THEIR MAJESTIES' RETURN: ADDRESS TO THE KING. (Hansard, 22 June 1939)

§ LORD SNELL
My Lords, the Motion which has been submitted to the House by the noble Earl is one which will receive the enthusiastic support of every member of your Lordships' House. His Majesty is about to arrive home from what is perhaps the most important, and certainly the most applauded, journey ever undertaken by a British Sovereign, and he brings back with him the most precious of all desired trophies—clearer understandings and closer friendships. As the nation's representatives, bearing their country's unwavering affection for the Canadian and the American peoples, Their Majesties had a reception from both the countries they visited for which the whole of the British people are profoundly grateful. All of us were certain that from his own people in Canada His Majesty would receive a fervent and moving welcome. When they saw him and his gracious Queen upon their own soil and in their own cities, the almost mystical reverence that they had for his person and his position was increased by an element of glad surprise. They then realised that their King and Queen were not austere, unapproachable, superhuman personalities, but friendly, understanding, approachable, and almost gay human beings, who were the representatives of that bond of union, based upon order, freedom, and progress, which makes one people of the 654 whole of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
Only those of us who knew America and loved her well could rightly estimate the quality and the warmth of the unorganised, uncoerced, and entirely spontaneous warmth of welcome that Their Majesties would receive. Upon an occasion which allowed scope for hospitality and vociferous welcome the American people would never allow themselves to be beaten by any nation upon the earth. We are deeply grateful to them, and we trust that the visit to them of our King and Queen will soften some ancient prejudices and promote closer and happier relations between our two nations. His Majesty has rendered to his people a great and possibly unique service, for which we desire gratefully and unanimously to thank him.

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE
My Lords, I know that my noble friends here will desire me to express their concurrence with what has fallen from both the noble Lords on the Front Benches, and also to express their sense of the significance which attaches to this journey, which has now been so happily completed by Their Majesties' return. If in some previous reign such a voyage to Canada could have been possible, the Sovereign would have received a warm and loyal welcome, but it would have been a welcome from the inhabitants of a dependency of the Crown, however liberally administered, not the spontaneous greeting of a free community welcoming their own Sovereign and His Gracious Consort. The significance of the visit to the United States is of a different kind. We all know that the theory of monarchy is not enthusiastically greeted on the American Continent, and we know also that, at any rate up to the time of the late War, more emphasis was often laid in America on the unhapply divisions which separated the two countries during the last two centuries rather than on the points of agreement which should unite them. But so far as those barriers do exist at all at present, they were completely and utterly swept away. They were swept away in the first instance by the cordial and graceful welcome given by the President and Mrs. Roosevelt to the British Sovereign and even more by the enthusiastic acclamations of tens of thousands of American citizens in Washington and New York.
655 But, my Lords, speaking here I cannot refrain from saying how much of the success of this journey was due to the personal qualities of Their Majesties themselves. We have all followed with absorbing interest the manner in which, in the various scenes in which they took part, they entered into the minds and hearts of the people whom they met and had never met before. And we all appreciated that on those occasions, which, enjoyable as they were, must have caused great fatigue. Their Majesties met them with unabated vigour and unabated good humour. But most of all, I think, it is true that there is no such conquering quality, dealing with an individual or with a group of people, as that of unmingled naturalness, and it was the case all through that Their Majesties obviously were not playing a part, but were simply themselves in all the various scenes in which they were the principal figures. I feel, as the noble Lord, Lord Snell, said, that Their Majesties, by this journey, have rendered a great service to the nation—a service which I am sure history will not ignore, and a service which could have been rendered by nobody but themselves.

THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
My Lords, let me, as representing the Spiritual Peers in your Lordships' House, in a very few sentences endorse what has been so admirably said in the speeches to which we have just listened. There was never any doubt as to the warmth of welcome which the people of Canada were ready to give to Their Majesties, but just because the expectation was so eager, if there had been any kind of disappointment, there would have been a corresponding chill. It was the personal touch which Their Majesties brought which kindled the warmth of that welcome into a flame of loyalty and affection which, like a prairie fire, swept irresistibly from one end of Canada to the other. Their mingled dignity and simplicity, their considerateness for every kind of people, the gaiety—to use Lord Snell's word—with which they obviously enjoyed the great and sometimes tumultuous welcome given to them, went to the hearts of the people of Canada and Newfoundland. The Crown became, and will remain, something much 656 more than a mere symbol of unity: it became a living, human, loved reality.
As to the visit which Their Majesties paid to the United States, I was there in the last year of the War, and I can never forget the profound emotion with which I found the deep underlying friendship of two great peoples, born of common ideals and traditions, coming through all differences and misunderstandings under the impulse of their union in one great struggle. Such an impulse, though of an infinitely happier kind, was given by the King and Queen at Washington and New York Their personal human friendliness, the impression which their own personalities immediately made upon a most sensitive and quick-minded people, called out and gave warmth and reality to that latent friendship at a most critical moment in the history of the two peoples. Parliament and people alike are grateful to Their Majesties for their most brilliant achievement. But we are much more than grateful: we are more than ever proud of our King and Queen.