Elizabeth Arrives in London To Assume Duties as Queen

Nation Has Understanding

By Carlyle Morgan | Chief of the London News Bureau of The Christian Science Monitor

London

Fresh gratitude sharpens the keenness of the loyalty of British people as they welcome home for the first time their new Queen, Elizabeth II, just as gratitude has tempered the national sorrow at the passing of a well-loved King.

There sweeps across the country a much clearer and stronger appreciation of what the respected tradition of royalty can mean in this country and to this country.

This appreciation is heightened by the obvious sincerity of the many messages of sympathy and of support for Britain as well as for the new Queen personally that have poured into the capital.

As if the drama now being enacted at the core of the British Commonwealth of Nations were insufficient, Britons saw their new Queen hurrying home by air, harried by storms, escorted by planes and ships ready for rescue in case of misadventure.

And while she flew her mother and her sister, Queen-Mother Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, prayed in the little church of St. Mary Magdalene at Sandringham near the royal country house. They knelt in the church for half an hour, and few persons saw them come or saw them leave. The few who did respected their privacy and also their sorrow and their gratitude, perhaps simply because they share these feelings.

The circumstances of the young Queen’s accession are at once fabulously colorful and vastly significant.

Queen Elizabeth II makes history by being the first British sovereign to accede to the throne while abroad in the Commonwealth. The fact will add one more tie of sentiment to the many durable intangibles which already bind together commonwealth peoples.

History in Jungle

She is doubtless also the first sovereign ever to accede to the throne while 30 feet aboveground in a jungle tree in equatorial Africa. That human and rather touching fact will make early study of British history more attractive than ever for British children.

Gradually beams of light are breaking through the grayness, both literal and figurative, that has hung over London since the forenoon of Feb. 6, when news of the King’s passing was announced from the royal estate in Sandringham. Symbolically, as it seems to many Londoners, that the city’s skies are actually a bit brighter than they were 24 hours ago.

But what is really dispersing the darkness here is the very evident gratefulness of the British people - to the new Queen for what she is as a woman as well as a sovereign, to the royal family for its unwavering devotion to duty, and not least to King George VI.

Britons Grateful

Britons of all walks of life are pridefully and gratefully recalling that no generation in Britain under any king has come through greater dangers, moral and physical, than the British people surmounted with King George.

No other generation of Britons, they feel sure, ever weathered more turbulent or more profound changes in the world or in their own social order than did his subjects, some of them at home in their tight little island, some scattered over the vast reaches of the empire and the commonwealth.

Among the British institutions of liberty the monarchy fulfills a function almost paradoxical to observers with a republican background such as exists in the United States. The emotion felt by the Briton looking wistfully at Buckingham Palace’s broad façade, or waiting in narrow Downing Street for some sign of what-next, or passing a jagged corner of a blitzed Southhampton block, is much more than a sentiment.

Big Cog in Machinery

It comes, an inquirer soon learns, from a practical-minded awareness of the value of King George VI as a very big cog in the British constitutional machinery. It comes, too, from a profoundly practical sense of the role of the family - any family - in the maintenance of national order and security with freedom.

Perhaps it is for that reason that the most frequently heard tributes Britons are paying to King George reflect British respect for him as a “family man.” In the first place that means a reliable and lovable member of his own family, imparting to the nation through his own behavior the qualities of stability and self-sacrifice.

To the prevalence of those qualities in their society the British people attribute their capacity for outriding storms abroad and averting storms at home.

In addition to a world war that shook the foundations of freedom over most of the world, the British people under King George VI witnessed at least three epochal developments. They were:

A “cold” revolution within Britain while a “cold” war went on outside.

Profound changes within the empire short of the “liquidation” at which Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared he never would preside.

Many folks here declare that without the ties which the British Crown provides between self-governing members of the commonwealth, the great changes in the empire might have come only at disastrous cost to Britain and added danger for the western world.