Hughes nailed his flag to the mast of the establishment when he became Poet Laureate, not just by accepting the post, but by reviving its most archaic and despised function, the celebration of royal birthdays, which had lapsed in the early nineteenth century. He joined the line of Shadwell, Cibber and Southey in being derided by other poets for his loyal efforts, and for his relations with members of the Royal Family. Reviewing Rain-Charm for the Duchy and Other Laureate Poems for the Sunday Times, Peter Reading described most of the poems as ‘clumsily contrived, cringingly sycophantic hack-work’, and speculated that ‘the poet laureate has been superseded by the court jester’. Becoming Laureate coincided with, and may have contributed to, a decline in Hughes’s critical reputation. Yet he probably took his royal verses more seriously than any of his mediocre eighteenth-century predecessors. He was a lifelong monarchist and, while still at university, had composed a dialogue between Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, in which the former scorns the latter’s reduced role, saying,