Analyzing Royalty’s Mystique

This three-day conference, which will feature talks on subjects ranging from hats and monarchs to the role of the Crown in a constitutional system, commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s ascension to the throne as well as the recently completed renovation of the palace. But it can also be seen as an unofficial celebration of another refurbishment: that of the study of modern monarchy itself.

Biographers and popular historians have never lost sight of royalty, especially if madness, romance and scandal were involved. But until recently the serious study of modern British monarchy — those kings and queens who for the past two centuries have reigned but not ruled — was covered in a thick layer of dust, if not disrepute.

“For many historians on the right, the monarchy was just there and it was good, so there was no reason to study it,” said David Cannadine, a professor of history at Princeton University and an organizer of the conference. “For historians on the left, it was absurd and indefensible, so there was no reason to study it.”

Many scholars trace the resurgence of scholarly interest to an essay by Professor Cannadine published in 1983, in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, lamenting the tendency to see the modern monarchy as little more than a highbrow soap opera of minimal interest to a profession that had turned decisively toward bottom-up social history. Since then, however, scholars have gone into the archives and emerged with serious studies of royal finances, ceremony, philanthropy and political power, often linking this most elite of elites to the concerns of ordinary people.

“The modern monarchy is not just a subject for biography,” said Arianne Chernock, an assistant professor of history at Boston University. “It has so much more use as a window onto broader cultural trends, attitudes and the way people imagine themselves as citizens.”

Professor Chernock is currently writing a book about 19th-century British perceptions of queenship, which, she argues, illuminate the broader rising demand for women’s political rights. “From the death of Catherine the Great to the election of Margaret Thatcher, no women were technically ruling European states,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean sovereigns aren’t doing real work. What does it mean to have a hereditary position when so few women have any power?”

Britons debated the relationship between Queen Victoria’s femininity and her sovereignty, while newspapers were filled with coverage of foreign female monarchs like the rapacious Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar (who expelled British missionaries and legalized the slave trade there) and Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti, whose struggles with the French were depicted as struggles on behalf of the rights of the people.

Even the feminist trailblazer Helena Normanton, Britain’s first practicing female barrister, who was called to the bar in 1922, was obsessed with monarchy and queens, filling her files with elaborate diagrams about their movements and activities.

“You get a profound sense that this fascination was linked to Normanton’s own pioneering work,” Professor Chernock said. “Women are taking comfort in the sense that they have this tradition of holding power.”

The monarchy has also been taken increasingly seriously by historians of the British Empire, who point out that even as the power of the Crown declined at home during the 19th century, it was expanded abroad, where Queen Victoria was often seen as a unifying figure as well as a defender of minority interests.

She was far from a mere symbolic prop in the imperial drama, said Miles Taylor, the director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and author of the forthcoming book “Empress: Queen Victoria and India.” Instead, he argued, she took an active role in drafting the 1858 proclamation bringing India under Crown control, restoring religious freedom and guaranteeing its inhabitants the same rights as other imperial subjects.

“From there on, Queen Victoria became seen as a sort of patriot queen, separate from the British government, deified and invoked for her generosity and sympathy,” he said.