A Royal Return to Jamestown
Elizabeth to Trace Steps of Her First U.S. Trip as Monarch

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 30, 2007

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."

In 1957, the queen and her husband came to the United States in mid-October. They visited Williamsburg and Jamestown -- the 350th anniversary of the 1607 landing was being celebrated -- Oct. 16.

In Washington, they were greeted by a million well-wishers who lined Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues in the rain and were hosted at the White House by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and first lady Mamie Eisenhower for four days.

They had lunch with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, went to a University of Maryland football game and visited a supermarket in West Hyattsville.

In New York, they were greeted by a million more people and a ticker tape parade Oct. 21.

Elizabeth had been queen for five years, since the death of her father, King George VI, on Feb. 6, 1952.

She was traveling in Africa when she learned the news: At 25, she had become the latest ruling descendant of Egbert, King of Wessex, and 40th English monarch since William the Conqueror.

But she was already well known from the years of World War II, when she and her family stayed in London during the Nazis' bombing blitz.

"She had this sort of image as a sweet young woman who did her duty," said Elisabeth Cawthon, an associate professor and expert in British constitutional history at the University of Texas at Arlington. "She and her parents had this image with the British public as sticking with them . . . [which] has remained in the British memory."

Elizabeth's coronation, as much fantasy as tradition, took place June 2, 1953, in Westminster Abbey. She signed her royal oath with a golden pen. She was anointed with the oil of musk and ambergris, scented with jasmine and cinnamon. She was given a ring of rubies and sapphires and a scepter set with a 500-carat diamond.

She rode with her husband in the four-ton, 192-year-old carriage.

Four years later, more confident, as the newspapers said, but still seeming so young for a queen, she chose Jamestown as her first stop on her first state visit to the United States as monarch.

She knew better than most, the British Embassy suggested last week, that the founding of the ragged outpost had proved as vital to Britain as to the United States.

Her arrival from Canada was a taste of what was coming. Ten thousand people met her at Patrick Henry airport -- now Newport News/Williamsburg International. Thirty thousand more would greet in her Williamsburg.

She was described by reporters as "lovely" and her prince as "rangy." She was "a magnificent girl," said the wife of Virginia's governor at the time, Thomas B. Stanley. "She does everything so well."

It was noted that the queen brought her own tea.

In Colonial Williamsburg, sedatives were given to the horses pulling her carriage to make sure they behaved, and the steeds were shod with rubber-soled shoes to make sure they didn't falter.

Oscar Gardner, 84, a retired Colonial Williamsburg police sergeant, walked beside the queen's carriage that day with three other police officers.

"She was a very beautiful lady," he recalled last week. Everything went well, but he did not get to shake her hand. "We didn't put our hands on her at all," he said.

In a short speech, the young queen spoke of the cooperation between the United States and Great Britain in the search for "a just and lasting peace for mankind."

But just outside the boundaries of the racially integrated Colonial Williamsburg historic site, justice was limited, recalled Hubert Alexander, 82, then the site's supervisor of restaurants, who helped serve the queen food that day.

Williamsburg was segregated. The schools. The bus station. The train station. The restaurants. Everything, Alexander said: "It was a completely Southern town."

And it was 1957.