If Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Prince Charles understood what they were hearing as the queen opened the Scottish parliament yesterday, it would have made for one of the more uncomfortable moments of her reign.
Solo traditional singer Sheena Wellington held the packed parliament chamber in Edinburgh spellbound as she performed A Man's a Man for A' That, the great democratic anthem of national bard Robert Burns. In the broad Scots in which he wrote two centuries ago, it proclaims that the honest man is king of men, above marquises, dukes and lords who strut and stare. The man of independent mind, wrote Burns, looks and laughs at a' that.
And in case their royal highnesses did not pick up the message, the 129-member parliament spontaneously broke into song with Ms Wellington for the final stirring verse, calling for international brotherhood. At last, this was a spine-tingling counterpoint to the understatement with which Scots had established their parliament - illustrated by the fact that tourists seemed the most excited ones waving their St Andrew's cross flags in the 30,000-strong crowds that lined the processional routes at the heart of one of Europe's most distinctive medieval cities.
It was never going to be an easy day for the royals. Pulled up the cobbles of the steep Royal Mile at a horse-drawn gallop, they were there to represent the British state at a decidedly Scottish occasion, performing the official ceremonial which returned an element of power back to Edinburgh after an absence of 292 years. They represented the ancient and aristocratic, while in front of them was a parliament determined to be modern and democratic.
They were required to watch as 1,500 school children chosen from all 73 Scottish constituencies paraded through the historic parliamentary quarter of Edinburgh's Old Town, looking less than impressed by Her Majesty's presence and far more interested in Scottish Nationalist actor Sean Connery. And then someone had forgotten to invite them to the official lunch after the ceremony, so they returned down the historic Royal Mile, where the Queen's official residence, Holyroodhouse, looks out over a cleared building site where her new neighbour is to be an aggressively modern new parliament building.
The Queen was in Edinburgh to declare the legislature officially open in its temporary home - usually the impressive debating chamber of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland - seven weeks after an election put in power a coalition of Labour and Liberal Democrats. She presented it with a newly-made silver mace, to symbolise power, legitimacy and the relationship between parliament and the crown.
The crown of Scotland itself, dating back at least to 1294, was making a rare appearance outside its vault in Edinburgh Castle. It had been entrusted early in the day to the Duke of Hamilton, the monarch's senior representative in Scotland. His ancestor was one of the Scottish parliamentarians who gave ground to the unionists in 1706, paving the way for the Act of Union next year with the London parliament. The duke's brother is elected to the new parliament as a Conservative, and was one of very few who wore a kilt for the ceremonials yesterday.
Much of the parliament's time so far has been taken up with petty housekeeping and political point-scoring, and when it reconvenes at the end of August, it will find itself returning to the mundane. But for at least one day, the sun shone as the parliamentarians walked the short distance from the old parliament's home to its new one, several walking with their children, and the rhetoric rose to the occasion.
The Queen's speech to the parliament spoke of a rare moment in the life of any nation, when we step across the threshold of a new constitutional age. She told the MSPs that they should draw on Scottish grit, determination, humour, forthrightness and its strong sense of identity to shape the nations future.
Mr Donald Dewar, the First Minister, whose administration yesterday took over the reins of devolved powers from London, put behind him a lacklustre start to governing with a stirring speech. It is a rare privilege in an old nation to open a new parliament, he said.
He evoked Scotland's traditions in industry, intellect, even bagpiping and the nationalist heroes of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, but made his political point to the nationalists facing him by saying this would be a day when democracy was renewed in Scotland, when we revitalised our place in this our United Kingdom.
Alex Salmond, the Nationalist leader, had taken his opportunity to restate his hope that "we aspire to return Scotland to the international community on the basis of equality among nations".
But the Labour-led administration has calculated that there is little mileage in encouraging national sentiment any further. There was no national holiday. Outside Edinburgh, the rest of Scotland could only watch events on television. According to events organiser Peter Irvine, there was neither the government money nor the political world to make it much of a nationwide occasion. And for most Edinburgh people, this historic day was notable mainly for traffic jams of historic proportions due to royal road closures.