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?
When George VI took over after the abdication, his canny consort understood how tenuous the family’s hold on the nation’s affection was. In 1940 Beaton acclaimed the “genius” of Queen Elizabeth, who “caused Buckingham Palace to be bombed so that the East Enders should not be alone in their misery” – the wartime blitz was one more spectacular production, in which the royal family could pretend to be suffering because the fringes of their opulent headquarters had taken a hit. By 1960, further acts of appeasement were necessary. Deliberating over which photographs of Princess Margaret’s glamorous wedding should be released to the press, the Queen Mother cooed: “This is for the dear public!” Then, in an aside to Beaton, she joked about distant rumbles of revolt: “I hope the populace aren’t too furious!”
Beaton the producer sometimes despaired of the uncharismatic mannequins he had to flatter. He sniffed at Edward VII’s “common hands”, thought that George VI lacked “mystery or magic”, and considered Elizabeth II “very inanimate”. Of course she could not appear to be lively: she had to function as a static icon, animated only by a waving hand that might have been automated and exhibiting a permanent smile that, she once privately confessed, caused her facial muscles to harden into a grim, painful rictus. She commented wistfully on her constitutional impotence in her 1957 Christmas broadcast. “I cannot lead you into battle,” she said, adding: “I do not give you laws”; she offered a private emotional tryst instead, cosily telling her subjects: “I can give you my heart.”
In her symbolic role, Elizabeth II compliantly transmitted what Acott Williams calls the “messaging” of successive governments. Her robes for the coronation were embroidered with emblems evoking Commonwealth territories to which post-imperial Britain still clung. Before an African tour in 1955, Beaton photographed her enthroned under a crimson canopy and loaded with gemstones, a display of riches that was supposed to intimidate republican agitators in Nigeria; the rebels were unpersuaded. Opening the Sydney Opera House in 1973, she even had the outline of its angular sails stitched into her dress, only to be outdone by Dame Edna Everage, who hoisted the entire edifice on to her batty head and wore it as a helmet. Ultimately, the monarch, like a fashion model, became a clothes horse. In Philip Ziegler’s Queen Elizabeth II: A Photographic Portrait, newly updated, she can be seen posed outdoors at Balmoral, adorned in “the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle” and bizarrely crowned among the heather beneath a baleful sky: Julian Calder’s image presents the state’s heraldic pomp as an absurdly overdressed charade.
Photographs of Elizabeth II, according to Ziegler, were the sole fixative in “a disintegrating society”. But the hallowing influence of those images wore out, and the poor woman stoically presided over the ensuing disintegration: on her last day at work she was obliged to exchange small talk with the ousted Boris Johnson, before inviting Liz Truss to cobble together a self-destructive maladministration in her name. After that, she had surely earned her merciful release. Charles III was subsequently anointed with holy oil, but has not inherited his mother’s studiously impersonal aura. In a diary entry about a Buckingham Palace assignment in 1960, Beaton described Prince Charles as “perpetually hunched”, with a “wrinkled forehead” and a “pained look in the eyes as if awaiting a clout from behind”. A very senior version of that insecure, apologetic adolescent, happy to chat to his herbaceous borders but flustered by leaky fountain pens, now reigns over us.
As an unctuous courtier, Beaton kept such sly insights to himself. His successors are the furtive snappers who watch for moments when the official countenance falters – Prince Andrew (in a photograph whose authenticity he disputes) with his arm hooked around a nubile teenager, Prince Harry partying in Nazi regalia, Prince Louis brattily grimacing while on parade. These formerly sacrosanct figures have been redefined as celebrities, which means that at best they are temporary gods, gratifying their audience most keenly when brought low by scandal. The populace may not be irate, but it is always ready for a bout of defamatory laughter.
• Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits by Claudia Acott Williams is published by Thames & Hudson (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• Queen Elizabeth II: A Photographic Portrait by Philip Ziegler is published by Thames & Hudson (£40). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
