Joe Biden will make his first overseas trip as president next week—and it’ll include a trip to visit Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle.
The British Royal Family announced the meeting Thursday morning, posting a photo of the castle on its social pages with the message: “The Queen will meet the President of the United States of America and First Lady Jill Biden at Windsor Castle on Sunday, 13th June 2021.”
Biden is traveling to the United Kingdom to attend the G7 summit in Cornwall, England with other world leaders. That will be immediately followed by a trip to Belgium for a NATO summit, then a scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Switzerland.
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Biden will become the 13th president to be greeted by the Queen, who ascended to the throne in 1952. She’s met every president since then with the one exception of Lyndon B. Johnson, who served from 1963 to 1969 but didn’t take a trip to the United Kingdom during his time in office. Elizabeth also met Harry Truman in 1951, when she was a princess.
The Bidens already have some royal friendships. Joe Biden once said he was getting jealous about the amount of time his wife, Jill, had spent with Prince Harry after she attended his Invictus Games event. Jill went to the inaugural charity games in 2014, and Biden later joked to reporters that his wife “spent too much damn time with Prince Harry.”
In April, the Bidens sent their condolences to the queen after the death of her husband Prince Philip at the age of 99, writing in a statement, “From his service during World War II, to his 73 years alongside the Queen, and his entire life in the public eye—Prince Philip gladly dedicated himself to the people of the U.K., the Commonwealth, and to his family.”
The Biden meeting will be Queen Elizabeth’s first major engagement since her husband’s passing on April 9.
The announcement of the Biden visit came as another racism scandal threatened to damage the royal family’s reputation. This week, British newspaper The Guardian uncovered papers showing that the monarchy employed racist hiring practices up until at least 1968. A civil servant wrote in a letter at the time that “it was not, in fact, the practice to appoint colored immigrants or foreigners” to “office posts.”
The queen’s press office pushed back on the story on Thursday, writing in a statement, “Claims based on a second hand account of conversations from over 50 years ago should not be used to draw or infer conclusions about modern day events or operations.” The statement added that modern royal households follow equality laws, both “in principle and in practice.”
Biden will travel to the U.K. on June 11.
