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Twenty-Five Years of Trial and Triumph,
Retrospect and Appreciation.
(Specially Contributed to the Ypres Times by Henry Benson, M.A.)
THIS summer the British Empire will be all for George and Merrie England!"
When Queen Victoria, crowned with the glory of her Diamond Jubilee, drove
through the streets of her great London in June, 1897, it was "roses, roses all the
way." Now, thirty-eight years later, her grandson, King George, is to set forth from
Buckingham Palace amidst the plaudits of his loyal subjects to give thanks in St. Paul's
Cathedral for his Silver Jubileea quarter of a century, which spans the most difficult
and anxious, if in some respects the most glorious, period of our Empire's history.
To old and young, to great and small, to rich and poor, the Jubilee is of personal
significance. Each unit in the land feels an individual sense of proprietorship in the
preparations for this festival of a nation, and Nature herself will hang out her ban
ners of green leaves and lovely blossoms to wave, we hope, in the glittering light of a
glorious May day.
Three Great Monarchs.
Victoria's task as a Sovereign was comparatively easy. She came to the throne
at a time when the political clouds left by the wars with Napoleon were beginning to
clear, and her reign coincided with a growth of national prosperity for which there
have been few parallels in the world's history. Moreover, the young Queen had the
advantage of engaging sentiment, whilst her virtues were enhanced by the unpopul
arity of her predecessors. At the end of her reign the British Crown had gathered
an Elizabethan nimbus, partly from her outstanding political wisdom, partly from her
length of years, and partly from the prosperous times, which had extended more than
six decades.
Her son, Edward VII., possessed the happy gift of appealing to crowds and traits
of character which commanded attention everywhere. He maintained the Crown in
the prestige which he had inherited but his reignan epilogue to one epoch and a
prologue to anotherwas far too short to test the quality of his political abilities as a
Sovereign, remarkable as they doubtless were.
The testing time came under George. He became King in the middle of the great
est constitutional crisis since 1688, and from that day onwards he has been under a
constant strain, more severe, perhaps, than any British King has been called upon to
endure. One slip, a single failure of judgment or temper, and the accumulated pop
ularity of the Crown might have crumbled.
Crisis Succeeds Crisis.
Let us look back
When the King came to the throne in 1910 he was, as far as the general public was
concerned, what the Germans call ein unbeschriebenes Blatt an unwritten page.
In the broad sense he was virtually unknown, save that, as the result of his Empire
tours, he had shown himself ahead of many of our statemen in grasping the true great
ness of the Empire idea. For the rest, his early youth and manhood had been over
shadowed by a great Queen and her brilliant and tremendously popular successor.
History, however, was to show, when in the fulness of time G.R. replaced E.R. as
the Royal monogram, that, although the ship of State had changed its owner, the
ballast was the same.
