‘A GREAT MANY STRANGE PUPPETS’:: QUEEN CAROLINE, MERLIN’S CAVE, AND SYMBOLIC ARTHURIANISM IN THE AGE OF REASON

Abstract

In 1735, an unusual building appeared in the gardens at Richmond Palace. It was commissioned by Queen Caroline, built in Gothic style, and christened ‘Merlin’s Cave’. Visitors who ventured inside this strange construction were confronted by six life-sized wax figures taken from both English history and, more interestingly, Arthurian myth. Part of a meticulously constructed and consciously symbolic iconographic programme that utilised Arthurian myth, medievalist sentiment, and patriotism, Merlin’s Cave was an attempt to integrate and authorise Hanoverian rule and to manufacture a relationship between the contemporary court and Britain’s native mythologies and literatures. The divided political responses to Merlin’s Cave demonstrate, along with other 1730s appropriations of King Arthur and Merlin, that the early eighteenth century was increasingly receptive to medievalism. Such appropriations combined Whiggish political sentiment and changing conceptions of the past to create distinctively eighteenth-century appropriations of the Arthurian mythos. By considering the ways in which both Caroline’s iconographic programme within Merlin’s Cave and literary responses to it fostered medievalist sentiments, this paper will demonstrate the necessity for modern scholars to assess the early eighteenth century by historical standards other than those of the Neo-Classical. Far from being the nadir of Arthurian myth, this paper will contend that the early eighteenth century engendered patriotic cultural memories and passions that laid the foundations for a wider re-emergence of Arthurian romance from the mid-century onwards.