In 1957, complimenting Cecil Beaton on his volume of royal portraits, the Queen Mother admitted that her clan owed its survival in part to his obsequious camera. “As a family,” she wrote, “we must be deeply grateful to you for producing us, as really quite nice and real people!” The reality was relative, which is why she used the term twice, had to italicise it the second time, and ended the sentence with an amazed exclamation at the fiction-making feat, but she was right to defer to him. As Claudia Acott Williams discloses in Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits, like a Hollywood mogul or a Broadway impresario Beaton was responsible for producing a costume drama that pretended to represent the identity of the nation, or of a disunited kingdom’s four fractious nations.
Once it was God who did the producing: monarchs, as Shakespeare’s Richard II tetchily puts it, were “deputies elected by the Lord”. That sense of sacred entitlement has given way to shrewd, deceptive PR; now, instead of an aureole representing divine grace, kings and queens have only a flimsy image to distinguish them from the rest of us. Edward VII made precious, petulant attempts to control the way he was depicted, and outraged precedent in doing so. He insisted on showing only his left profile to ensure that the parting of his hair was visible, which meant that on the new coins minted for his brief reign he did not face in the opposite direction to his predecessor, as dynastic protocol dictated. Did his coiffure matter more to him than the crown?
