Many times I have written about the travails involved in finding free-licence images for Wikimedia Commons, but this time it is sound files that concern me.
When Charles III acceded to the throne two years ago, the royal anthem of the Commonwealth Realms changed from “God Save the Queen” to “God Save the King”, having been in the feminine form for longer than the internet had existed. Extant recordings of the masculine form were hard to find, and those that did exist were inevitably very old.
Lacking the budget to form my own choir or hire a recording studio, I went looking for recordings of the song in the place it seemed most likely to find them – videos of His Majesty’s outdoor accession proclamations.
Of the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of these which actually took place, I managed to find just four for which either the venue host or a charitable bystander had uploaded the video to YouTube under Creative Commons. I firstly copied these videos themselves to Wikimedia Commons, then set about extracting the audio of people singing. Both of these involved a bit of a learning curve and the use of some third-party tools.
This is the most high-profile of the four, and the one with the best sound quality. The band are playing (I think) Sir Henry Wood’s arrangement of the anthem (which is good because the composition itself is public domain) and the crowd are all in time. There is some noise due to wind, local dogs and the sliding of camera shutters.
This version is sung a cappella. Most of the crowd have picked up by the third syllable and stay remarkably in time for the rest, though not necessarily in tune – one in particular says “noble” and “victorious” in a way that sounds almost like a dog yawning.
One of the recurrent themes of this blog is the inconsistency of licensing in British governmental and parliamentary photographs. Without rehearsing the entire story again, I will note that yesterday I made a wonderful discovery:
Since the day of the event itself I had thought that the only photograph of the 2024 State Opening of Parliament to be released under a free licence was this one of His Majesty in procession through the royal gallery. It is fairly tightly framed, with only the middle ground in focus so that Charles and the page boys to his flanks appear a little too sharp while the Duke of Norfolk in front and the Marchioness of Lansdowne behind are entirely blurred.
The House of Lords Flickr account had a generous album of high quality shots, but these were released under a Non-Commercial and No Derivatives licence, rendering them useless for Wikimedia Commons*. When this happened last year I was able to get around it by using those which had been re-issued under a looser licence by the Oireachtas, although some other Wikipedians challenged the legitimacy of these. No such republication existed this time around.
Happily, yesterday when strolling through the relevant category on Wikimedia Commons I came across a second photograph of the event, taken from inside the upper chamber and showing the speech being read. The source was given as parliament.assetbank-server.com, and the link revealed a page from what seemed to be an official Parliament-owned website with twenty-eight of the forty-five photographs in the Flickr album, but this time very explicitly licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0), which meant they could be used on Wikimedia Commons. Of course, I took the opportunity offered by the handy “DOWNLOAD ALL AS ZIP” button to transfer the lot of them. I had to give new names to all of them as the file originals were mostly gibberish and I noticed that the metadata were inconsistent as well (some had timestamps and others didn’t, some were taken by Roger Harris and others by Annabel Moeller). Some more editing may well be required in future to rectify this.
Though I am reluctant to look this gift horse in the mouth, I am a little perplexed by the existence of this website, which bears the UK Parliament logo but is not at the parliament.uk domain, and whose individual pages can be seen freely once you have the direct link but which cannot be navigated without a login. It could be the case that the majority – or indeed entirety – of the recent House of Lords photograph collection is actually released under a usable licence and these pages would prove it, if only we ever manage to find them.
*The irritating thing about photographing licensing in a parliamentary context is that one must continually differentiate between Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons and the House of Commons. The presence of Their Majesties in these images means that “royalty-free” isn’t very practical either.
Fresh from attending special sittings of the States of Jersey and the States of Deliberation in Guernsey, today Their Majesties returned to Westminster for the opening of the first session of the fifty-ninth Parliament of the United Kingdom.
This was the first King’s Speech under a Labour government since 1950. There is some symmetry, perhaps, between Charles III’s second speech and George VI’s second-to-last.
This is the only free-licence photograph of the event so far.
While the content of the speech was very lengthy and stood in radical contrast to the one delivered for Sunak’s government in November, in ceremonial terms there was very little change. The King’s getup was identical to that worn last time. The Queen’s changed a little – instead of her coronation gown, she has reverted to the style of dress she wore in 2019 and earlier. Reeta Chakrabarti, presenting the BBC’s coverage, described it as “very fine, off-white silk crepe embroidered by Fiona Claire”. She has not taken to wearing a sash again, but the star of the Order of the Garter appears around her left hip. This was also, incidentally, her 77th birthday.
Shabana Mahmood appeared as Lord Chancellor. Being a barrister, she wore the full-bottomed wig. This is the first time a woman has performed this role at a state opening, for Liz Truss’s brief tenure in the role did not include one. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, can be seen for the first time wearing the collar of the Royal Victorian Order.
The most striking visual difference was in the change of pages – last time King Charles’ train was carried by Nicholas Barclay, Ralph Tollemache, Charles van Cutsem and Lord Oliver Cholmondeley (three of whom also appeared at the coronation). This time Tollemache returned but the other three were replaced by William Sackville, Alfred Wellesley and Guy Tryon. I don’t know any biographical detail about them beyond what I can guess from their surnames but they all appeared to be several years younger than the boys whom they replaced. Queen Camilla continued to use William Keswick and Arthur Elliott as before. As at last year’s ceremony Her Majesty’s two pages held her robe in the middle rather than at the end so that the end still dragged along the carpet, whereas His Majesty’s four pages kept the whole garment elevated (despite it being longer than his wife’s).
Some other things of note – as is custom after the first state opening of a new parliament, the lower house appointed three temporary deputy speakers. The senior of these is Sir Edward Leigh. I don’t think a Father of the House has ever been appointed as a deputy speaker before. These three will hold office for the brief period until new deputies are elected. All three of the deputy speakers sitting before dissolution have now left the house (one against his will), which was last the case in 1997. There will thus be no continuity except for Sir Lindsay Hoyle himself. Also today the first life peerages of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership were patented – Lord Vallance of Balham and Lady Smith of Malvern. It appears that the ministerial appointments will be taking priority over the dissolution honours after all.
A few months ago I noted that, during the illness of her husband, Queen Camilla had been carrying out royal engagements solo, and had been flying the generic ermine-bordered version of the royal banner of arms.
The King has since recovered at least enough to be allowed out, and today Their Majesties jointly visit the Bailiwick of Jersey – a crown dependency in the English channel. Although a self-governing country with its own coat of arms, Jersey is part of the realm of the United Kingdom (i.e. it doesn’t count as a separate crown from the British one) and the sovereign’s heraldic identity is the same as in England.
In the disappointingly-limited series of photographs and videos I have found so far (none of them free-licence) I could not see much evidence of the sovereign’s banner flying over buildings, though I did see it on the roof of the Bentley State Limousine. What intrigued me was seeing (at 2m08s in the video above) some enthusiasts who had brought their own banner of Her Majesty’s arms and draped it over the railing. Based on the art style, I am dead certain it is a printout of this creation by Fry1989. The King actually reacts to it, though I can’t quite make out the words he says. The presumed owner of the flag says to him “I hope you enjoyed France last year.” in what I take to be a French accent.
Rolling coverage by the BBC. It has a segment on James Landale, whom I’m fairly sure is the same person as appears next to the speaker I referenced in the video above.
In the eight years and two weeks since the EU referendum, Sir Keir Starmer is the fifth person to be appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This means we have a lot of recent precedents against which to compare the events of the last few days.
The Palace
Up to and including 2010 it was the norm for the invitation of a new premier to form a government to take place entirely off-camera, with the politicians only being seen as they came in and out of the door and the monarch not to be seen at all.
Beginning in 2016 it became custom for the monarch and the new prime minister to be photographed at the start of their meeting and for this photograph to be shared with the press (May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak). Starmer’s appointment goes a little further by even having a short video clip of His Majesty speaking to him. I’m not familiar enough with internal layout of Buckingham Palace to know precisely where each meeting takes place (and the photographs themselves are not labelled in that way) but it’s clear that May, Johnson and Starmer all met the sovereign in the same room while Sunak was in a different part of the palace. Truss’s, of course, took place at Balmoral Castle and is famous as the last time Elizabeth II was photographed before she died. The sight of the two men in adjacent armchairs is reminiscent of scenes with outgoing and incoming Presidents of the United States in the Oval Office.
The Cars
From Thatcher until Johnson the cars used by Prime Ministers were various generations of Jaguar XJs. During Johnson’s tenure the government began phasing these out in favour of Range Rover Sentinels and then Audi A8Ls. In this instance Sunak arrived at the Palace in an Audi (KN23 XFE). Starmer arrived in a Range Rover (0Y20 CFU), then left in the same Audi. It is not clear where the limousine was hiding between Sunak’s meeting and Starmer’s, or which type of car was used to drive the Conservative leader away as his departure was apparently by a rear exit, off-camera. At some point I may do another post comparing the vehicles used in all these moments.
The Cabinet
At this point the full extent of Starmer’s first cabinet is known, though there is still some way to go with the appointment of all the junior ministers. New cabinet ministers overwhelmingly occupy the same post they had been shadowing before the election, with exceptions few enough to list individually:
Thangam Debbonaire (Culture, Media & Sport) and Jonathan Ashworth (Paymaster General) lost their seats, replaced by Lisa Nandy and Nick Thomas-Symonds respectively.
Anneliese Dodds (Women & Equalities) was a Shadow Secretary of State but is now only a Minister of State (both for that portfolio and at the FCDO).
Emily Thornberry (Attorney General) was dropped from the frontbench and replaced by Richard Hermer. She doesn’t seem to have been offered Debbonaire’s or Ashworth’s place either, and now sits as a backbencher.
Some of those who were full members of the shadow cabinet have been demoted to “also attending” the real one. Starmer has followed David Cameron’s example from 2010 in avoiding immediate changes to the machinery of government – while new ministers have been appointed, the ministerial departments themselves are as the previous government left them.
Whereas Blair’s cabinet of 1997 was desperately short of prior ministerial experience (the late Lord Morris of Aberavon being the only veteran of the Wilson-Callaghan years), Starmer’s cabinet of 2024 has quite a few people who served under Blair and Brown. The most prominent example is Ed Miliband, who returns to his old job as energy secretary. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was previously Chief Secretary to the Treasury and then head of the DWP, Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn formerly headed DfID and DEFRA while a few others held multiple junior roles.
Some other New Labour grandees have returned to Parliament after a long absence to serve as lesser ministers e.g. Douglas Alexander (Business & Trade) back in the Commons, (although not for the same constituency) and Jacqui Smith (Education) to be appointed to the Lords.
Smith’s is not the only peerage required to facilitate a ministerial appointment – Hermer is not currently in Parliament either, nor are Sir Patrick Vallance (Minister of State for Science, Research & Innovation) or James Timpson (Minister of State for Prisons, Parole & Probation). It is not clear if these last three are expected to actually join the Labour Party as they were not in political roles before. Vallance in particular (famous from the COVID-era press conferences) has spent five years as a civil servant in the position of Government Chief Scientific Adviser. It is also not clear if these peerages will be created before or after those already announced in the dissolution honours.
The Council
Secretaries of State and some other officeholders are appointed at plenary sessions of the privy council. This time, unusually, the installation of the new cabinet seems to have been spread over two meetings.
The first meeting, on Saturday 6th July, saw Lucy Powell declared Lord President of the Council, then Rayner, Lammy, Cooper, Healey, Mahmood, Kendal and Nandy appointed secretaries of state. Lady Smith of Basildon was appointed Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. The contents page preceding the actual orders in council (an innovation since the last government) splits the secretaries of state into four sections rather than as one bloc so as to have Rayner (the Deputy Prime Minister) above Reeves (the Chancellor of the Exchequer), with Mahmood given her own section due to her distinction of also being Lord High Chancellor. The contents page (though not the actual order in council) also bizarrely describes the Chancellor of the Exchequer as being a Secretary of State, which it isn’t. To make matters worse, the tab header for the PDF says “Lis of Business” rather than “List of Business”! I suspect the Privy Council Office needed some extra proofreading here.
The order in council refers to the new head of government himself as follows:
This day the Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC (Prime Minister) did, by His Majesty’s command, make solemn affirmation as First Lord of the Treasury.
Writing it this way depicts Sir Keir as already being Prime Minister at the time of his appointment as First Lord, making clear that these are distinct titles. Notably Rayner is not described as (Deputy Prime Minister) in the same fashion. Rishi Sunak’s appointment on 27th October 2022 is written the same way, as were Liz Truss’s on 12th October 2022 and Theresa May’s on 19th July 2016. Boris Johnson’s presumably happened on 25th July 2019 but the file seems to be missing. David Cameron’s happened on 13th May 2010 but the document only shows the contents summary. I find it interesting that May and Truss both delayed their swearings-in as First Lord until the meeting after that in which most of their cabinet ministers were sworn, with Truss’s in particular being so delayed that it was closer to the end of her premiership than to the beginning.
The second meeting, on Wednesday 10th July, shows the appointment of secretaries Streeting, Phillipson, Miliband, Reynolds, Kyle, Haigh, Reed, Benn, Murray and Stevens, followed by Reynolds again as President of the Board of Trade – this showing a contrasting approach to the ordering of business.
The ‘Clature (alright, I’m reaching here)
In keeping with David Cameron’s example as already mentioned, Starmer has still renamed one ministerial department even if he hasn’t seriously reorganised any: At the Saturday council Angela Rayner was sworn Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. At the Wednesday council she was sworn again as Secretary of State for Housing, Communites and Local Government.
This department has been in existence since 2001 without major changes to its functions but it has had multiple changes of name. I will list all of them now.
2001 – Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM)
2006 – Department for Communites and Local Government (DCLG)
Notably GOV.UK treats the 2018 and 2024 establishments as distinct entities despite them having the same name. The (il)logic of when to say “office”, “ministry” or “department” is probably worth an article in itself at some later date. To change the Department for Children, Schools and Families into the Department for Education in 2010 required an eight-page statutory instrument. To change the MHCLG into the DLUHC in 2021 required twenty pages. Who knows how long it will take to change back again. The problem of “shopping list” department names has been noted for some time. It was reported that the “Levelling Up” part of the name was dropped because it was regarded as merely an empty slogan. Personally I would prefer that the vague “Communities” part be dropped as well, to restore the 1951-1970 name.
I mentioned in a previous post that most of my written and photographic output (online and off) post-dates Gordon Brown’s resignation. I should note now that this is also the case for most of the present digital profile of His Majesty’s Government. GOV.UK itself only dates back to 2012 (although Martha Lane Fox had started working on the project in 2009), and online minutes of the Privy Council only go back to the start of 2010. ParliamentLive.TV only dates back to December 2007 and most government Flickr accounts were in their infancy or non-existent at the time of the 2010 general election. Parliament.uk was very heavily redesigned during the later New Tens. This is not a perfect correlation, let alone a causal relationship, but it does indicate how novel it is to have all these online accounts operating under a Labour regime rather than a Conservative one.
Today was the last in a string of high-profile royal engagements that went ahead despite the ongoing general election – although there are reports that the traditional “royal week” has been shortened due to the need for His Majesty to run back to London on Friday to meet the prime minister.
Unlike last year’s Presentation of the Honours of Scotland, this was a standard ceremony of the Order of the Thistle. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were due to have their banners installed at the High Kirk.
This excursion also featured the Ceremony of the Keys – which will be Alastair Bruce’s last as Governor of Edinburgh Castle.
It would be nice if I could include some photographs of either event, but it seems that unlike last year (when the Scottish Government Flickr account uploaded many) there are only commercial ones to be found. I hope that perhaps some amateur ones may be released under the right licensing arrangements soon. I also hope that we will soon get a good look at the Scottish arrangement of Her Majesty’s coat of arms – not that we don’t already know exactly what it should look like, but just to get proof that it exists!
Naruhito & Masako, Emperor & Empress of Japan, conducted a three day visit to the United Kingdom this week. It was the third state visit to Britain during the present reign, and the first monarchical one since that by the King & Queen of the Netherlands in 2018.
According to the Court Circular for 25 June, the palace guest list included “Mr. Christopher Broad (Founder of YouTube channel, Abroad in Japan)”. This is thought to be the first time that a prominent YouTuber has been invited to a state event specifically in that capacity.
As is customary during state visits, the monarchs exchanged appointments to their respective orders of chivalry: Charles received the Collar of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum while Naruhito became a Stranger Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. It is a shame that his visit was not a few days earlier, or he could have marched in the procession.
Sodacan’s representation of the Japanese Garter arms.
Naruhito ascended the imperial throne in 2019 when his father Akihito abdicated. Japan now joins Spain and the Netherlands in having two Garter stalls simultaneously. What makes the Japanese representation different to the Spanish and Dutch is the different style of heraldry. The Japanese Imperial Seal is a mon representing a stylised chrysanthemum flower. Mon are normally standalone objects without a background – more visually similar to a Western crest or livery badge than a shield of arms. To make the symbol compatible with European heraldic customs for use in St George’s Chapel it is typically presented as the lone charge on a red background for the shield and banner, then again without a background as the crest atop the helm. The Emperor paid a private visit to Windsor Castle to view his predecessors’ stall plates there and to lay a floral wreath on Elizabeth II’s tomb.
The state banquet also marked the first appearance of the Royal Family Order of Charles III. Dating back to the reign of George IV, the royal family orders are an informal and highly personal decoration restricted to senior royal women. Each consists of a silk ribbon from which hangs a jeweled miniature portrait of the sovereign. The orders do not always have formal classes but their badges tend to come in different sizes which correlate to the seniority of the recipient. The colour of the ribbon varies: Charles III follows George V in using pale blue, whereas Victoria used white, Edward VII blue and red lined with gold, George VI pink and Elizabeth II yellow. The Queen was seen wearing the new Carolean order immediately above the Elizabethan one she received as Duchess of Cornwall in 2007, and there is a clear difference in size. The Duchess of Edinburgh also wore Elizabeth’s order to the banquet.
This state visit was a little unusual in that it happened during a general election campaign. Some changes had to be made to the itinerary to cut out the more obviously political elements: Unlike previous visiting sovereigns, the Emperor did not make an address to Parliament (since their isn’t one) and while the cabinet and opposition leaders attended the state banquet they did not have individual meetings with him. Notably Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Edward Davey were not wearing their respective knightly insignia.
Today saw yet another of the royal public events that were too big to cancel – the procession of the Knights of the Garter to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. As with other big public events, I primarily experienced it in the form of the passive livestream on YouTube.
The cameras followed the knights, heralds and other officers as they marched on foot from the castle to the chapel, then went back again by carriage. They also filmed a large procession of what I assumed to be security cars following along the same stretch of road, which took something away from the splendour of the occasion. The cameras did not go inside the chapel, instead just showing the crowds and guards waiting outside for the duration, but the microphones (wherever the may have been positioned) were able to pick up a reasonable audio feed of the speeches, sermons and hymns.
The new members being installed today were royal lady the Duchess of Gloucester and knights companions the Lords Peach, Kakkar and Lloyd-Webber.
Stall plates and banners as photographed in The Dragon. Artist unknown.
Earlier this year, at the prompting of Baz Manning, I subscribed to The Dragon, the community newsletter of St George’s Chapel. Although this mainly covers religious events, it is also often where knights’ armorial bearings are leaked for the first time. The edition of 9th June included photographs of the newly-delivered stall plates for Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes, while that of 16th June showed the banners of Lords Peach and Kakkar. Apparently Peach’s must have been granted fairly recently, for the article claims that the sword is a reference to him carrying Curtana at the coronation last year. That means Lloyd-Webber is the only current member who remains at present armorially anonymous.
UPDATE (20th June)
The video I originally linked at the top of the article has been removed from Associated Press’s YouTube channel. All the other channels that also uploaded the same video seem to have removed it as well. For now I have replaced it with an amateur video by David Dumbrăveanu. The Daily Mail curiously still seems to have the full video up, and most other channels have at least small snippets.
The Queen’s Reading Room today celebrated its second annual festival at Hampton Court Palace.
Rather than focus on the festival event specifically, of which I could not find much footage, I wanted to use the opportunity to write more broadly about the reading room as a concept.
At the start of 2021 Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, launched the reading room under her title as an online book club. In 2023, her husband having acceded to the throne, she reconstituted it as a charity and updated the name to reflect her change in status.1
I had been intrigued by the royal couple’s literary interests since the pandemic forced so much of public interaction into the virtual space, and the bookshelf backdrop became an important element of one’s self-presentation. Conferences held from her study at Birkhall show her with at least three books by J. K. Rowling and six by Philippa Gregory2 — the latter suggesting an unorthodox approach to family history. Charles’s shelf was also the subject of some news articles.
The website contains numerous video interviews with authors, celebrity readings and, of course, a weekly podcast.
The most intriguing part of the enterprise, naturally, is in the particular choice of books: There is a page dedicated to Her Majesty’s own picks, which are named in batches of four every season (i.e. sixteen per year). As of June 2024 there have been fourteen literary seasons, resulting in a list of fifty-six books so far. I have listed them here oldest to newest.
Pride & Prejudice
Austen, Jane
1813
Frankenstein
Shelley, Mary
1818
A Christmas Carol
Dickens, Charles
1843
The Queen’s Necklace
Dumas, Alexandre
1849
A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens, Charles
1859
The Woman in White
Collins, Wilkie
1859
Black Beauty
Sewell, Anna
1877
Dracula
Stoker, Bram
1897
A Book of Food
Shand, P. Morton
1927
Rebecca
Maurier, Daphne du
1938
I Capture the Castle
Smith, Dodie
1948
My Family and Other Animals
Durrell, Gerald
1956
Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris
Gallico, Paul
1958
The Far Pavilions
Kaye, M. M.
1978
War Horse
Morpurgo, Michael
1982
Love in the Time of Cholera
Márquez, Gabriel García
1988
The Remains of the Day
Ishiguro, Kazuo
1989
The Light Years
Howard, Elizabeth Jane
1990
A Suitable Boy
Seth, Vikram
1993
Charlotte Gray
Faulks, Sebastian
1998
The Poisonwood Bible
Kingsolver, Barbara
1998
Atonement
McEwan, Ian
2001
The Secret Life of Bees
Kidd, Sue Monk
2001
The Kite Runner
Hasseini Khaled
2003
Suite Française
Némirovsky, Irène
2004
The Various Haunts of Men
Hill, Susan
2004
Labyrinth
Mosse, Kate
2005
The Island
Hislop, Victoria
2005
Half of a Yellow Sun
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
2006
Restless
Boyd, William
2006
The Book Thief
Zusak, Marcus
2006
The Lords’ Day
Dobbs, Michael
2007
The Year of Eating Dangerously
Parker Bowles, Tom
2007
My Brilliant Friend
Ferrante, Elena
2012
The Architect’s Apprentice
Shafak, Elif
2013
The Red Notebook
Laurain, Antoine
2015
A Gentleman in Moscow
Towles, Amor
2016
Magpie Murders
Horowitz, Anthony
2016
The Little Library Cookbook
Young, Kate
2017
Where the Crawdads Sing
Owens, Delia
2018
City of Girls
Gilbert, Elizabeth
2019
Girl
O’Brien, Edna
2019
Girl, Woman, Other
Evaristo, Bernadine
2019
Lady in Waiting
Glenconner, Anne, Baroness
2019
The Secret Commonwealth
Pullman, Philip
2019
A Half Baked Idea
Potts, Olivia
2020
Dark Tides
Gregory, Philippa
2020
Hamnet
O’Farrell, Maggie
2020
Miss Benson’s Beetle
Joyce, Rachel
2020
The Mirror & the Light
Mantel, Hilary
2020
Great Circle
Shipstead, Maggie
2021
Left You Dead
James, Peter
2021
The Fair Botanists
Sheridan, Sara
2021
The Paper Palace
Heller, Miranda Cowley
2021
Lessons in Chemistry
Garmus, Bonnie
2022
The Whalebone Theatre
Quinn, Joanna
2022
The selection skews modern. While there are some obvious classics in there (e.g. Dickens and Austen) the majority of entries are from the present century. In this long list the only one which I personally recall reading in full is The Book Thief, about eleven years ago. Fittingly enough, that story is itself about the importance of literacy for intellectual development and freedom, in the context of living through World War II under the German regime that encouraged book-burning.
There are many others from which I have at least read extracts (or listened to them in audiobooks) or which I know by reputation.
The one which sticks out to me the most, given the regal patronage of the Reading Room is The Lords’ Day (2007) by Michael Dobbs. This is a political thriller about the Palace of Westminster being captured by terrorists on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, with fictionalised versions of Elizabeth II and her then-Prince of Wales among the characters. Dobbs (himself ennobled in 2010) earlier wrote the famous House of Cards/To Play the King/The Final Cut trilogy whose second instalment also features a fictionalised version of Charles — ascending to the throne thirty years earlier than in real life and then swiftly being forced to abdicate after a losing a constitutional battle against an evil prime minister. Also featured is Lady in Waiting (2019) by the Lady Glenconner (which I bought at a charity shop last year but haven’t gotten around to reading yet), a memoir which goes into great detail about her time with the Princess Margaret.
The historical novels also often touch on potentially-sensitive topics: e.g. Dumas’s The Queen’s Necklace and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities both centre on the French Revolution while Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow deals with the Russian one. Seth and Kaye both write about British India, Kingsolver about the Belgian Congo. It would be hard to find a set of popular historical books set in Britain (whether fictional or factual) without encountering at least one about the royal family themselves. In this case Her Majesty chose Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, the last in a trilogy about the career of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. There are quite a lot more books about Word War II as well.
The King also gets a look-in. Before his accession to the throne, the Prince Charles shared five of his favourite books: The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby, Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker, Lustrum by Robert Harris, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn and Napoleon by Adam Zamoyski. That second book is likely particularly important to Charles, given his attempts to live that life himself.
There is a further section dealing specifically with children’s books, figureheaded by the Princess of Wales.3 On World Book Day 2022 Catherine similarly made five personal recommendations, and there are dozens more recommended by other friends of the charity. The proportion of these which I have personally read is higher than in the adult section but there are fewer interesting points I have to make about them.
It is also worth noting that while quite a few of the entries end up being about the royal family, there are so far as I can tell none of the books by them e.g. A Vision of Britain, The Old Man of Lochnagar, Crowned in a Far Country or Budgie the Little Helicopter. The Queen did, however, recommend one book by her non-royal son.
I daresay that Her Majesty is at times being a little, well, courageous in associating herself with some of these books. The monarchy strives to be above politics, yet literature is fundamentally about ideas and politics are never far away. A reading room project which took a wide berth from any possible controversy would probably end to watered-down to be worth doing, so Camilla has taken the riskier but more rewarding path. This was exemplified by her Clarence House speech in 2023 for the relaunch of the project, at which she told writers collectively to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination” in what was widely perceived as an intervention in an ongoing controversy over the proposed Bowdlerisation of some classic Roald Dahl books. The edits ultimately did not go ahead.
I originally meant the title of this post to be a weak pun on the project’s actual name, but lately I have discovered that there actually is a newly-launched podcast called Reading the Room.
UPDATE (October 2025)
The Queen has, reportedly, gotten herself included in The Hawk is Dead, an upcoming crime novel by Peter James.
FOOTNOTES
1 It went straight from “The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room” to “The Queen’s Reading Room” without being called “The Queen Consort’s Reading Room” in between, perhaps the earliest hint at the eventual abandonment of this honorific crutch at the coronation.
2 I can’t get a perfect view even in 1080p, but I think I recognised The Lady of the Rivers, The Red Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter and Three Sisters, Three Queens. What Camilla chose for the above list, however, was Dark Tides, one of the non-royal Fairmile series.
3Catherine’s URL slug has been updated for the new reign but Charles’s has not, giving the impression that they are husband and wife instead of father and daughter-in-law.
Yesterday I wrote about the text of the royal proclamation for the dissolution of Parliament appearing on the Privy Council website. Today it was actually read out in public.
Traditionally there are two public readings of the proclamation – the first is by the Common Cryer of the City of London (Major Peter Oweh, his first time doing this) on the steps of the Royal Exchange, the second is by the Lord Lyon King of Arms (Canon Joseph Morrow, now on his fourth general election) from the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.
As with many ceremonial events like this it has been frustratingly difficult to find good visual recording – despite most big news outlets doing rolling coverage of the general election for the past few days. The London proclamation was filmed by The Daily Mirror as seen above and had a few still photographs taken by Getty. For the Edinburgh version I am limited to the Lyon Court’s own blog and this amateur video by Haizhen’s Hut. To make matters worse, the United Kingdom is far from the only country having a national general election this year and even just searching for “dissolution of parliament” often brings up articles about Israel.
Yesterday I received a campaign letter from the Conservative candidate for Beverley & Holderness, Rt Hon Graham Stuart. Cannily, I would presume, he had them printed and sent out on 29th May so that at time of writing he could still use the MP post-nominals on the return address of the envelope, even though he would cease to be one by the time most recipients of his letter actually read it. Electoral projections that I can find at this time are conflicted as to whether he will be returned or replaced by the Labour candidate Margaret Pinder.
Also of note are the writs of election, which of course the Lord High Chancellor has as per said proclamation caused to be issued. Medway Council recently published a photograph of the writs for the three constituencies for which it was responsible. These are, of course, the first writs for these constituencies to be issued in the name of Charles the Third.
That brings me on to another point – while dissolving Parliament is a routine part of the election process in many democratic countries, the return of the regnal name Charles in relation to such matters provokes some historical sniggering in reminiscence of the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It is curious, therefore, that the first British dissolution in this reign should be immediately after Oak Apple Day, the now-obscure commemoration of the restoration of the monarchy after the fall of Cromwell’s republic. The name refers to the Royal Oak, a tree in Boscobel Wood which Charles II used to hide from the Roundheads in 1651. Given that the oak tree went on to become the symbol of the Conservative Party, it is perhaps a little surprising that no senior figures in the party (or in the headline-hungry media) have made a prominent reference to it. Of course, once suspects that his present Majesty would prefer not to be drawn into partisanship in that way.
Robin Stanley Taylor 
