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 PR dates back centuries.

Long before communications teams and media advisers became fixtures of royal life, Queen Caroline (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 the king of Great Britain and Ireland, George II (1683-1760), Caroline belonged to the House of Hanover. The German dynasty had inherited the British throne only two decades earlier and was still viewed with suspicion by many of their 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 from a fairy tale: a gothic thatched building filled with wax figures of Merlin, legendary prophets and other figures from Britain’s distant past. Many contemporaries thought it bizarre, with one critic........

© The Conversation