This 18th-Century British Queen Turned King Arthur Into a P.R. Strategy, Drawing on Myth to Promote Her Dynasty's Claim to the Throne

Amid family feuds, damaging headlines and questions about its future role, Britain’s royal family has spent much of the past decade managing its public image. But the importance of good royal P.R. dates back centuries. Long before communications teams and media advisers became fixtures of royal life, Queen Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1683-1737) attempted a remarkable piece of image management.

Faced with the challenge of making a German royal dynasty seem unmistakably British, she turned to one of Britain’s most powerful national stories: the legends of King Arthur and Merlin. As the wife of Great Britain and Ireland’s then-king, George II (1683-1760), Caroline belonged to the House of Hanover. The German dynasty had only inherited the British throne in 1714 and was still viewed with suspicion by many of its subjects.

At the same time, an increasingly public feud between the king and his heir, Frederick, Prince of Wales, threatened to undermine the image of stability that a country recently torn apart by civil war, religious schisms and political revolution so desperately needed. Caroline’s solution to this problem was unexpected. In 1735, she commissioned a curious attraction in the gardens of her palace at Richmond.

Known as Merlin’s Cave, it looked like something out of a fairy tale: a Gothic thatched building filled with wax figures of Merlin, legendary prophets and other individuals from Britain’s distant past. Many contemporaries thought the grotto bizarre, with one critic dismissing its inhabitants as “a great many strange puppets.” Yet Merlin’s Cave was far more than an eccentric garden folly. Although an unlikely tool of statecraft, Caroline’s use of Arthurian iconography sought not only to strengthen the Hanoverian claim but also to promote a shared British identity at a time of political uncertainty.

The House of Hanover had inherited the British throne two decades earlier and did not yet possess a deep-rooted place in the nation’s imagination. George I, who reigned between 1714 and 1727, preferred his native Hanover to his new dominion and had relied heavily on interpreters and intermediaries throughout his reign. This exposed the Protestant dynasty to accusations that its kings were foreign rulers.

Supporters of the exiled Stuart dynasty, known as Jacobites, continued to regard the son of the Catholic king James II, who’d been deposed by his Protestant daughter and son-in-law in 1688, as Britain’s legitimate ruler. They had attempted ill-fated but bloody uprisings in support of James Francis Edward Stuart, the so-called Old Pretender, in 1715 and 1719. On his accession to the throne in 1727, George II therefore faced a challenge that was both political and cultural: He needed not only to rule Britain but also to persuade his people that he belonged there.