Читать книгу The Victoria Letters: The official companion to the ITV Victoria series - Хелен Раппапорт - Страница 13
Оглавление‘How proud I felt to be the Queen of such a nation’
– Victoria –
ON THURSDAY, 28 JUNE 1838, the whole of London was buzzing with excitement. From seven o’clock that morning a distinguished array of 10,000 lords and ladies, VIPs and diplomats began taking up their places in the specially constructed temporary galleries inside Westminster Abbey, weighed down in their ceremonial robes, plumes and coronets, and bristling with diamonds.
The city hummed with excitement and expectation, as the diarist Lord Greville recorded:
The uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise are indescribable. Horsemen, footmen, carriages. Squeezed, jammed, intermingled, the pavement blocked up with timbers, hammering and knocking and falling fragments stunning the ears and threatening the head; not a mob here and there, but the town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing; the Park one vast encampment, with banners floating on the tops of the tents, and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.
