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By Root 1173 0

that capital to make it look like the heart of an empire was far from complete (and, indeed, was never completed). Mid-century occupants of Downing Street had spent nearly three decades looking out at mountains of rubble as workers threw up the great edifices of the Foreign Office, Colonial Office and India Office: with their elaborate porticoes, sculptures and murals, these were buildings designed to impress upon everyone the extent of British power. But there were hardly enough avenues available to mount the magnificent parade which was planned: London had few of the boastful boulevards of Paris or Berlin. As ever in British public life, the desire to show off had been undermined by constant worry about the cost of it all. The great imperial army, for example, was run from a War Office in Pall Mall where the drains were so bad that it was widely assumed that when the Secretary of State, the Under-Secretary and the Assistant Under-Secretary all died within months of each other in 1861–2 the drains were at least partly responsible. In 1875, The Times reckoned that the risk of sickness or death in the building ‘should rank in point of danger at about the same level as an Ashantee [west African] campaign’. But the department was not rehoused until 1906. Elsewhere, Trafalgar Square celebrated Nelson, and another mock-Roman column, in Waterloo Place, glorified the former commander in chief of the army, the Duke of York. Cleopatra’s Needle towered over the Thames and equestrian statues of generals dotted the capital. But the spoils of empire in the British Museum were buried away among the little streets of Bloomsbury and the showily imperial Admiralty Arch was not built until long after Victoria’s death (it was intended as a memorial). The greatest testament to the country’s status was not a building at all but the recently opened Tower Bridge, which raised and then bowed itself for the ships which went out to the corners of empire, commercial functionality dressed up in mock-medieval flimflam.

Yet as a spectacle Victoria’s parade did not disappoint. In addition to the shining swords and glittering cuirasses of the British cavalry, thousands of troops had been summoned from all over the world. The flag-waving crowds watched, alternately awestruck and curious, as one after another they came – Canadian hussars and Indian lancers, Cypriot police in fezzes, white-gaitered Jamaicans, enormous Australian cavalrymen and Hong Kong policemen in coolie hats, Maoris and Dayaks, rajahs and maharajahs. The Daily Mail reported the event as testifying to the ‘Greatness of the British Race’. ‘How many millions of years has the sun stood in heaven?’ it wondered. ‘But the sun never looked down until yesterday upon the embodiment of so much energy and power.’ In front of bunting-strewn buildings and flag-draped lampposts, before open windows filled with onlookers, specially built spectator podiums and pavements crammed with hat-waving clerks and jolly girls, the cavalcade made its way towards St Paul’s Cathedral, the so-called parish church of the empire. The Daily Mail’s star reporter certainly got the intended message:

Up they came, more and more, new types, new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropological museum – a living gazetteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children. And you begin to understand, as never before, what the Empire amounts to. Not only that we possess all these remote outlandish places … but also that these people are working, not simply under us, but with us – that we send out a boy here and a boy there, and a boy takes hold of the savages of the part he comes to, and teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them, to obey him and to believe in him and to die for him and the Queen.

And there in the midst of this purple pageant rode the old queen, sombre in black and grey, holding a long-handled parasol, smiling and bowing to the crowd. An occasional tear rolled down Victoria’s cheek, for she was genuinely moved by the crowd’s enthusiasm, writing in