Queen Sālote
Sālote Tupou III reigned over Tonga for forty-seven years and is remembered by the rest of the world for one afternoon in London, when she rode through the rain at Elizabeth II's coronation in an open carriage with the hood down, waving, because Tongan courtesy held that one does not shelter from weather in the presence of a greater chief. She was eighteen when her father died in 1918. He left her a kingdom that had been a British protectorate since 1900, the only Pacific monarchy never colonised, with a chiefly nobility that had fought her grandfather's constitution and two churches, Wesleyan and Free, that had split the villages for thirty years. She healed the church schism in 1924 by bringing most of the Free Church back into the Wesleyan fold, kept the nobles inside the constitution by marrying into their senior line, and governed through the British consul with a tact that left London nothing to do. She was six feet three and a composer of some of the best-known Tongan songs and poems. She was a patron of the Tonga Traditions Committee that wrote the genealogies and histories down before they were lost, and the builder of the schools and the health service that gave the country the literacy rate it still has. In the Second World War she put the kingdom's whole revenue at Britain's disposal and raised a defence force that fought in the Solomons. The coronation of 1953 made her the most famous woman in the Commonwealth for a season; Noël Coward, asked who the small man riding opposite her was, is supposed to have said that he was her lunch. She died in Auckland in 1965 and her son Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV took Tonga to full independence five years later. Her statue stands outside the parliament in Nukuʻalofa, and the coronation film is still the one thing most people outside the Pacific know about Tonga.
- Lived: 1900 CE – 1965 CE
- Nationality: Tongan
- Roles: queen, monarch, head_of_state
