How Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18th-century royal PR strategy
Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18C royal PR strategy
In 1735, Queen Caroline, wife of George II, commissioned Merlin's Cave, a gothic folly filled with wax figures, in her Richmond gardens. Facing a dynasty viewed as foreign and a public feud with her son, she used Arthurian legend to craft a distinctly British identity for the House of Hanover. This article explores how myth served as political messaging, and how critics' mockery proved they understood her intent.
Legitimacy depends not on inheritance, but on the stories people tell about who belongs to the nation and who should shape its future.
- Ylano
"Foreign dynasty needs stronger local branding, commissions elaborate content tying itself to beloved national mythology" could almost be a communications strategy written today. Merlin's Cave is just an unusually expensive 18th-century version of it.
- zenbane
No actual evidence in this article that this "PR Move" was anything other than a common garden folly. This article and "research" is long on assumption and speculation and has less evidence than an arthurian tale. Can modern historians provide anything of substance these days?
- jph
If you like Arthur, you may be surprised that some scholars think he wasn't English, but rather he was Cymro/Welsh: https://www.wales.com/about/history-and-heritage/welsh-tradi...