Why the King’s meeting with Biden will be much more than a mere formality

Although Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher were said not to have gotten along, Her Majesty certainly complemented her prime minister’s political relationship with the president with statecraft, who met the queen again in London in 1984 and 1988. President George HW Bush and his wife had lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in June 1989, and the Clintons visited the Queen twice, in 1995 and 2000, with President Clinton meeting her at commemorations for the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994. President George W Bush briefly saw her in 2001.

It may not come as a surprise that for more than a century after American colonists fell out with George III, there was little traffic between the White House and Buckingham Palace. However, in 1815, when he was ambassador to London, John Quincy Adams met the future George IV (then Prince Regent during his father’s madness) and his brother, the future William IV. Like President Ford, he protested that there were no hard feelings, even though only three years had passed since the War of 1812.

Queen Victoria, though she never set foot in the United States, became very popular there during her 63-year reign, primarily because she embodied the virtues of Christian conduct, moral rectitude, service, and fidelity that most Americans they saw, or hoped they would become, inherent in their own society. Unknowingly, she inaugurated “the special relationship”. Until President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt went to Panama in 1906, no sitting president had traveled abroad: however, after Adams’s embassy in London, Queen Victoria met future President James Buchanan when he was ambassador in 1853, and former President Ulysses S Grant in 1877, when he and his wife visited her in Windsor.

However, Teddy Roosevelt befriended King Edward VII, wanting to improve relations with Great Britain, then the world’s leading power. The king saw himself as an active ambassador for Great Britain and encouraged the relationship. They never met, but the King’s Windsor papers include many letters from Roosevelt to “My dear King Edward.” The king was so interested in meeting Roosevelt that he invited him to London after leaving office in 1909, and Roosevelt planned to come after a safari in Africa. However, while he was traveling, the king suddenly died. Roosevelt was appointed by his successor, President Taft, to represent the United States at King Edward’s funeral. This made quite an impression on the British and indeed the American public.

The first state visit to Britain by an American president came six weeks after the end of the Great War, when Woodrow Wilson, at the invitation of Lloyd George, came directly after Christmas while in Europe for the Versailles Conference. King George V was furious: he had not been consulted about the timing and he had to cut short his holidays at Sandringham – and his pheasant and partridge hunt – to receive the president and his wife.

The King’s official biographer, Sir Harold Nicolson, recorded that “Mr and Mrs Woodrow Wilson arrived in London from France on the afternoon of Boxing Day. Through decorated streets the King, with the President at his side, drove from the station to Buckingham Palace: the Queen and Mrs Wilson followed in the second carriage. The men and women who crowded the sidewalks and the windows greeted the President with wonder and hope: they found him a theocratic figure, the prophet of a more beautiful revelation. Mr. Wilson responded to his respectful applause by raising his top hat and smiling a broad but dry smile…”

Wilson, like President Biden, did not exude great affection for Britain. The United States had entered the Great War in April 1917 not out of solidarity with the Allies, but because German submarines continued to accidentally sink American ships, despite warnings of dire consequences. One of Wilson’s main war goals was to use this international upheaval to destroy British imperial power: not that he shared that thought with King George. Nicolson reflected that “the King, during their brief conversation, got no impression of the shades of vanity and suspects that they marred the splendor of Woodrow Wilson’s mind and heart.” “He is quite easy to get along with,” the king commented in his diary, saying that at the state banquet he “made a nice speech.” However, according to the king’s unofficial biographer, Kenneth Rose, Wilson did nothing of the sort. “Wilson made a woeful impression,” Rose wrote. “In response to the toast to his health, he omitted any reference to the role played or the sacrifices borne by the British Empire in their joint struggle.” The king told a friend of Wilson’s: “I couldn’t bear it…a completely cold academic professor, a hateful man.”