Best in show

“This image is quite clearly taken from the centrepiece of Van Dyck’s triple portrait of Charles I and it is, if you’ll pardon the expression, very well executed.

It was painted by Henry Pierce Bone who – along with his father, Henry senior – produced a series of enamel miniatures of earlier, larger portraits of kings and queens in the mid-19th century.

They were carrying on a 200-year-old tradition that saw newly rich families commissioning paintings of monarchs to hang alongside their own family portraits. This practice helped establish them as loyal servants of the Crown, people of lineage and, perhaps, the first middle class.

The Bones’s patron, however, was Prince Albert, who purchased the pictures for £400 in 1843 and placed them in his dressing room at Buckingham Palace.

Prince Albert may well have felt like a ‘new boy’ who came over here to marry a queen at a time of great change. He could have set the Bones to work on a series of paintings of his wife’s early ancestors to help him feel more ‘at home’.

We have 26 of them on display at Southwell Minster in an exhibition that celebrates the Queen’s 60 years as supreme governor of the Church of England.

It’s quite a coup to get them and it happened almost by chance. Looking to complement a set of 17th-century Long Gallery pictures of monarchs we borrowed from Ripon Cathedral, I got in touch with my former director at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who is now, rather helpfully, surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.

I asked him if he thought there might be a similar set lying in a corridor at Osborne House or somewhere like that. He offered these wonderful pictures, which the Royal Collection is loaning to a cathedral for the first time.

Of all the monarchs featured in them, the reign of Charles I has a real resonance in Southwell, a place he visited quite regularly.

When things really started to heat up during the civil war, the king escaped from Oxford and was smuggled into what is now the Saracen’s Head Hotel in the town where he was hoping to persuade Scottish forces to return to the Royalist fold.

He was double-crossed, of course, and handed over to Cromwell’s soldiers at nearby Newark. And the rest, to say the least, is history.”

Monarchy: Icons and Imagery of Royalty runs in Southwell Minster’s Chapter House from 19 May to 17 June

Charlie Leggatt is the director of fundraising at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire