For months now America has been worrying about the etiquette of meeting and greeting Queen Elizabeth. Should citizens of the great republic bow or curtsey? Is it OK to offer your hand to be shaken? Would it be an unforgivable gaffe to mention Diana?
These anxieties were on display in Richmond, Virginia last Thursday as the welcome committee spent a good half hour minutely adjusting the red carpet laid down on the tarmac for her arrival. Then the airport marshalling crew, with equal care, painstakingly directed Her Majesty’s chartered Boeing 777 so it came to a halt five meters beyond that. Sweating gentlemen in uniform took an unscheduled quarter of an hour to bundle the carpet five meters sideways, while Prince Philip looked on amused. Less amused, HM’s Director of Travel looked meaningfully at his watch. “Four hundred years,” sardonically remarked one of the watching English press pack, “and they still can’t lay a bloody carpet.”
Her Majesty, of course, said nothing so uncharitable. Serenity is her style. She was visiting the United States to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Anglo-Saxon settlement in North America — on May 11, 1607 three ships containing 104 male English colonists sailed into Chesapeake Bay to found the Jamestown settlement in the name of her ten-times-great grandfather, James I. Fifty years ago she was here for the 350th anniversary, when the popular view of the settlement’s history was well conveyed by the immortal Peggy Lee song:
Captain Smith and Pocahontas
Had a very mad affair
When her daddy tried to kill him,
She said daddy, no, don’t you dare
He gives me feev-ah . . . . .
Today historians consider the love affair between Smith and the native princess to be a PR story concocted by the wily captain — and any suggestion of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism is taboo. In 2007 the emphasis is on the sad fate of the native Americans, decimated by European diseases (the English brought malaria with them), and the disastrous impact that fertility-draining tobacco farming had on the existing ecology of the New World.
“Human progress rarely comes without cost,” remarked the Queen to the Virginia Assembly as she reflected on the changing perspectives of the past fifty years. “It is right that we continue to reassess the meaning of historical events.” Her reference was to the arrival of the first shipload of manacled Africans in the colony in 1619 — they had been captured by pirates in the Caribbean and were promptly set to work in the tobacco fields. The birthplace of representative government in North America was also the starting point of US slavery.
The Queen absorbed the human side of this history as she toured Jamestown’s Archaearium. If you don’t know how to pronounce that (‘ark-ee-air-ee-um’), don’t worry. There’s not another archaearium in the world: Jamestown has invented the term to describe its new museum of archaeological remains — 1,000 or so of more than a million objects that have been sifted from the dirt along the banks of the James River. As she ranged over the museum’s glass cases, the Queen inspected gambling dice made of bone, ivory and lead, Venetian glass beads, a rat’s jaw with some fearsome teeth, and a beautiful black mineral crucifix which suggests there may have been at least one secret Catholic among the holy roller Protestant colonists.
The royal eye was particularly caught by some medical instruments, dated 1611, that included a metal ear-wax remover and a long and painful-looking spatula designed for dealing with constipation — “a disease that killeth many.” She summoned her doctor, Surgeon Captain David Swain, CVO RN, who was walking behind her — as he does on all her tours, lugging a heavy bag containing resuscitation equipment and sachets of plasma containing the blood royal. “You should have some things like that,” she said to him, indicating the spatula. The good doctor smiled wanly and kept on plodding.
People noted how energetically the Queen herself was walking — uphill and down. She set a brisk pace. She was eighty-one last month, and she picked her way round the palisaded fort with significantly more agility than her heavyset escort, Vice President Dick Cheney, 66, who had flown down from Washington. Her Majesty had selected an elegant lilac outfit with coral trim for her arrival in Virginia with a hat to match; for Jamestown her coat was turquoise with grey trim, surmounted by an even more jaunty hat.
The Queen’s dresses were often criticized in the early years of her reign — she was still relying on the Presbyterian taste of her severe Scottish nursery maid, Bobo MacDonald. But her latest dresser, Angela Kelly, is credited with injecting sunniness into the royal wardrobe — which certainly has little to do with the Queen herself. If Her Majesty had her way, she would dress in tweed, tweed, tweed — as she does when off duty.
The one exception might be for a visit to the races. Elizabeth loves horses deeply — like dogs, they have no idea that she’s a queen: they respond to her without flattery. For her first-ever visit to America’s premier horse race, the Kentucky Derby on May 5th at Lexington, she appeared in a delectably tasty mint-julep green costume and hat.
The horses lived up to the hat. Along with 150,000 other spectators, the Queen was treated to a thrilling race, the most dramatic Derby in several years, in which Street Sense, charging forward from 19th place, came up along the rails to claim a famous victory and the $3 million purse. This two-year-old colt was a son of Street Cry out of Bedazzle, and it is safe to presume that Elizabeth, a long-time racehorse owner herself and a keen student of blood lines, was fully familiar with the pedigree and form of both those horses.
It is also safe to assume, as Her Majesty headed for Washington to spend two days planting trees and dining with President George W Bush and the bigwigs of the capital, that the dutiful monarch had already experienced the highlights of her trip.