Page:The coronation of Edward the Seventh - a chapter of European and imperial history.djvu/12

4 a king, with Marie Antoinette immured in the convent of the Feuillans, the first of their prisons on the way to the guillotine.

On August 9, 1902, the King and Queen of England went forth from their palace to be crowned, amid the acclamations of their subjects, doubly joyful because the shadow of a great disaster had hovered over the royal house and had passed away. They, too, represented a monarchy more than eight centuries old. But instead of a people chafing to be rid of sovereignty and its symbols, the throng which they saw on the road to Westminster cheered not only a popular prince who had valiantly overcome a plague of sickness, but a monarch whose crown, about to be assumed, had become an emblem of Empire wider than Darius or the early Cæsars had ever dreamed of. Hence it was that the population of the capital was reinforced not merely by provincial sightseers, such as had repaired to previous coronations from the counties of Great Britain, but by British subjects from the farthest ends of the earth. Hence it was that the troops lining the streets were not simply soldiers of the standing army. The loyal press of a London crowd was contained by British citizens from Canada, from Australia, from New Zealand, wearing the khaki which, whatever its fate as a warlike uniform, will ever be associated with the help nobly given by the colonies to the mother-country struggling for supremacy in South Africa. In guarding the capital on Coronation-day these gallant white settlers of our distant possessions were peacefully aided by dark warriors from our Indian Empire, of military tradition more ancient than that of their conquerors. Wren's steeples at Westminster rocked with the clanging of bells, while the Tower of London, more aged