Back in the 1990s, when I was a student at Cambridge, I met Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret. A party had been arranged in her honor by the historian J. H. Plumb. There was jazz and dancing; the champagne flowed. Her Royal Highness drifted around, making excruciatingly banal conversation with everyone there. She seemed utterly bored. Certainly we were. One wondered why she bothered. The second season of Netflix’s series The Crown provides a partial answer. Such parties were an escape from the even more excruciatingly banal duties of being a minor British royal.
A more recent “spare” to the British throne, Prince Harry, is soon to be married to the American actress Meghan Markle. That’s great news for whoever does the marketing for The Crown. The royal engagement was announced just before the second season of the show, which covers the years 1956 to 1963, launched, perfectly teeing up a major storyline about Princess Margaret’s relationship with the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones. “Tony” was similarly welcomed as an egalitarian breath of fresh air for the monarchy. Queen Elizabeth surely appreciates the irony of how the public and media adore Markle—that she has been married and divorced seeming to matter not at all. Had King Edward VIII been able to marry his American divorcée rather than abdicate in 1936, reluctant Elizabeth may never have become queen at all. And had Margaret been allowed to marry her father’s divorced equerry Peter Townsend, she might have found the happiness that eluded her.
Harry and Meghan’s engagement is just one of the ways in which life is imitating art in The Crown. The midcentury fictional Elizabeth is pregnant with her third child. The Duchess of Cambridge, wife of Harry’s older brother—the future King William V—is pregnant with her third child. Anglo-American tensions abound, with prime minister and president at loggerheads then and now. Even #MeToo finds its echo in strong storylines about sexual harassment and abusive behavior. Elizabeth’s husband Philip invites a female journalist to his private quarters for an interview (the young woman outfoxes him), and John F. Kennedy is seen verbally and physically abusing Jackie. Taking one last curtain call is Christine Keeler—focal point of the infamous Profumo scandal when she shared her bed alternately with a British cabinet minister and the Soviet military attaché in London. Keeler died just a few days before the release of the new season, which has the scandal that rocked the British establishment to its core in 1963 in the background.
“What the hell is going on in this country?” asked the Daily Mirror at the height of Keeler’s fame. And pre-Brexit Britain is a country every bit as anxious and divided as the one portrayed in the show. At the start of this new season, Elizabeth accuses the errant Philip of “being lost in your role and lost in yourself.” It’s a conscious echo of former secretary of state Dean Acheson’s cutting 1962 observation that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Themes of inglorious decline and institutions in peril ebb and flow throughout the 10 episodes. The public attack on the crown from Lord Altrincham in 1957 made plain what should have been obvious: “republics, not monarchies, are now the rule, not the exception.”
But what’s striking about watching The Crown is how the sense of a monarchy in peril is one way in which this series does not echo contemporary events. While all around her political and cultural institutions are under assault, Queen Elizabeth II, 65 years into her reign, seems never to have been more popular and admired. The younger generation of William and Harry, with some added Markle Sparkle, are liked and respected. Even public reservations about Prince Charles, now 69, are tempered by a grudging acceptance that, after waiting so long, he’ll deserve his short tenure in the top job when the time comes.
Quite how the royal family arrived at this unexpectedly strong position is the obsession at the heart of The Crown. Virtually every one of Peter Morgan’s storylines this season brilliantly explores the tensions between traditionalists (Elizabeth herself, the Queen Mother, loyal courtier Tommy Lascelles) and modernists (Margaret, Prince Philip, the former Edward VIII) as they battle on how best to rescue a then-unpopular and unfashionable institution.
Characters caught in the middle usually get crushed. Poor young Charles is a case in point. The standard line on the heir-to-throne’s childhood has always been that Philip inflicted his own alma mater, the Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, on the boy because he cared little or nothing about his son’s happiness. Morgan suggests another side of the story. The decision to send Charles to Gordonstoun was made out of a determination to break the mold—to get him “away from all this nonsense” and to stop him becoming just another upper-class twit. “This is not the real world,” Philip explains lovingly to him at Buckingham Palace in the ninth episode. “Who we are is not what glitters, it’s the spirit that defines us.” But instead of making the boy, the school breaks him. The real Charles compared the school to a prisoner-of-war camp—“Colditz in kilts.”
Images that contrast different attitudes to what’s fashionable occur time and again in the second season of The Crown, from a witty use of Handel’s coronation anthem “Zadok the Priest,” as Elizabeth gets her trademark helmet hairstyle (complete with rollers), to the sinister moment when the always à la mode Margaret is chased by paparazzi in a scene evoking the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
While the actress Claire Foy doesn’t look like the queen, she perfectly captures her voice and her ruthless integrity. Her Elizabeth eviscerates Prime Minister Anthony Eden after the Suez Crisis, exposing his neuroses at being “in Winston’s shadow.” Even though Eden will lie to the House of Commons over Suez, he cannot bring himself to lie to her. Philip, too, when the crucial moment comes, cannot lie to her. “There’s ice in those veins if there needs to be,” he says, and we don’t doubt it.
In the end, The Crown is a story about the triumph of duty. The Queen Mother complains at one point, “the stings and bites we suffer as it all slips away, piece by piece; our authority, our divine right; from ruling to reigning to nothing at all—marionettes.” Her daughter understands that her job is to keep the show on the road, even if sometimes it means, says Elizabeth, “I feel like an actress, like a showgirl.”
All around is “progress,” even revolution. Fashions and attitudes change at a bewildering speed. Modernizers, whether egalitarian or from the beau monde, urge constant change and innovation on the monarchy. They have many good points. Philip is right to insist the 1953 coronation be televised. Margaret personifies a certain type of sexiness, at once audacious and vulnerable. We feel her exhilaration and freedom riding through London at night on a motorcycle.
But whatever utility the modernizers have, they lack Elizabeth’s wider sense of duty and honor. Philip is irresponsible and self-indulgent—a “boy,” she calls him. His friends in the infamous Thursday Club think they’re fun-loving hedonists, but today we recognize them as predatory and misogynistic, badgering young waitresses and female journalists for sex. Margaret is heartbreaking. We sympathize with her yearning to break away, but the amoral world of Antony Armstrong-Jones is dissolute to the point of coldness and cruelty. Modernity, at least as represented here, seems to mean not loving anyone, not committing to anyone, not being loyal to anyone.
Today, we are struck by what is modern about the young royals, symbolized by Harry’s marriage to a biracial American divorcée. But many presumably are also comforted by what is traditional about them. For while the Wills, Kates, Harrys, and Meghans of the world are socially progressive in ways that their grandparents could not imagine, they manage to be both Elizabeth and Margaret by remaining conservative in manners and mores.
Elizabeth, with her severe manner and dowdy fashions, may not provoke excitement or even tenderness, but she does inspire loyalty. She symbolizes a certain kind of unchanging integrity. In the end, that turns out to matter for an institution like the monarchy. It’s an interesting thought, and one as unfashionable today as it was in the 1960s, that some traditions might be worth holding on to even when they appear anachronistic. In that regard the conservative Elizabeth has had the last laugh. For while the morals and ideas of the 1960s modernists look burnt out, she carries on, not fashionable, but always there—grandmother to the nation.
In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange
There was one constant good:
She did not change.
Philip Larkin, the great poet of her reign, wrote affectionate beautiful lines for her silver jubilee in 1977. But he wasn’t quite right. The Crown demonstrates that Elizabeth understood that she had to change just enough in order for things to stay the same.
Richard Aldous is the Eugene Meyer professor of British history at Bard College. His books include The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli.
