Category Archives: Royal Family

Garter Day 2024

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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.

Reading the Room

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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.

FURTHER READING

UPDATE (June 2025)

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.

3 Catherine’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.

The Proclamation in Public

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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.

Comparing Dissolution Proclamations

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The Fifty-Eighth Parliament of the United Kingdom is no more. It dissolved just after midnight… or did it?

Parliament’s own website and guidance documents seem to indicate that dissolution took effect at 00:01 today, but I doubt the factual accuracy of this and I am not the only one.

I spent much of today keeping a close eye on the Privy Council website to see when there would be an update about today’s meeting. It arrived sometime before 13:00. The PDF records that His Majesty ordered the Lord Chancellor to affix the Great Seal of the Realm to the proclamation, and also (alongside the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) to arrange the issuance of writs of summons and election. The text of the proclamation itself is reproduced below:

Whereas We have thought fit, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, to dissolve this
present Parliament, which stands prorogued to Friday, the thirty-first day of May: We do, for
that End, publish this Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby dissolve the said Parliament
accordingly: And the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Members of the House of
Commons, are discharged from further Attendance thereat: And We being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in Parliament, do
hereby make known to all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new
Parliament: and do hereby further declare, that, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council,
We have given Order that Our Chancellor of Great Britain and Our Secretary of State for
Northern Ireland do respectively, upon Notice thereof, forthwith, issue out Writs, in due Form
and according to Law, for calling a new Parliament: And We do hereby also, by this Our
Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm, require Writs forthwith to be issued
accordingly by Our said Chancellor and Secretary of State respectively, for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal and Commons who are to serve in the said Parliament to be duly
returned to, and give their Attendance in, Our said Parliament on Tuesday, the ninth day of
July next, which Writs are to be returnable in due course of Law.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this thirtieth day of May in the Year of our Lord
two thousand and twenty four and in the second year of Our Reign.

The Privy Council website does not give texts like these for 2010 and earlier, but sound recordings of those earlier occasions confirm that the same wording was in use. The most notable feature of these proclamations is that they specify dissolution taking place immediately upon the date given and also fix the date for the new parliament to assemble, but don’t actually say when polling day will be.

The FTPA Era

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 substantially altered the mechanics of British general elections. No longer could the sitting prime minister simply “go to the country” whenever he pleased, instead the date of the general election would be fixed as the first Thursday in May in the fifth year since the previous general election, unless two thirds of the House of Commons voted to have one earlier. Dissolution of the outgoing legislature would occur automatically twenty-five working days before polling.

In a moment of supreme constitutional pettiness, the act even transferred the authority for writs of election for MPs (though curiously not writs of summons for peers) to the Lord Chancellor and Northern Ireland Secretary to act without the monarch’s instruction, so that this element was taken out of the proclamation.

Three general elections occurred while the FTPA was in force – the fifty-fifth Parliament was allowed to run its natural course, the fifty-sixth was dissolved early by the two thirds motion and the fifty-seventh by a special act of its own passage. Despite these very different constitutional circumstances, the proclamations in all cases were identical (save of course the specific dates mentioned). Below is the text of the proclamation from 2019:

Whereas We, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, being desirous and
resolved, as soon as may be, to meet Our People, and to have their Advice in
Parliament, do publish this, Our Royal Proclamation, and do hereby make known to
all Our loving Subjects Our Royal Will and Pleasure to call a new Parliament to be
holden at Westminster on Tuesday the seventeenth day of December next: And We do
hereby also, by this Our Royal Proclamation under Our Great Seal of Our Realm,
require Writs to be issued by Our Lord High Chancellor for causing the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal who are to serve in the said Parliament to give their
Attendance in Our said Parliament on the said date.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this sixth day of November in the Year of
our Lord two thousand and nineteen and in the sixty-eighth year of Our Reign.

The 2017 version can be read here, and that of 2015 heard here. The 2017 election also had a different proclamation nine days earlier to appoint the polling date, though this proclamation did not enjoy any of the latter’s accompanying ceremony despite clearly being the more politically important of the two.

As you can see, this version of the proclamation is a pathetic sliver of its former self – the issuance of writs refers entirely to the House of Lords and thus doesn’t actually say anything to the general public about participating in an election. The only substantive agency which Her Majesty retained was in choosing the date on which the new Parliament met – and per the other provisions of the FTPA this no longer had any knock-on effect for subsequent elections. Even the name was changed – it became simply “A Proclamation for declaring the calling of a new Parliament” instead of “A Proclamation for dissolving the present Parliament and declaring the calling of another”.

Changes in Procedure

Although it may seem a question of semantics, there is an important difference in the sequence of events between FTPA-era elections and earlier ones: Traditional practice involves a proclamation to dissolve Parliament with immediate effect, then an election happening a certain time after that. FTPA practice was for the election date to be fixed far in advance (whether by the other type of proclamation or by statute) and dissolution would happen a certain number of days before that. In the old system a privy council comprising incumbent parliamentarians would convene to cause their own dissolution and the other matters connected, whereas in under the FTPA they would meet to arrange the other matters several hours after dissolution had already occurred.

That brings us to the key point of this article – the time of day at which dissolution actually takes effect: With the FTPA in place and thus the dissolution date pre-ordained without the need for further action, it was logical to treat it as happening as soon as that date arrived*, which would also have been the case under the old system if a Parliament had been allowed to run its full course. When Parliament is being dissolved by a specific proclamation for that purpose, then it obviously must stay in existence until the proclamation is actually produced – and it is rare for a privy council to be convened at midnight. None of the proclamations specified delaying their effects until the end of the date, and obviously they cannot be retroactive to the beginning of the date because, as mentioned in the previous post, there have been instances of Parliaments still sitting earlier on the same date as that on which they would be dissolved, and retroactive dissolution would have meant that the sitting (including any acts passed and royal assents given thereat) was invalid.

In today’s example, the fifty-eighth Parliament had already been prorogued from 24th May to 31st, but until the privy council held around noon there had been nothing in law to cause it to dissolve, and its natural expiration was still many months away. If Sunak’s government had suddenly gotten cold feet about calling an election, or if His Majesty was somehow prevented from attending (for the sake of the hypothetical let us assume he could not arrange any counsellors of state to be there either) and thus the meeting to approve the proclamation had not gone ahead, then Parliament would have remained in existence and reconvened the next day for the beginning of a fifth session.

Given that the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 repealed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act with the explicit intention to revert to pre-2011 procedure as far as possible, it does not make sense for parliamentary authorities to declare in their guidance and press briefings that the legislature had dissolved many hours before any such thing had actually taken place. The most logical explanation (pending further research) that comes to mind is that that the guidance was written during the 2011-22 period and not updated thereafter, so that the FTPA mentality remains in force even though the law itself does not.

This whole business also caused some difficulty for me as a Wikipedia editor, since I noticed upon rising this morning that another editor had, just after midnight, already changed the tense of my disclaimer flairs on the biographies of still-current MPs. I reverted the change and did not set it forward again until many hours later when I had actually seen the proclamation published online. In all fairness the other editor was merely following reliable sources as we are bound to do. Unfortunately this goes to show that there are many times when the reliable sources can still get things wrong.

*There is a secondary deliberation as to whether this means exactly midnight or, to avoid ambiguity, one minute later. I will not quibble with that particular question here as it does not affect the primary matter I am discussing.

UPDATE (May 2024)

David Torrance has produced a research briefing for the House of Commons Library. Page 7 cites this post and states that “This timing was intended for operational purposes rather than as a statement of the legal position.” with page 10 confirming that the actual dissolution occurred at 11:57am with the application of the Great Seal to the proclamation.

Why stop when you’re on a roll?

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Today marks the first anniversary of Their Majesties’ coronation, and there have been some public ceremonies to commemorate.

A few days ago the coronation roll was unveiled, serving as a written record of the proceedings that took place in the abbey (and some of the key events leading up to it) as well as listing all the prominent attendees. As this was the first British coronation to take place in the internet age, a digital version of the roll has also been set up, interlaced with video interviews from many of the core participants.

David Torrance has produced a lengthy briefing document for the House of Commons library about it.

While I’m here, there is another aspect of the coronation on which I’d like to look back – the status of the chairs on which Their Majesties sat during the ceremony. Some weeks before the event the antiquarian Dr Allan Barton put out a video called When Is a Chair a Throne? The answer, essentially, is that it must be on some form of dais to raise it above the floor.

At the business end of the abbey during the coronation there are five seats of special importance: Closest to the alter is St Edward’s Chair, the ancient wooden relic on which the monarch is actually crowned. A few metres behind, in the crossing, sit two “throne chairs”, in this case a pair of X-framed armchairs (almost looking like something a film director would use) originally made for George VI & Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Perpendicular to these are chairs of estate, these ones originally made for Elizabeth II and Philip Mountbatten, allowing the couple to sit behind their respective faldstools.

From what I can see in images of past coronations, both painted and photographic, a pattern is clear – the consort’s throne sits on three steps and the monarch’s throne on five, while the chairs of estate and St Edward’s chair sit directly on the floor. The 2023 coronation breaks the trend – the monarch’s X-framed chair has just one block underneath it while the consort’s counterpart has none at all (though it still has upholstered footstools in front). Does this mean that, technically, only one of these chairs counts as a throne?

IMAGE REFERENCES

That Time of Year Again

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Lord Kakkar by Roger Harris, 2019 (CC-BY-3.0)

St George’s Day – 23rd April – is the traditional day for announcing new appointments to the Order of the Garter. The King today named three new ordinary knights and one new royal lady:

  • The Lord Peach, Chief of the Defence Staff 2016-18. This is fairly unsurprising as another former chief, Lord Stirrup, is also part of the order, as were many other (though not all) chiefs before him.
  • The Lord Kakkar, former Chairman of the Appointments Commissions for both the House of Lords and the Judiciary. He is most prominently known for his work in business and medicine.
  • The Lord Lloyd-Webber, one of the musical composers for the coronation, is probably the most famous. It is perhaps a little surprising that he went directly to the Garter and was not offered the Royal Victorian Order first.
  • The Duchess of Gloucester, President of the Royal Academy of Music since 1997. This appointment is a bit of a departure from convention as, while royals by birth are nearly all given the Garter as a matter of course (Princess Margaret and Prince Michael being odd exceptions), royals by marriage (unless their spouse be first in line to the throne or already sitting on it) generally are not. This honour is presumably in thanks for the additional duties the duchess has taken on since the winding down of Elizabeth II’s reign, and in particular during Charles III’s recent illness. It remains to be seen if the Duchess of Kent will be extended the same.

In addition to these appointments, there was some reshuffling of honorary offices among the other orders of chivalry which in recent years had fallen vacant or merged with the crown: The Queen was made Grand Master of the Order of the British Empire (last held by the Prince Philip, 1953-2021) while the Prince of Wales was made Great Master of the Order of the Bath (last held by Charles himself from 1974 until his accession).

The most revolutionary of today’s changes regards the Order of the Companions of Honour. This was created in 1917 alongside the Order of the British Empire and designed to reward outstanding achievements in art, science, medicine or public service among people who would not accept titular dignities. Appointments are made on ministerial advice. Currently the order has a quota of sixty-five ordinary members, of which two places are currently vacant. There is also one honorary member, the Indian economist Amartya Sen. Until now, no member of the royal family had been appointed a Companion of Honour. Given the origins of the institution, it seems a little odd that His Majesty (or the Prime Minister) would choose to create the supernumerary category of Royal Companion (similar to that in the Garter), and to make his daughter-in-law the Princess of Wales the first incumbent. This stands in contrast to the Order of Merit, in which Elizabeth II appointed both her husband and her son as full members on the same basis as all the others.

In armorial terms, obviously this will mean four new banners to hang in St George’s Chapel. The Duchess of Gloucester’s arms are well-known, and I have already found and illustrated those of Lord Kakkar (though doubtless his increased prominence will lead to a better rendering by a different artist soon enough), but Peach and Lloyd-Webber are a mystery – the former having been ennobled too recently to appear in the last print of Debrett’s.

UPDATE (24th April)

There are now three vacancies among the Companions of Honour, as it transpires that the Lord Field of Birkenhead died while I was writing this post.

Review: Charles III by Robert Hardman

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Robert Hardman is no stranger to royal biography, having already penned quite a handful about Elizabeth II in the last decade or so of her life, including Queen of Our Times which came out in March 2022 as part of her Platinum Jubilee season and then in December of the same year was released again in a “commemorative edition” to update for the fact that she’d died. Now he moves into the present reign with a biography of her eldest son. I am a little confused about the title of this one as the British publication is called “Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story”1 but on Google Books I can see that the United States version is called “The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy”. I suspect the titles must be written this way for SEO purposes, or perhaps he just couldn’t decide which description he wanted so used all of them at once. It must be quite a fraught process to come up with a distinctive and meaningful name for a biography when you know that lots of other biographies will be documenting the same person and all competing to emerge in future history as the one definitive authority thereon. Most likely in the long run the general public (maybe academics too) will discard the pretentious subtitle and just remember it as “[AUTHOR] on [SUBJECT]” (e.g. “Jenkins on Churchill”) instead.

Hardman’s lengthy volume covers the first year of the New Carolean era. As one might expect, this period in royal history was particularly dominated by two big ceremonial events: His mother’s funeral and his own coronation. In the book, the funeral (as well as the period of Operation London Bridge leading up to it) takes up chapters 3, 4 and 5 while the planning and execution of the coronation takes 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. That makes for nine chapters out of a total of eighteen across the whole book. The coronation section in particular is loaded with dense historical comparisons, detailing not just the crowning of Charles III but also quite a lot about those of George VI an Elizabeth II. A less charitable reader may accuse Hardman of padding here, though doubtless a lot of the innovations (and omissions) of 2023 cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of what came before. Anyone buying this book at first printing will, doubtless, have already watched the public side of these events on television as they were happening, so the real value of these chapters is in reading the personal accounts of the people involved as to what went on behind the scenes, such as the aide who spontaneously hugged Princess Anne to console her in her grief, the brigadier getting a summons back to London while giving a speech at his daughter’s wedding in Corfu, the Duke of Norfolk getting his GCVO investiture in a rush so he could wear his sash in the procession or the royal pages being packed off into a side room with some video games. It is worth mentioning as well that Hardman directed a BBC documentary about the coronation and some other aspects of royal life that year which aired at Christmas and can be seen in some ways as the prelude to this book.

The other chapters are about the personalities of Charles & Camilla, the looming political challenges for the institution of the crown and some of the other projects in which the sovereign couple have engaged themselves (such as the Prince’s Trust/Charity/Foundation organisations which now all have to be renamed). The running thread is the process of establishing Charles’s approach to kingship and the need to assert, like most new incumbents whose predecessors served an unusually-long time, that he is his own person and is not obliged to become a clone of his forbear with whom the institution had become synonymous. Charles, of all our sovereigns, had the longest pre-accession life and a brings with him a much more complete (and publicly-known) individual persona, which makes this task all the more pressing. I was amused to read in Chapter 15 that an unnamed senior courtier refers to this as “Doctor Who syndrome”, showing that the habit of explaining the British constitution in terms of that franchise is one that runs all the way to the top. Given the relative perceptions of the new king and his late mother, I would especially see parallels to Colin Baker succeeding Peter Davidson, or Capaldi following Tennant and Smith.

Being acutely aware of some of the less-sympathetic perceptions that have swirled around the royal family as a whole in recent years, and around Charles in particular for many decades, Hardman occasionally includes explicit references to and arguments against ideas emanating from either that acclaimed Netflix drama or statements by the exiled Duke & Duchess of Sussex. At times it can feel as if he has a bit of an axe to grind. It’s probably redundant in any event, as the people likely to be credulous of the claims he’s refuting are not likely to picking up his book in the first place. I’d like to think this is merely a demonstration of Hardman’s passion for truth over sensationalism, but I can’t entirely trust him on that front given he writes for the Daily Mail after all.

These minor quibbles aside, New King New Court is an engaging and enlightening work which I would recommend to anyone interested in the topic area, though any customer (or library) sinking their money into the original edition now may wind up feeling short-changed he does another expanded version in the near future.

1The use of full stops means that the title mercifully evades what TV Tropes calls “Colon Cancer”, though I would have preferred commas.

Waving the White Flag

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In recent weeks there has been some reshuffling of responsibilities within the royal family: The King and the Princess of Wales have both been undergoing cancer treatment, limiting their ability to carry out public engagements away from their residences. Consequently, a greater burden has fallen on His Majesty’s wife and ever-trusty sister.

The Queen’s recent sole engagements have included Douglas City Hall on the Isle of Man (for the presentation of the letters patent to confer city status), and Worcester Cathedral (for the Maundy service ahead of Easter).

As was noted in Mark Scott’s lecture a month ago, the granting of banners of arms to members of the royal family is a separate event from the granting of the armorial achievement itself (rather than being automatic as it would be for lesser armigers). Eighteen months into her tenure as queen consort, it appears that Camilla’s own banner has not been granted, for I have repeatedly seen the Bentley State Limousine flying the ermine-bordered version of the royal standard used for lesser members of the firm who had not been granted personalised heraldic flags of their own, while the shield affixed to the roof shows the arms of the sovereign undifferenced.

As is so often the case, the Wikimedia Community have moved much faster than reality – a graphic representing Camilla’s banner as queen consort was uploaded preemptively way back in 2016 and has been used in multiple articles since her husband’s accession. Perhaps this will need to be revised in light of new evidence.

PHOTOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

Edward gets the Thistle

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The Prince Edward seems to have made a habit of collecting new titles on his birthdays. For the occasion of his wedding in 1999 he was ennobled as Earl of Wessex and Viscount Severn. These both refer to places in England, in contrast with the normal convention for royal peerages. On his fifty-fifth birthday he gained a surprise Scottish title – Earl of Forfar – and then for his fifty-ninth he gained another, long-awaited and far more prestigious one – Duke of Edinburgh. Now that his primary title refers to a Scottish place – and the capital at that – it would seem a little strange for him not to join Scotland’s highest order of chivalry.

It was not exactly surprising, then, to learn that on his sixtieth birthday he had been appointed an Extra Knight of the Order of the Thistle. In this category he joins his nephew the Duke of Rothesay and his sisters the Queen and the Princess Royal. We can expect that soon his banner of arms will be hung alongside theirs at the High Kirk in his namesake city.

The King also announced three new appointments among the ordinary membership of the order – the Baroness Black of Strome, the Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws and Sir Godfrey “Geoff” Palmer – all of whom, curiously, have academic careers. This brings the order up to its full complement of sixteen members (excluding royals). It is unusual for all the appointments to be made today as traditionally they are announced on 18th June.

Finally, a concurrent press release confirmed that the duke had been appointed to a second term as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a post which he last held in 2014-15. In the Scottish order of precedence he will rank immediately below the sovereign himself, rather than his natural precedence as a brother thereof.

Notes on the Memorial of Constantine II at Windsor

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People of prominence often find that one period of mourning is not enough. For many of high status there will be the funeral itself within weeks of their death and then a separate, less formal, memorial service as much as a year later. Prince Philip had one of these in 2022, as did Lady Boothroyd last month.

Constantine II, King of the Hellenes 1964-73, died on 10 January 2023 and his funeral was held in Athens six days later. Yesterday a thanksgiving service took place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, hosted and attended by the British royals.

Although it was a British-hosted event, only the Greek family’s website seems to list the order of service or any photographs. The order of service is has the late monarch’s arms illustrated on the first cover and those of the Order of the Garter on the last. This time the illustration is not that by Sodacan for Wikimedia Commons. I cannot identify the artist for this one, nor which typeface was used for the prose.

Most intriguing about the online material is that it highlights the contribution of the Lord Soames of Fletching. There is even a link to his website, which is still up even though it clearly hasn’t been updated since the most recent general election.