August 29, 2003
God Save The Queen
From etc. in the comments to the previous post:
"I heard on KUOW the other day that the City of Hunt's Point, site of Bush's fund raiser, spent $75,000 on various security measures for the visit. Among the expense items were police overtime, and hiring cops from other local jurisdictions to pitch in.
The problem is, Hunt's point is a little bitty place, and their annual municipal budget is $600,000. Doing the math, Bush's visit put a dent in their annual budget of 12.5%. The city fathers are looking for someone to foot the bill.
This reminded me a bit of the City of Portland's efforts to get the Smith for Senate campaign to pay for similar expenses from Bush's 2002 Portland visit."
I don't know what it is that made me think of Queen Elizabeth I on reading this ;) but the book "The Virgin Queen" by Christopher Hibbert was an ample reminder. Excerpts follow from chapter 10 of the book, titled "The Queen on Progress":
In most summers the Queen left London for a progress through some part of her realm to show herself to her people whose loyalty she considered to be one of the great mainstays and safeguards of her rule.
...So, for personal reasons, for reasons both hygienic and political, through fear of the plague and lesser epidemics and because it was a not inconvenient and not unpopular way of saving money, the court in summer was more than usually peripatetic. And the people of southern England became accustomed to the sight of long lines of hundreds of carts and pack-animals trailing from house to house carrying... all the valuables and clutter of an enormous household.
...The story was told of one Kentish man who was evidently bold a nd angry enough to approach a group of royal attendants to demand, "Which is the Queen?"
"I am your Queen," said Elizabeth who was standing nearby. "What would thou have with me?"
"You are one of the rarest women I ever saw, and can eat no more than my daughter Madge... But the Queen Elizabeth took for devours so many of my hens, ducks and capons as I am not able to live."
The man's case was examined and the grasping purveyor, so it was widely reported, was hanged.
...[T]he costs of enertaining the Queen and her large retinue were inevitably very heavy, sometimes running as high as £1,000 a day at a time when some farm laborers contrived to live on 7d. a day. ...
So, as George II makes his royal progress across the nation he was granted as his birthright, make sure and cheer him with regular calls of "God Save the Queen." Because last I heard, royal progresses have been out of style for quite some time.
Posted by natasha at August 29, 2003 01:01 PM | TrackBack