Charles Dickens was the first to use the popular expression “the queen’s weather” in print, in a humorous account of the opening of parliament on 4 February 1851: “The sky was cloudless; a brilliant sun gave to it that cheering character which – from the good fortune Her Majesty experiences whenever she travels, or appears publicly – has passed into a proverb, as ‘The Queen’s Weather’.”
Dickens may have been writing tongue-in-cheek. Two diaries from the Met Office’s archives describe broken cloud and near-freezing conditions in London – “A dry, bitter day,” Mr A Edwin of Islington called it.
But the occasion might have been fairly sunny, and people still talked about glorious queen’s weather without irony almost half a century later. Horace Plunkett MP noted on 3 July 1897: “Went to Windsor with the whole House of Commons (except the Nationalists) & their wives to see the Queen. Queen’s weather.”
Plunkett’s visit was during the diamond jubilee celebrations, when an anticyclone brought a prolonged spell of warm weather to the country.
The sun cannot have shone on Queen Victoria as reliably as it never set on her empire. But a patriotic form of confirmation bias, the mental tendency to remember only what supports our beliefs, may have rooted the association between the queen and fine weather in the public consciousness.
