The royal touch: consecration, self-legitimation, and nation building through royal events, 1870-1949

Abstract

How has the British monarchy navigated social change in a period that increasingly questioned the legitimacy of its hereditary power? Previous studies have examined British royals’ frontstage behaviour through the lenses of media representation, majestic royal events, or public perceptions of the monarchy. Instead, this study focuses on the unexplored phenomenon of royals’ selfpublicised daily behaviour. Using advanced quantitative and computational techniques to create a longitudinal dataset of events (N = 150,806), this thesis analyses the Court Circular, the monarchapproved official diary of royal activities published daily in The Times since 1803. This thesis focuses on three aspects of royals’ behaviour. First, drawing upon Kantorowicz’ theory of the king’s two bodies, I examine royals’ interactions with society and find that the royals shifted from publicising their private and leisure-oriented activities to showcasing their constitutional and nation-building bodies. Victorian royal activities centred exclusively on aristocrats before expanding their ties to public officials and the military. By the early 20th century, the monarchy stopped obeying to the peerage etiquette in the frequency of interactions with different peerage ranks, selectively including aristocrats in leisure contexts through patters of segregated inclusion. Second, I examine the geography of royals’ publicised behaviour across Britain. I demonstrate that, in an act of what I term ‘royal touch’ nationalism (building upon Bloch’s concept), royals sporadically visited most of the United Kingdom, but the majority of their engagements remained concentrated in the South of England and London, symbolically consolidating an Anglo-centred union. Finally, looking at the relationship between royal interactions and individuals’ career and title mobility, I find that the monarchy acted simultaneously as a consecrating agent for those already established, a title accelerator for aristocrats, and a career propulsor in the professions that remained strongholds of the patrician elite. This thesis contributes to the sociology of elites, the sociology of nationalism, and historical sociology by putting the monarchy back into sociological debates on status and power.