AM entry to the 2:15 PM processional-exit. The Recognition-Oath-Anointing-Investiture-Crowning-Enthronement-and-Homage sequence followed the traditional ceremonial of the English-monarchy. The Crowning moment came at the 12:34 PM when the Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher placed the Imperial Crown of St Edward on the Queen's head and the cry of God Save the Queen was raised by the Westminster-Abbey congregation, the trumpets sounded the fanfare, and the Tower-of-London-and-Hyde-Park guns fired the Royal-Salute. The Queen took the Coronation Oath in the five-part form (to govern the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, of Pakistan, and of Ceylon, and of her Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs).

THE TELEVISED CORONATION

The BBC live-television-broadcast of the Coronation across the 11 AM-to-5 PM ceremony-and-procession period was the foundational televised-state-occasion in British public life. The BBC outside-broadcast team under the Director-General Sir Ian Jacob and the Outside-Broadcasts-Director Peter Dimmock had assembled the twenty-one-camera-team across the Westminster-Abbey-and-Procession-route, with the running-commentary by the BBC television-commentator Richard Dimbleby (the Dimbleby-commentary on the Coronation became the template for the BBC-state-occasion-coverage of the next sixty years). The television audience was estimated at 277 million viewers across the British-and-international BBC-relayed-broadcast networks (approximately 27 million in the United Kingdom, approximately 100 million across the Commonwealth, and approximately 150 million across the American-and-European-relayed BBC-television-broadcast). The 1953 Coronation-television-broadcast was the largest single-event television-audience to that date in the history of the medium and was the trigger for the popular adoption of the television-set as the domestic-British-household-fixture across the 1953-to-1960 television-set-purchase-boom (the United-Kingdom-television-set ownership grew from approximately 1.5 million sets at the 1953-Coronation to approximately 11 million sets by the 1960-mark, the fastest domestic-consumer-electronics-adoption in the history of the British consumer-market).

Queen Elizabeth II reigned for the 70 years and 214 days following the Coronation, the longest reign of any British monarch in history. She died at Balmoral Castle on the eighth of September 2022 in her ninety-seventh year. Her state-funeral at Westminster Abbey on the nineteenth of September 2022 was the most-watched-single broadcast event in British history with a estimated 2.5 billion viewers across the global-television-and-streaming-platform audience. The Windsor name in modern British state-ceremonial carries the weight of the morning at the Westminster Abbey on the second of June 1953.