I complained mildly seven years ago that the Court Circular, the official source for the doings of the British monarchy, referred to the Queen as ‘The Queen’. It made her look like a work of fiction. The Royal Household is at it still, referring to ‘The Princess Royal’, ‘The Royal Navy’ and even ‘The Royal Arms of Canada’. The result looks like the late Betty Kenward’s ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in Harpers & Queen: the triumph of deference over grammar.
No one, I hope, would write ‘The Tower of London’, even though it is Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London. By its nature, the definite article does not partake in the capitalisation of proper names. Unless the name comes at the beginning of a sentence, it is the Thames, the Glorious Twelfth, the Prime Minister, the BBC, the Scottish parliament.
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