GREAT BRITAIN: Pray Be Seated

For the first time in 66 years, a reigning Queen opened Britain’s Parliament. Crowds were already thronging Parliament Square and Buckingham Palace gate under chill skies two hours before the ceremonies began.

It was 10:30 a.m. when Elizabeth II, clad in a pale gold evening dress and white ermine cloak, at last emerged from the palace and entered the Irish State Coach. Breastplated household cavalrymen rode ahead, scarlet outriders trotted alongside as the Queen was borne to Westminster through wave after wave of band music and past a United Press photographer who got a memorably radiant picture of the young Queen (see cut). At Westminster she was greeted by an ear-splitting bray of heraldic trumpets.

In the House of Commons, where no King or Queen is allowed to enter, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and other members of government and loyal opposition waited in fidgety silence until the stentorian cry of “Black Rod!” was heard in the corridors. A moment later General Sir Brian Horrocks, Black Rod himself, knocked three times on their lobby door and, bowing, commanded “this honorable House to wait upon Her Majesty immediately in the House of Peers.”

Like Victoria at her first Parliament, Elizabeth II has not yet been crowned. Her crown was borne before her on a crimson cushion by the Marquess of Salisbury; a coronet of diamonds and pearls took the crown’s place on her brow. A velvet robe caped with ermine hung from her shoulders, its 6-yd. train supported by two page boys. At her left walked her husband, Philip, who foreswore the traditional trappings of a Royal Duke for the dress uniform of a naval commander.* He guided Elizabeth to a spot just before her throne and stepped down one step to the left to his own gilded chair of state. “My Lords,” said Elizabeth, “pray be seated.” Then, because she was not yet a crowned Queen, Elizabeth repeated her oath of accession and her promise to “secure the Protestant succession.”

The Queen’s speach was handed to her. As she went unhesitatingly through the long dull document, written, as such speeches always are, by her ministers, many of those listening detected a new note of authority in the voice that had recently seemed high-pitched and girlish. The speech itself was a simple Tory proclamation of the Tory intention of preserving peace, saving the economy and denationalizing steel. The triumph was the Queen’s, not her speechwriters’.

-Last week Philip also earned the right to try for a new insignia (wings) on his uniform by passing the air-crew test which qualifies him for flight training.