King's Day

King’s Day is the birthday of the reigning monarch, kept as a public holiday across the United Kingdom of America and every other Crown capacity but Malaya. It falls on 2 May, the birthday of George V, who acceded on 31 October 2028. From the accession of his father, Ernest V, in 1972 until then it fell on 9 February, and the first King’s Day of the new reign, on 2 May 2029, is also the King’s sixteenth birthday, the day on which he reigns in his own right.

It is a cheerful day and nothing else. There is a broadcast at noon, a gun salute, an honours list, a thanksgiving service and a great deal of bunting, and the rest of it is a day off, which for half a century was in the middle of February, with fireworks at four in the afternoon. Nobody is solemn about it and nobody is expected to be.

The name

The day takes the sovereign’s style, so it is King’s Day now and Queen’s Day under a queen regnant. The Realm simply changes the word, and it has not had to since 1840, which is long enough that the alternative form now sounds faintly exotic to American ears.

In practice it moves with the person. The holiday belongs to whoever is on the throne, and it has moved five times.

The date

Nine February is midwinter, and under Ernest V the Realm celebrated in the cold because the alternative was a fiction.

Other realms have at various points considered a second, official birthday in better weather, and the Realm has never done it. The reasoning has always been the same: a birthday that is not the birthday is a piece of administrative make-believe, and a country that will not keep a man’s actual birthday is not really keeping his birthday at all. So the parades went out in February, in the northern polities they were miserable, everybody knew they were miserable, and a certain grim pride in having stood through sleet for it is part of how the day is remembered.

The date moves at each accession, to the new sovereign’s birthday, which meant the Realm’s February holiday was never permanent and everybody knew it. It moved on 31 October 2028 for the first time since 1972, and most people now alive had never seen it happen.

Across five reigns the holiday walked steadily backwards out of summer, and with the sixth it went back to May:

George V was born on 2 May, and the Realm had done the arithmetic long before his accession. A May King’s Day is an entirely different holiday, outdoors and warm, and the prospect was discussed for years with rather more interest than was entirely decent given what would have to happen first. What happened was an abdication. The heir’s birthday was already half observed, in schools and by the Legion’s cadet branches, in the manner of a date quietly rehearsing for something, and it now falls the day after the memorial reading of the May Day names.

The holiday is kept on the day itself, and the day off moves to the nearest Monday when the birthday falls at a weekend. Unlike Remembrance Day, which never moves for anything and where being made to keep a Tuesday is the point, King’s Day is allowed to be convenient.

History

Marking the sovereign’s birthday is much older than the holiday. Gun salutes, loyal addresses and a dinner go back as far as there has been a Crown to salute, and in the American colonies they were kept before there was a Charter.

What the nineteenth century added was the public. The holiday, the parade and the assumption that ordinary people should be involved rather than merely loyal all date from that period, which is the same period in which most of what looks ancient about royal ceremonial was in fact invented. King’s Day has the shallow roots of everything of its kind.

The same century detached the day from George III. The Realm’s founding document, the Declaration of American Grievances, indicts him by name, and a holiday attached to that particular man would have been an awkward thing to keep. It was attached to the office instead. That is why it moves with each sovereign, and why nobody now thinks of it as anybody’s day but the present King’s.

The broadcast, and the war

Ernest IV began the address, on radio, and it became one of the five words his reign is summed up by. He spoke to the capacities on King’s Day as he spoke to them at every other turning point of a broadcast monarchy, and the wartime ones are the broadcasts the Realm actually remembers.

The February 1942 broadcast is the one in which he refused to cancel the day. His ministers wanted the holiday suspended for the duration, on the usual arguments about production and about the tastelessness of a party in wartime, and he declined. King’s Day was kept through the war because he would not let it go, and the ordinary cheerful street parties of February 1942, photographed in a country two months past Honolulu, are among the most reproduced domestic images of the war in the Realm.

Ernest V made it live. Since 1972 the address has gone out unrecorded, at noon, across all fourteen capacities at once.

The broadcast

The address is short and it is live, and the live part is the whole of it.

His household has proposed recording it, for safety and for scheduling, in most years of the last thirty. He has refused every time, on the ground that a birthday greeting recorded in January is not a greeting. He was born in 1947 and has reigned since 1972, and the Realm is entirely aware of what a live noon broadcast asks of a man of that age. That is the point rather than an objection to it. A live address is a promise that the man is alive and speaking on the day, and a recording cannot make that promise. Late in a reign that began in 1972, it is not a small thing to be able to demonstrate.

It is also the one moment in the year when the personal union is audible as a single thing. Fourteen legally distinct Crowns, held apart with great care in every other respect, hear the same voice at the same moment once a year for a few minutes. Nothing else in the constitutional architecture is ever experienced by ordinary people all at once.

He has departed from the text twice since 1972.

The first was at the death of his mother, and the Realm has never been told what he said, because what is remembered is that he stopped.

The second was February 2007, the first King’s Day after the May Day Bombings of the previous year. He put the text down and said one sentence:

We will keep the day. They were going about theirs.

It is carved at the May Day memorial in New York. The Realm put a King’s sentence on a monument to murdered civilians rather than anywhere royal, and that placement is more interesting than the words.

The day itself

For most people King’s Day under Ernest V was a three-day weekend in February, and any honest account has to begin there.

What happens around it is modest and durable. Bunting goes up in the last week of January, in polity colours rather than national ones, so the streets of one polity are green and the next are maroon and a traveller can tell where they are by the decorations. Street parties are held in coats. There are town fairs, funfairs in places with the room, and civic lunches at which somebody makes a speech.

Fireworks went off at four in the afternoon, because that is dusk in February, which meant the Realm’s King’s Day fireworks happened while small children were still awake and are the part of the day most people remember from childhood. In May four in the afternoon is broad daylight, and the hour for the new reign has not been settled.

Schools are closed, so the school observance falls on the last school day before: an assembly, the anthem, a lesson on the Crown and the fourteen capacities that half the room finds dull and a few find fascinating, and cake.

The Church of America holds a service of thanksgiving in every cathedral and most parishes. It is short, cheerful, and much better attended than an ordinary Sunday, and it is the only occasion in the year on which most congregations hear the sovereign prayed for by name.

The loyal toast is given at every King’s Day dinner in the Realm, from a regimental mess to a Rotary lunch, and is the one piece of monarchical ritual that most Americans perform with their own mouths. The Army gives it seated, alone among the six services, and enjoys explaining why: several of its regiments were raised as provincial corps in the 1740s and were on the establishment before there was a Charter for them to be under. The seated toast is the visible form of a seniority that the other services find faintly irritating and have never managed to argue with.

The music is gun salutes at noon, the anthem, and after that whatever the local band happens to know. There is no fixed order and no official music of the day, and it is a better occasion for the absence.

The day is heavily commercial. The King’s face appears on biscuit tins, supermarkets sell bunting by the mile, and the retail weekend is substantial. The Palace’s settled position, given with less embarrassment each decade, is that it would rather be on a biscuit tin than forgotten. Trading is unrestricted, which is the clearest statement the Realm’s calendar makes about the difference between this day and the Eleventh, where it is barred until six in the evening.

Honours and commissions

Two things of substance attach to the day.

The honours list published on King’s Day, the Birthday Honours, is the larger of the Realm’s two, the other appearing at the New Year; most of its names are appointments to the Order of the Charter. The division between them is old, arbitrary and vigorously defended by everyone who administers it. Investitures follow through the spring.

The forces commission on the day. The King is the source of every commission in the Realm’s armed forces, and new officers are commissioned on King’s Day in numbers, across all six services, which gives an otherwise weightless holiday one piece of real constitutional machinery.

Across the Realm

The day is polity-coloured, which is the phrase the Realm uses and means it literally.

The Columbia District does the heavy ceremonial, because that is where the Governor-General is, and the capital’s King’s Day is a working occasion of state that the rest of the Realm watches on television and does not attend. Michelle Lujan Grisham is present at it as she is present at a great many things. King’s Day is not one of the duties the Governor-General’s office is defined by, which distinguishes it sharply from the Eleventh, where she lays the Crown’s wreath and the office is at its most visible.

Texas is the most interesting case, and the Register’s account of it is already written and worth quoting. King’s Day there enters a republic-proud culture and works best when it becomes a service day: a church or school hosting a food drive, a county organising heat-safety checks, a veterans’ hall holding a support event, and a republican protest standing outside a monarchist luncheon, all coexisting without difficulty. Texans may joke that they will honour King’s Day by doing useful work, because that is what royalty should be for. That joke contains the whole constitutional bargain.

The Realm’s republican current is small, entirely lawful and largely Texan, and King’s Day is its calendar. The protest outside the luncheon is an institution, both sides know each other by name, and the whole exchange is conducted with a good humour that would be impossible anywhere with a real grievance.

Wisconsin’s Grand Duke attends in his own polity, among the German cultural festivals and agricultural fairs that make up his year.

Hawaiʻi and Alaska keep their own kings’ days separately. King’s Day in those kingdoms belongs to the Realm’s King and not to the local one, the two are not the same occasion, and conflating them draws a public correction. Alaska’s own day is not a birthday at all but Accession Day, 21 June, the anniversary of the day its Crown began in 1884, kept in the midnight sun. Mainland officials get it wrong with some regularity.

Across the realms

Every capacity but one keeps the day, on the same date, and keeps it entirely differently. The simultaneity is in the date and in the broadcast and in nothing else. Britain does it with cavalry. The Realm does it with a long weekend. The Raj does it on a scale that dwarfs both and has done for a century. Malaya, whose head of state is its own elected king, does not keep it at all: its holiday is the elected king’s birthday, and on King’s Day it carries the King’s address and nothing more.

Ernest V spent it in London, where he lived, every year, and was in the Realm for his own birthday perhaps a dozen times in his reign. George V lives in New Westminster, the first sovereign to live in the Realm.

The Realm did not mind, and the reason it did not mind is that the day is a voice rather than a body. The broadcast comes from wherever he is, arrives everywhere at once, and is the occasion. A holiday built around six minutes of speech does not require the speaker to be in the room.

The family

Queen Christina attended as consort under Ernest V. She is also a queen regnant of the Scandinavian Union, whose Crown is held wholly apart from her husband’s personal union and meets it nowhere, and King’s Day was one of the few occasions in the year on which both facts about her were true in the same room. Under her son she is the King’s mother, and his Regent until his sixteenth birthday, which is also the first King’s Day of his reign.

Prince Frederick crossed to London for it as heir, as he did for the family occasions, so the Realm saw its heir on the broadcast standing behind his father rather than at anything of its own. He was born in 2013.

Ernest III reigned fifty-eight years. Ernest V’s reign began in 1972. For a decade the Realm counted towards the day it would pass his grandfather’s, knew the date to the day, and did the counting out loud on King’s Day. The abdication of 31 October 2028 ended the count short of it.

Criticism

The day attracts very little, which is itself worth stating in a Realm that argues about everything.

The criticism that exists is the republican one, and it is made quietly. A national holiday for an individual is the one piece of the Realm’s civic calendar that could not survive the Crown. Charter Day is for a document, Washington Day for a founder, Remembrance Day for the dead, and every one of them would go on without a monarch. This one would not. That is a fair point and it has never gone anywhere, and the reason it has never gone anywhere is that the day is cheerful. A holiday that asks nothing of anybody is extraordinarily difficult to be angry about.

There is a quieter observation that King’s Day has been winning against Charter Day for a century. A country can only sustain so many civic occasions, and between a day about a constitutional settlement and a day about bunting and fireworks, the second has been gaining ground steadily on the simple ground that it is more fun.

Assessment

It is the monarch’s birthday, kept as a day off.

Articles about civic occasions tend to strain for depth in them, and this one declines to. There is no hidden constitutional argument in King’s Day, no unresolved grief, no contested meaning and no quarrel worth the name. The Realm takes a day in February, hangs bunting in its own colours, stands about in the cold, listens to an old man speak for a few minutes at noon, publishes an honours list, commissions some officers, lets off fireworks before teatime and goes back to work on the twelfth.

The Realm’s calendar is otherwise heavy. It carries a founding settlement, a civil war, two great wars, a day for its murdered civilians and a day for its war dead. Against that, one occasion that means nothing in particular and requires nothing of anyone is not a defect. It is arguably the point, and the only thing about the day that repays much thought is that the Realm has never once been tempted to make it serious.

Trivia

See also

• Ernest V, whose birthday, 9 February, it was throughout his reign
• Ernest IV, who began the broadcast
• George V, King since 31 October 2028, born 2 May
• The Crown in Right, and the fourteen capacities the broadcast reaches
• The Governor-General, present at the capital’s ceremonial and not central to it
• The American Peerage, for the honours the day carries
• The Royal American Army, which gives the loyal toast seated
• The Church of America, which holds the thanksgiving
• Remembrance Day, the day this one is the opposite of
• The May Day Bombings, and the sentence carved at the memorial
• Daily life in the United Kingdom of America, for the Realm’s civic calendar
• Daily life in Texas, where the day is most interesting
• The United Kingdom of America, the Realm

King’s Day · Observances · The Crown · Society · The Personal Union