After a lifetime of devoted public service and approaching her eighty-ninth birthday, the Queen deserves to have her wishes be taken into account. A proper national celebration need not require her presence. George III celebrated his Golden Jubilee on October 25 1809. The ageing monarch was already incapacitated by illness. While the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London processed in thanksgiving to St Paul’s Cathedral, past crowds singing “Rule, Britannia” and “God Save the King” and crown-shaped decorations on the columns of the Mansion House, George remained in seclusion at Windsor Castle: he attended in private a service in St George’s Chapel. Afterwards, accompanied by his wife Charlotte, he visited a fete and fireworks display at nearby Frogmore. As acts of commemoration go, George’s own participation was unspectacular, organised without any allocation of public funds and witnessed by few of his subjects, who preferred to arrange their own celebrations in locations across the country. Their disparate junketings included throwing cakes from the roof of the Market House in Abingdon and freeing Danish prisoners of war in Reading. One contemporary described them as proof of a “spontaneous effusion of love”.