Dearly Beloved

A million watched; millions listened to the warm young voices, the sonorous old voices. Billions of words about it were printed, and closely read. In Accra, where the equatorial sun beats down on the white church steeples (relics of a vanished Danish empire), parties were held in celebration. Paris noted it, and Panama. In heedless Manhattan thousands got out of bed at 6 a.m. to hang over radios. Shanghai and Hankow had never seen so many weddings; Chinese brides deemed it lucky to be married on the day that Elizabeth, heiress to Britain's throne, became the wife of Philip Mountbatten.

Something Steady. This wedding, on a dark day of a troubled, distracted and most uncertain time, carried over six continents and seven seas a brightness so simple it was hard to understand. Its appeal was too nearly universal to be explained by such words as "glamor," "publicity," "sentimentality," or even by harsher and more present words, such as "power" or "wealth." Of the millions who spoke and wrote of it, perhaps a London linotyper and an archbishop came closest to saying what it meant.

On the morning of the wedding, the linotyper, on his way home from work, paused amid the happy, shabby throngs. He answered a question, musingly: "I'm a good trade unionist and a Labor Party man, but the royal family means something. My father saw Victoria once, as close as you and me are now. Those two are getting married--they carry it on. I suppose it's having something steady in your life. And God knows there isn't much that's steady these days."

That was one essential side of it--the contrast between the stability of the Throne and the confusion teeming around it. The other side was expressed in a quiet talk of great beauty and simplicity (see RELIGION). The old Archbishop of York stood before the couple and said: "Notwithstanding the splendor and national significance of this occasion, this service in all essentials is exactly the same as it would be for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the dales."

The contrast cherished by the linotyper was made warm and living by the similarity expounded by the archbishop. At a coronation the people triumphantly proclaim their acceptance of authority, which is just the opposite of subservience to power. The great social victory of order, out of which freedom issues, had, in turn, its source in marriage, whether in Westminster Abbey or in a country church. Thus, what would otherwise have been merely a flash of gems, a blare of horns and a hash of gossip took on a meaning for Briton and alien by a fascinating interplay of dignity and earthiness, of humor, pomp and prayer.

A Royal Pratfall. As the kings (5) and queens (6), ruling and retired, began to arrive, the royal family's eight-year austerity unbent. At a dance at Buckingham Palace, plump Princess Juliana of The Netherlands was dancing a conga with Elizabeth's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. She slipped, and stayed down, while Harry of Gloucester tried to tug her up amid a moment of embarrassed silence.

Next night, at a less active palace reception, Prime Minister Clement Attlee said cheerily to some Tory friends: "We should really have more of these parties." This remark was widely repeated. "The bahstud," muttered one of those who knew that Attlee's government had carried its austerity drive deep into the wedding festivities, by shortening the length and speeding up the pace of the procession, by asking workers to stay at their jobs, and even, at first, by refusing to put the Household Cavalry in full dress. When the Cavalry turned up in full dress in Sir Alexander Korda's movie An Ideal Husband, released a week before the wedding, the government backed down.

At the same reception where Attlee made his well-meant, ill-received remark, Beatrice Lillie (Lady Peel) was strolling about, smoking a cigarette in a holder. Princess Margaret came up. Bea, not wanting to curtsy while brandishing a cigarette, stuffed it and the holder into her dress front. At St. James's Palace earlier in the day, while a certain lady of title was viewing the royal wedding presents, the King came up to her and, with a very quizzical expression, said: "A lot of people must have had a lot of very nice things stored away for a very long time."

Little mishaps and irreverent remarks continued, but grew less frequent as the festivities narrowed toward the ceremony itself. The crowd began to gather early the night before in favored places near Buckingham Palace and Parliament Square. The crowd was good-natured, a bit rowdy, ill-clad and ill-fed. And, more than in other times, avid for the show that would lift it, not by illusion but by legitimate right, into a symbolic reminder of its own worth. As they waited, chaff flew. When black smoke poured from the palace chimney, a wit said: "Blimey, now they've gone an' burnt the blinkin' soup."

Another cockney called the palace "the poorhouse." Rebuked, he answered: "Why not, they're living on our charity, ain't they?" Any American who read malice or even envy into this would be not only wrong, but fiercely resented. The cockney wanted the royal family living just that way, and he wanted it the more fiercely as his "charity" pinched.

Philip was first almost early, then almost late. He popped out of Kensington Palace at 11 o'clock, shook hands with a chimney sweep (for luck), glanced at his watch and popped back in again. At 11:05 he and his best man, the Marquess of Milford Haven, set out in a limousine for the Abbey, after Philip, glancing at his watch again, said: "Bad show, we're a little late." "Cutting it a bit fine, isn't he?" murmured a lady at the palace as Philip sped by.

The King and the Princess proceeded more slowly, and the King's mother, Queen Mary, slower still. She, who understood the pageant best, sat on the jump seat of her Daimler where the crowd could see her plainly.

"Ow," cried a girl outside the Abbey, "I feel all tickly up and down me spine!"

Inside, the royal, noble and merely distinguished guests were scarcely less tickly. They rose when Churchill entered, beaming, kept their seats when Attlee came in. The Dowager Marchioness of Reading strode up to peer at the cushions placed for Elizabeth and Philip.

In the Sight of God. Then a fanfare of trumpets split the silence, Westminster's choir sang Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven, and behind a parade of Abbey officials Elizabeth came up the aisle on her father's arm. Her face looked drawn and pale. "My, she looks nervous," gasped a lady in the nave, as the wedding procession carefully skirted the grave of the Unknown Soldier. Behind the bride, supporting her 15-foot train, marched her cousins, the five-year-old Princes Michael of Kent and William of Gloucester, so intent on their job that they tramped sturdily right over the sacred pavement.

"Dearly Beloved," began the Dean of Westminster, "we are gathered together here in the sight of God. . . ." From her seat on the sacrarium, the Queen time & again interrupted her seldom-failing smile to dart anxious glances at her daughter. She seemed less at ease than at any time in her queenly career, but once when Philip looked uncertain and alarmed, she flashed him a warm, reassuring smile. When the time came for him to step back, George VI laid his daughter's hand in that of Philip with infinite gentleness.

The Truest Truth. John Osborne, head of TIME's London Bureau, described the scene: None there will forget the deep greyness of the Abbey, subduing the gleam of the golden high altar, the light of the candles and the fire of many jewels, winking in the Gothic dusk. Remembered too will be the silvered sounding of trumpets, the great beat of the Abbey organ, and the belling voice of Canterbury saying: "Philip, wilt thou have this woman," and "Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, wilt thou have this man," and the girl's response, "to love, cherish, and to obey," audible only to those nearest in the Abbey (but clear on the radio), and the tall, tender and slightly bending young man as he said: "With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship."

Some will remember Winston Churchill, a confirmed romantic and devoted royalist, causing a stir when he rose in mid-ceremony to don his coat against the Abbey chill (did he, surveying the straight back of George the Sixth, have a thought for the absent Edward the Eighth, whom he loved and supported?); and tiny Prince William of Gloucester, restive in the long stances before the sacrarium and the high altar; and the King, quick to note the tiring of the pages and to help them with the bride's train when it caught on the marriage steps; and the Princess Margaret, lovely and still in ivory loneness at the center of the sacrarium; and, most of all, the sureness and reality of God Save the King when, at the end of the trumpets, the Abbey organ and the chorus hidden in the high arches sang the ancient and truest truth of England.

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