Word: queenly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Swathed in a velvet train, with the imperial crown carefully balanced on her coiffed brown hair, Queen Elizabeth II opened the final session of Parliament before her subjects vote again in a general election. In one of Britain's better pageants, the Queen spoke from a golden throne in the gilded House of Lords, surrounded by such royal functionaries as her Gold Stick in Waiting and the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant. So many ermined peers and bejeweled peeresses were present that a journalistic wag observed there was a "tiara boom today...
...central characters of this year's parliamentary drama, however, were huddled in the rear of the chamber among other members of the House of Commons, who had been summoned to the Queen's presence by another treasured anachronism known as Black Rod. Prime Minister James Callaghan and Conservative Leader Margaret Thatcher listened idly to an arid speech that the government, by custom, had prepared for the Queen to read...
...address-a laundry list of legislative goals-contained little in the way of major news or promise for the new Parliament. The most important item in the Queen's speech was an assurance to Scottish and Welsh nationalists that there would be referendums on March 1 on local assemblies for these areas-the first step toward devolution, or limited home rule. Opposed by Thatcher's Tories, who have 281 seats, and the Liberal Party (13), Callaghan's Labor minority of 312 can now stay in power only with the help of smaller parties. Callaghan needs the votes...
...party for the world's newest nation, which happens to be a real banana republic. The tiny Commonwealth of Dominica (pop. 78,000), a 290-sq.-mi. speck in the Lesser Antilles, earns 70% of its $12 million export revenues from the serviceable fruit, and it has replaced Queen Elizabeth II as head of state with a ceremonial President. Nonetheless, the Queen's younger sister, a newly thinned-down Princess Margaret, presided over the independence ceremonies that made Dominica the Western Hemisphere's 30th sovereign state. As the Union Jack was hauled down in Windsor Cricket Park...
...stemmed from an incident in which Marie Howe's friend, Walter Silva, forcibly removed the door of one of Howe's tenants from its hinges, while Marie participated in the break-in. Two years later, the Journal gave front-page coverage to Marie's arrest for disorderly conduct during Queen Elizabeth's bicentennial visit to Boston; the paper reported that Marie bit the hand of her arresting officer, requiring him to go to the hospital to get a tetanus shot, and that she then gave the police an alias so they wouldn't know she was a state representative...