The Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant flotilla—in honor of Elizabeth II’s sixtieth year on the throne—was due to pass by Battersea Bridge yesterday afternoon at 2:25 P.M. It would be the largest such procession on the Thames since 1662, when Charles II and Queen Catherine of Braganza, returning to Whitehall from Hampton Court, were greeted by vessels so numerous that, Samuel Pepys wrote, “we could see no water for them.” The Diamond Jubilee flotilla was to be a spectacular: a thousand boats, travelling seven miles under fourteen bridges at four knots, led by a floating belfry whose peals would be echoed and answered by ringing from riverbank churches along the route. Three miles of mooring chains. Fourteen miles of bunting. Boats—warships, cocklers, oyster smackers, eel barges, herring drifters, fishing trawlers—too big to pass under the Thames bridges would muster at the St. Katharine Docks. Foreknowledge of these facts was inescapable to anyone who had turned on a television, or opened a paper, or even gone to a grocery store in weeks leading up to the Jubilee. (I don’t often agree with Jan Moir, of the Daily Mail, but she was right that the BBC diminished itself with its “full cream sycophancy.”) As a republican, I found this all a little dismal, but out of curiosity I headed down to the river.
Between Battersea and Albert bridges, several thousand people had gathered. The weather was atrocious, but the mood was relaxed: it was a deely-bobbers kind of scene. You could move, but if you wanted to see anything, you had to secure a post at least a few feet above river-level. (Unless you’d camped out.) So the Queen’s subjects were hoisting their kids on top of Port-a-Loos; sitting on bus shelters; clinging to statues, whose pedestals provided a boost, forming flag-waving Laocoöns. A friend and I scaled a brick wall. And then the boats started coming. The belfry was ding-donging. There were Maori rowers, shirtless in the fog except for their straw capes. The Queen and her favored relations floated by on the Spirit of Chartwell, which, bedecked in red velvet and all manner of gilt flair, looked as though it had been decorated for the Jubilee of Elton John. (The Middletons were relegated to a nineteenth-century paddle steamer.) Forget republicanism! This was a party. (Others, bearing signs that read “Don’t Jubilee’ve It,” kept the good fight going near City Hall.) The awesome delight of seeing the full width of the Thames jammed with boats of all shapes and sizes, their colorful flags whipping in the wind, was only enhanced by reading later that the entire thing had been recreated on a duck pond by the people of Goudhurst, a village in Kent.
On the way down to the river, crossing the King’s Road, we had been arrested by a cadre of scooters, heralding the arrival of a motorcade. Some more scooters hovered in the intersection. A few Range Rovers whizzed by. Then came a gleaming green Bentley, all wax and muscle. Behind the left-hand backseat window, someone was making slow waves. For however long she may reign, I will always think of the Queen as a disembodied hand in a white glove.
Read more of our coverage of the Diamond Jubilee—and Lauren Collins’s article on last year’s royal wedding.
Photograph by Adrian Dennis/WPA Pool/Getty Images.