| Birthday celebrations were enjoyed by the City of Annapolis residents as they toasted to the City's namesake, Queen Anne of Great Britain. The Queen issued a royal charter for the City 300 years ago. In 1694, soon after the overthrow of the Catholic government of the lord proprietor, Sir Francis Nicholson moved the capital of the royal colony there and named the town Annapolis after Princess Anne, soon to be the Queen of Great Britain; it was incorporated as a city in 1708.
The Deputy Head of Mission for the British Embassy presented a speech for the guests, that even her Royal Majesty proclaimed" Was the most wondrous and brilliant speech we have heard"
Please enjoy it!
Annapolis, 6 February 2009
Mrs Ellen Moyer, Mayor of the city of Annapolis, Professor David Fogle, Master of Ceremonies, Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland, as presented by Mary Anne Jung, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not sure that was the right order of precedence but this is a Republic.
In my last job I was British ambassador to Sri Lanka. So I'm used to dealing with the British colonial legacy. To-night looks like being more fun that most. There are so many reasons to be glad to be invited to today's birthday party for Queen Anne, I scarcely know where to begin.
I am a graduate of Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth so your invitation to Annapolis has given me the perfect excuse to spend this afternoon visiting the naval academy, the American counterpart of my alma mater. It was while I was a midshipman at Dartmouth that I first heard of the city of Annapolis, because of the connection between the two naval officer training establishments. I learned this afternoon of the great improvements made to the Royal Navy, Britain's navy, during Queen Anne's reign. And I marvelled at the career of John Paul Jones, the founder of the US navy, whose stunning marble tomb lies in the crypt of the academy's chapel.
I passed out of Dartmouth 30 years ago. But the memories and lessons learned during my naval training have stayed with me down the years, and I am sure the same is equally true for the fine men and women who graduate from the naval academy here.
As I teenager, I loved sailing. So it's wonderful to be in such a renowned and famous centre for sailing. Annapolis is also a very beautiful city, with many lovely, historic buildings. And speaking of history, it's great, as a British diplomat posted to Washington, to be able to celebrate the connection between my country and this land and, in particular, to be in a city named after an English queen.
So I'd like to say something now about Queen Anne. If truth be told, Anne probably doesn't feature amongst the best known or most admired monarchs of England or Britain. Queens Elizabeth the first and Victoria are more popular and present in the contemporary imagination. Amongst Anne's near contemporaries, Charles the second enjoys the epithet, the merry monarch, and William and Mary are loved for kicking out the catholic king, James the second, and cementing the democratic values of the glorious revolution.
Queen Anne is perhaps best remembered these days for a certain style of architecture and furniture. Many beautiful houses were constructed during her reign, including Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. But her reign should be remembered for more than just being a period of elegance in design.
A little research has convinced me that now is the right moment to relaunch and to rebrand Anne. She has been overlooked for too long. Anne is very much a Queen for out present times. And here are six reasons why.
First, in last year's presidential election Americans voted for a candidate committed to changing the politics of Washington. One of the strongest messages identified in opinion polls during the campaign was that the American people did not want politics as usual. They wanted to see partisan politics replaced by parties coming together for the national good. And President Obama has been reaching across the aisle to Republicans in his lobbying on the economic recovery bill and in his picks for the administration.
Well, Anne too was a unifying figure who did away with politics as usual. Although it is true that politicians coalesced around two political parties and that party politics began to take shape during her reign, it is also the case that Anne picked ministers from both major parties - Tories and Whigs (although she preferred the former to the latter).
Most importantly, however, during her reign, the Scots and the English, for centuries enemies, reached out towards each other and agreed to merge their national political identities and become one state. This happened in the fifth year of Anne's reign, in 1707. Anne's title then changed from Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland and France to Queen of Great Britain, Ireland and France.
Just in case there are any French people here, it would only be fair to add that the claim to rule France was aspirational or at least historic. The last bit of mainland France under the English crown, the port of Calais, had been lost or liberated, depending on your point of view, during Mary Tudor's reign.
The second echo from out time to hers is that Anne came to the throne with very high expectations. She didn't use the phrase 'audacity of hope' but she certainly encouraged the sentiment. For sure, William and Mary before her had successfully brought in the values of the Glorious Revolution and overseen the passage of the Bill of Rights - two huge steps forward for our democracy. But there is an unwritten law in Britain that the female members of the royal family are more popular than the men. We have generally been well served by our Queens. Because Mary died first, William reigned as widower and king for eight years. And after eight years of W, as he was not affectionately known, the British people wanted change.
Along with the joy of a new Queen ascending the throne and the high expectations that came with her, the third element that resonates today was that Anne's reign began at a time of crisis for the nation. She inherited the circumstances that almost immediately led to the outbreak of the war of the Spanish Succession. This was not a war of her making. But she had to deal with it and it came to dominate her time as Queen.
Like President Obama, her major assets in the war were the quality of her leading general and the fortitude of her allies. She had her General Petraeus in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who vanquished Britain's enemies and kept our country safe. In fact, Marlborough remarkably never lost a battle or a siege in his long career as our top general. We wish the same success for General Petraeus today.
The connection between those turbulent events and our times is even closer than meets the eye. Next time you spot President Obama smoking, check out his brand of cigarettes. It might well be Marlboro, named after Marlborough Street in London, which in turn is named after Queen Anne's famous fighting Duke. Given the importance of the tobacco industry in this part of the United States at that time, the president's vice, if smoking cigarettes is a vice, is historically apt. And just to complete the circle, there are rumours that a major British tobacco company is planning to launch a new brand of cigarettes called Petraeus.
Fourthly, I have mentioned one contemporary public health issue, smoking, so I hope you won't mind my mentioning another, obesity. Queen Anne was very much in tune with our times in this respect also. She was a large lady who ate well and often. She used to invite members of the Privy Council to the palace to share her TV dinners - that's tremendously vast dinners. She was so huge when she died that her coffin was nearly square. Had she lived today, she would probably have been the subject of a fly on the wall documentary - the monarch who's too fat to mount her own horse.
Fifthly, many of us are captivated by President Obama's international background. Part of his appeal, certainly outside America, is the sense that a bit of him is African, a bit Asian, a bit European as well as his being American. He has Muslim and Christian and non-believing relatives. He is somehow a symbol of our globalised age, an incarnation of an emerging sense of the commonality of mankind.
In Queen Anne's time too, the ancestry of kings and queens was a matter of great interest. On her mother's side of the family, Anne was solidly English. But through her father, King James II, Anne had French, Danish, Scottish, Austrian, German and Italian blood, as well as English. Her background therefore covered many of the countries of the proximate world and included both its major religions - Catholics and Protestants.
The parallel with the president goes further. He's a Christian; his father was a Muslim. Anne's father was one religion - Catholic. She was brought up in another - Protestantism. It seems appropriate that this city which bears her name, that of a Protestant queen, is the capital of a state with a very Catholic sounding name, Maryland.
The sixth connection between past and present concerns the nature of political debate then and now. Queen Anne's reign saw a great flowering of free speech, through the custom of individuals writing and publishing pamphlets on the issues of the day. Jonathan Swift is the perhaps the most famous pamphleteer of the era.
Pamphlets were the Internet of Queen Anne's age. Had Swift lived today, he would have been a blogger, railing in cyberspace against the tyranny of landlords in Ireland and other injustices. The vitality of British political discourse, with pamphlets being the main vehicle, seems to me to be very reminiscent of the liveliness of the bloggosphere today.
So there are six reasons for thinking of Queen Anne as a contemporary as well as a historical figure, someone embedded in the past but with many vibrant connections to the present.
That seems to me to symbolise something bigger, the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom today. We are both very modern, highly developed, sophisticated, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural countries. We are great friends and have proven to be staunch allies in testing times. Our business links are formidable - we are each other's largest foreign direct investors.
Our cultures travel easily both ways across the Atlantic and find ready audiences and partners on the other side. The greatest collection of Shakespeare first folio editions is to be found in Washington, a city that has two theatre companies dedicated to England's greatest playwright. And this year's Oscar nominations contain another good crop of British films and actors. Our universities are forging ever closer links too. And I am delighted that four students from the Naval Academy have recently won Marshall scholarships to the UK.
This intricate web of connections did not come about without a cause. As Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of Music: "Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could. So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good."
Well the cause of the special relationship the UK and the US enjoy is, of course, to be found in the youth or childhood of the European settlement of the United States. The shared values - the common attachment to democracy, human rights, freedom of the individual, accountability to the people of those who govern us - these values spring from the same root, the politics and culture of late 17th century England, particularly the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights.
Those roots supported a great trunk which, as the years went by and as events turned out, divided, with one branch growing on this side of the Atlantic and one on the other. But the rootstock remained common to both.
The relations between our two countries are thus both modern and historic. Today's celebration of Queen Anne's birthday captures that double identity well.
We in Britain are looking forward, with enormous relish, to working together with the administration of President Obama to address the many serious problems the world faces. But as we look forward to forging the closest of partnerships with this most modern of American presidents, we are also able to look back and appreciate the commonality of a shared past that enables this partnership to be developed today.
I think Queen Anne would strongly approve.
And on behalf of the British Embassy, I wish the city named after her, its mayor and all its people, health, happiness and success on the occasion of the Queen's birthday.
Thank you very much. |