Bertie and Elizabeth

This isn't a review so much as it is an explanation. In the film, King George V is at dinner with David, Bertie, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Queen Mary. David asks George V "why this obsession with ritual?" and George V replies "Monarchy is ritual, boy. That's why. Doing things in the prescribed manner. You've read your Badgett...". Badgett is how the closed captioning spells the word.

I have tried several times to locate anything named or written by Badgett and have always come up empty. So I began to play around with the spelling of Badgett. And I stumbled upon Walter Bagehot who wrote a book called, "The English Constitution", which was originally published in 1867. After the Reform Act of 1867, an extensive addition was added in the 2nd edition of 1872.

The book explores the nature of the English Constitution and its relation to Parliament and Monarchy. This is, I believe, the book David has supposedly read which sets out how to do things in the prescribed manner.