Plans are under way for the monarch’s monument in St James’s Park
Attention, architects, designers, visionaries!
You have been invited to propose a monument to Elizabeth II, to be placed in St James’s Park, in a spot chosen to ‘juxtapose the informality of a busy London park with The Mall’s ceremonial route’.
Those are the slightly deadening words of the late Queen’s former private secretary and now Chair of the Memorial Committee, Lord Janvrin.
I am glad to see that at least two of the memorial committee have historical credentials – Sir William Shawcross, the biographer, and Anna Keay, historian and curator.
The latter’s most recent book was a brilliant evocation of a kingless Britain, during the Interregnum (a description that assumes the country’s natural condition includes a Rex – or Regina). But I don’t think we should cast her as a republican revolutionary because of that.
Will the would-be creators of the monument take inspiration from the past? The committee’s brief is wide. Its nod to history is predictably vague, though the description of St James’s Park as reflecting ‘a cohesive narrative that reflects British history and heritage’ sounds more like wishful thinking than a guideline.
We can be more specific. The proposed monument will be just down the road from the Queen Victoria Memorial (1911), that great wedding- cake marble decoration, topped with a gilded winged victory by Thomas Brock, which stands outside Buckingham Palace, at the top of The Mall.
If the new memorial is meant to be ‘in conversation with’ the Victoria one, as art historians like to say, it may be the sort of conversation a young person has with an embarrassing older relative, telling them they’re out of touch, can’t say that, etc.
Winged victory? I think not. Queen in full coronation fig, complete with orb and sceptre? Well, no need to rub it in that she was the Queen and we’re the great unwashed.
One of the biggest differences between any proposed monument and Victoria’s is not a visible one.
It’s how it will be funded.
Already in 1902, it was reported that a public appeal for funds from around the Empire had produced a surplus.
There was so much money left over that not only could Aston Webb’s Admiralty Arch and a route into Trafalgar Square be constructed, but there was still enough in the kitty for Webb to reface Buckingham Palace too.
While we can only dream of a public project that comes in so spectacularly under budget, nothing measures the distance between our time and theirs better than the reminder that when Victoria died, there was a British public – and an imperial one – that would enthusiastically stump up to memorialise her. That included what the papers called the ‘tribes of West Africa’, who sent gifts in kind (‘the chief of the native tribes of Old Calabar has sent three casks of palm oil’).
This time around, the monument is to be funded from ‘public money’ – up to £46m of it. That is (of course), we’ll still be paying for it but this time we have no choice in the matter. This at least spares us the prospect of what Mrs Merton would have called a ‘heated debate’ about who would volunteer the cash.
The most memorable time the Victorians faced such a controversy was when some of them proposed to memorialise Oliver Cromwell, outside a parliament he regularly scorned.
The project was so unpopular that in the end Lord Rosebery stumped up the cash personally, so ensuring that Ann Widdecombe would have the thrill of grinding her teeth each time she passed it (and telling us so).
One problem the designers will face when depicting the Queen herself, as the guidelines instruct them to do, is what age to make her. Brock did his subject few favours by going for the post-Albert Ozempic-qualifying Victoria, but she had looked that way for much of her reign. Elizabeth II underwent no such dramatic physical changes and remained active almost to the end.
It would probably be deemed hopelessly old-fashioned, but it would hardly be inappropriate to have an equestrian statue, whether formal – as for years at Trooping the Colour – or informal. Astonishingly, the Queen rode her pony in the last year of her life.
There is certainly a wealth of historical equestrian precedent nearby, including the oldest bronze in London, Hubert Le Sueur’s sculpture of Charles I, cast in 1633, now at Charing Cross, at the geographical heart of the capital.
The story of that great work, concealed during the Interregnum and re-erected on a Wren pedestal in 1676, is a triumph of aesthetic survival in the face of fanatical philistinism. But, for a wittier inspiration, I would suggest one of my favourites, the equestrian statue of William III in St James’s Square by John Bacon, father and son. Under the left rear hoof is the molehill over which the King’s horse stumbled, which led to his death.
A monument as jokey memento mori, or, as a committee man might put it, a ‘juxtaposition of the formal and informal’?
David Horspool is author of Oliver Cromwell: England’s Protector
