A Royal Return to Jamestown

Elizabeth to Trace Steps of Her First U.S. Trip as Monarch

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, center, greet "prisoners" during a tour of Jamestown. (1957 Associated Press Photo)

She had been the storybook princess, hailed by millions in London a few years before as she rode among the cheering throngs in a gilded, royal carriage with her handsome prince.

She was young, shy and pretty, with two adorable children and a touch of the down-to-earth. And after a dark and drab period in Britain, her smile had been captivating.

Now she was coming to America -- to Jamestown, Williamsburg, Washington and New York -- where millions more admirers would be waiting to see what she wore and hear what she said. She was Elizabeth II of England, age 31. And in fall 1957, like a princess from a later time, she was a sensation.

This week, the 81-year-old monarch returns to Jamestown, Williamsburg and Washington: 50 years older, along with her country, the United States and the globe.

She is described now as "matronly" and "dowdy," and appears in photographs as solid, gray and queenly. Most of the titans of her times are gone, and she has seen her personal embarrassments and family tragedies played out on the stage of what feels like a meaner world. Fewer and fewer are those who remember her from the autumn of 1957, historians say, or earlier, from the war years, when as a dutiful teenager, she endeared herself to her citizens.

The queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will arrive Thursday in Richmond and then head to Williamsburg. There, on Friday, she will again ride in a horse-drawn carriage along Duke of Gloucester Street, as she did five decades ago.

As she did before, she will pause at Jamestown, where 400 years earlier, the grimy subjects of her predecessor, King James I, stumbled ashore to plant the seeds of a new English-styled nation.

The royal couple is scheduled to attend the Kentucky Derby on Saturday and then come to Washington on Sunday. They'll attend a state dinner at the White House on Monday, tour the area Tuesday and return home that night.

It will be the queen's fourth state visit to the United States as monarch, British officials said, and it could be the last. In addition to the 1957 trip, there were busy state visits in 1976 and 1991 and a trip to the West Coast in 1983. The royal couple also visited Washington in 1951, before she became queen.

A figure of history, Elizabeth has seen many momentous days. And while she comes now to pay tribute to the adventure of 1607, she will strangely echo the more recent innocence of 1957.

"We're looking at history," said Richard C.V. Nicoll, a native of Britain and the man who will drive the queen's polished two-horse carriage in Williamsburg on Friday.

"She's coming to a historic site, but we're having this privilege, you and me, of seeing history," Nicoll, 58, director of coach and livestock at Colonial Williamsburg, said last week. "What she's seen in her life and times, it's the history of the 20th century. . . . It's incredible."