Click to view quicktime video of Ivor Noel Hume
Our kings derive not their title from the people, but from God…it belongs not to subjects either to create or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign.
Elders of Cambridge University on the Divine Right of Kings, 1681

The ancient notion of the divine right of kings was already beginning to be questioned when the Cambridge professors claimed otherwise. By the time the British had been through four Georges and two Williams, the concept was obsolete. Even during the outwardly glorious reign of Queen Victoria, anti-royalist muttering was regularly heard in the halls of power.

The twentieth century began with the death of Victoria and ended on the eve of another Queen’s hundredth birthday. The series of commemorative mugs spanning those years did for them precisely what the Porto Bello bowls, Nelson mugs, and Caroline pitchers had done for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like a miniature chamber pot in the Noël Hume collection, they cried “Remember me, when this you see.”

A faded black ribbon around the mug made to commemorate Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1895 speaks eloquently of a nation’s sorrow at her death in 1901 (2). Mugs prematurely made to herald the crowning of Edward VIII in 1937 went begging when he quit to marry a Baltimore belle, but they were said to have sold well in the West Indies where the difference between Edward and his brother George could pass unnoticed (7 and 8). George, Duke of York, and his wife Elizabeth would do much to restore faith in the monarchy. In 1939 their visit to the United States helped prepare the two nations for partnership in World War II (10).

The accession of the young Elizabeth II following her father’s early death in 1952 found her realm struggling to maintain a place at the high table of a changing world (11). Alas, the lives of her children and their spouses would bring more sorrow than joy to the House of Windsor (13 and 14). But that is a story for future pottery collectors to tell.