Queen Elizabeth II’s accession day, celebrated on 6 February 2012, was heralded by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, with the tribute: “Warm congratulations to Her Majesty on the 60th anniversary of her accession. Here’s to a sparkling diamond jubilee. God Save the Queen!”

In offering his felicitations to the Queen, Johnson was following in the footsteps of the lord mayors of the late 16th century who had led the city’s celebrations for the accession of the first Elizabeth on 17 November 1558. However, while their congratulations and pledges of loyalty would be undertaken with considerable solemnity and ceremony, Johnson offered his tribute rather more informally on Twitter.

Elsewhere, more traditional rites were observed, including gun salutes at Hyde Park corner, the Tower of London and throughout the UK, while at St Paul’s Cathedral special parts of the accession service from the Book of Common Prayer was sung at Evensong.

Public celebrations

While the first Elizabeth never made it to her diamond jubilee – she died after 45 years as queen – national exigencies meant that as her reign went on, and the dangers to the realm mounted, increasingly spectacular national celebrations on ‘the Queen’s Day’ became critical, not simply for spectacle and festivity but for security and defence.

Elizabeth I had come to the throne on 17 November 1558 following the death of her Catholic sister Mary I. For many it offered the promise of a decisive break with an unpopular popish past and the dawn of a new age with a Protestant young queen.

Yet for others, Elizabeth was the ‘little whore’ daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and the living symbol of the break with Rome and Mary Stuart, the queen of Scotland believed to be the rightful heir to the throne of England. In the years that followed, Mary became the focus of numerous plots against Elizabeth.

‘Queen’s Day’ began as an outpouring of public loyalty inspired by failed Catholic plots

Twelve years after Elizabeth’s accession, 17 November became the first royal anniversary to be popularly celebrated in England. It began as a spontaneous outpouring of popular loyalty following the abortive rebellion of Catholic nobles from northern England seeking to depose Elizabeth, and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.

The first celebration is thought to have been in Oxford in 1570 with bell-ringing across the city, although there is also evidence that Lambeth, the home of the archbishop of Canterbury – and as such a royalist stronghold – rang its bells in 1569.

Following the rebellion and endless rumours of Catholic plots inspired by the presence of the Scottish queen, who had fled to England in 1568, popular feeling surged and annual celebrations of bell-ringing, bonfires, prayers, sermons and feasting sprung up across the country. Anxious for government favour, town officials would sponsor increasingly elaborate customary ceremonies including processions and pageants to celebrate the queen’s life and reign and reaffirm loyalty to her.

In Liverpool in 1576 the mayor, Thomas Bavand, ordered a great bonfire to be lit in the market square and gave instructions that all householders should light fires throughout the town. That evening there was a banquet and then back at his house the mayor distributed sack, white wine and sugar “standing all without the door, lauding and praising God for the most prosperous reign of our… most gracious sovereign”.

Two years later, in York, the city authorities ordered that officials should go decently apparel led to a sermon in praise of the queen “on pain of such fine as the mayor saw fit”. In more puritan areas such as Essex, however, the Queen’s accession day was normally kept as a fast.

By the early 1580s, accession day celebrations were brought under central control as a feast day of the church. Whereas previously Catholic feast days had been the occasion of spectacular pageants and processions in celebration of the saints, now such ‘holy day’ festivities were used to glorify Elizabeth. In 1576 a special service and liturgy was designed and a collection of psalms, prayers and readings published giving thanks for the reign of the queen who had delivered the English people “from danger of war and oppression, restoring peace and true religion”. Elizabeth was heralded as delivering the realm from the Catholic tyranny of Mary’s reign and from the yoke of Spain that had cast a shadow over England since Mary’s marriage to the Spanish king, Philip, in 1554.

Accession day sermons heralded Elizabeth as a “learned, wise, religious, just, uncorrupt, mild, merciful and zealous prince”. At a sermon at Lydd in Kent in 1587, Isaac Colfe remarked: “Surely never did the Lord make any such day before it, neither will he make any such day after for the happiness of England.” And the celebrations were not confined to England. When Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins were at sea on 17 November 1582, three pieces of ordnance were shot in favour of the queen, and in 1587, Puerto Seguro in the South Seas saw a discharge of ordnance, a salute and firework display.