The second season of the Netflix show The Crown, released on December 8, is compellingly watchable television, a luscious treat for any recovering Downton Abbey addict or sedulous follower of the British royal family. The series is also an intelligent consideration of some crucial years of 20th-century history, making a subtle case for societal stability, traditional morality, and the institutions that once upheld both. But it lets the other side have its say, too: The series is honest not only about the value of the standards represented by Elizabeth II’s crown but also about the high cost at which they are maintained. It gives fair play to the case against the queen’s unfashionable virtues.
A second season rarely lives up to the promise of a great first one, but with so much history to cover, the writers for The Crown can never be at a complete loss for a plot for the next episode, à la the increasingly hapless folks responsible for House of Cards. On the other hand, that history imposes limitations. We can’t be in real suspense about whether Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage will ultimately survive rumors of his infidelity, whether the royal family will be called Windsor or Mountbatten, or which man Princess Margaret will marry. The show cannot alter those facts without sacrificing our sense that we’re watching a real (or real enough) telling of the life of Queen Elizabeth. The writers get around that problem partly by clever use of little-known bits of historical detail, which can be either reported with freshness or fictionalized without contradicting our memories. They do a little of both. We probably don’t remember whether Ghana stayed in the Commonwealth after independence, and we don’t know the details of Prince Philip’s private secretary’s divorce. Elizabeth’s decision in the first season about whether to promote a junior functionary over the head of a senior one against palace protocol was, astonishingly, both turned into a cliffhanger and freighted with deep thematic significance.
The Crown also keeps us watching with a great script and some of the finest acting on screen. Claire Foy as Elizabeth and Matt Smith as Philip are pure joy to watch. They’ve created two unusual characters and a compelling relationship. And what they manage to convey by their facial expressions alone is remarkable. I’m thinking particularly of Smith in the closing scene of the second season, in which two crucial parts of the complex and long-obscure truth about Prince Philip’s rumored affairs are revealed in one extended close-up of his face—and of Foy in nearly every scene.
Queen Elizabeth (Claire Foy) meets Jackie Kennedy (Jodi Balfour) [Alex Bailey / Netflix]
The writing is brilliant. Elizabeth on Jackie Kennedy’s unhappy marriage before the assassination: “That’s the thing about unhappiness. All it takes is for something worse to come along. And you realize it was actually happiness after all.” But it’s not just bons mots. For every argument the story seems to make there’s a counterargument. We have no sooner accepted the theory that Elizabeth’s (apparent) toleration of Philip’s (apparent) adultery is reasonable, even an admirable expression of love, than we’re made to see how utterly contemptible Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s complaisance at his wife’s lifelong betrayal is.
This point-counterpoint technique is applied to the main theme that in one way or another animates nearly every episode of The Crown. Critic Kyle Smith has pointed to the “stirring and deeply considered apologia for Burkean conservatism”—an argument for “the intermingled values of duty, honor, discipline, self-control, patriotism, and tradition”—in the warning that a trusted palace official offers Elizabeth against jumping the junior functionary over the senior one. The extraordinary speech in that first-season scene was sit-up-and-take-notice television, like the moment in Breaking Bad when Walter White writes “Judeo-Christian principles” on the “con” side of his list for deciding whether or not to commit his first premeditated murder. But it’s far from the final word. Egalitarianism gets its say, particularly in the season two story of Lord Altrincham’s campaign to modernize the monarchy. And authenticity, liberation, and emotional intensity—the forces perpetually besieging the monarchy, its traditions, and the monarch’s commitment to duty—get theirs when Princess Margaret’s delirious happiness in her unconventional relationship with Antony Armstrong-Jones, who is helping her find her true self at last (or so she believes), is contrasted with Elizabeth and Philip’s dutiful entertainment of boring VIPs and separate preparations for separate beds in their separate rooms.
Viewers may find themselves thinking that falling for a gender-bending photographer precisely because he has contempt for you and your family is likely to turn out better for those who possess the social capital of a royal princess than for those who don’t. Or that living at the inflection point between tradition and modernity, when you can still rely on the residual benefits of the societal structures that you’re helping break down, looks like more fun than living in the aftermath.
* * *
We are on the other side of the great wave of social change whose story is explored in The Crown. Nostalgia for the structures washed away by that wave is one driver of the demand for costume dramas like this one—and Downton Abbey, which made an under-the-radar case for the value of the societal constraints whose breakdown the show was on the surface celebrating. Downton’s Lady Sybil encouraged the servants to educate themselves for better jobs and ran off with the chauffeur. Gay footman Thomas won the acceptance even of Carson, the Archie Bunker of the servants’ hall. Ultimately, though, the series came down on the side of nostalgia for the past that was dissolving before our eyes. Thus it tended to ricochet between earnest after-school-special-style promotion of an issue of the week and sentimental sops to our weaknesses for happy endings for the charming and vindication for the downtrodden. Downton Abbey was only—or maybe only almost—saved from descent into soap-opera cheapness by fabulous settings and costumes, delicious nuggets of historical trivia, and good acting.
The Crown takes up a question that made Downton as deeply conservative as it was superficially liberal: the relationship between community and authority. What we ultimately learned from life at the abbey was that life in common requires hierarchy. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in defense of St. Paul’s perennially unpopular admonition to wives to obey their husbands, some kind of authority is necessary to maintain any permanent bond between people. The whole Downton milieu was a wonderful little society held together by the power, wealth, style, loyalties, and principles of a bygone aristocracy. Lord Grantham was the benevolent constitutional ruler whose authority made the imperfect but ultimately satisfying common life of Downton’s inhabitants possible.
As grateful as we are not to be living like Daisy the kitchenmaid, that community was naturally attractive to us inhabitants of a 21st-century society that is atomizing at an alarming rate, with institutional and other ties fraying. We wouldn’t want to give up our freedoms, but the constraints that we have thrown off, from class distinctions to old-fashioned sexual morality, did a lot to maintain connections between people, contributing to happiness and overall wellbeing. Part of the appeal of these historical dramas is the chance to wallow in a fantasy of living in a tighter social nexus without having to pay the costs or make the tradeoffs.
But The Crown isn’t just fantasy fluff for deracinated postmoderns. Its explicit theme is those very tradeoffs and costs, which are felt by all the characters but chiefly borne by Elizabeth, whose unique role it is to embody the British nation and to buttress the strength of her people. Her whole life is an exhausting exercise in metonymy: She represents the health of the nation, and the crown itself is a sort of representation of her representation, so that Elizabeth carries the weight of it all on her head both literally and figuratively. In her shining example—her gracious manners, ideal family life, impeccably tasteful clothes and jewels, absolute commitment to duty, and flawless adherence to the highest moral standards—the public sees a picture of the nation’s flourishing and of the virtues that make it possible. The monarchy gives the people something that is infinitely above them and yet belongs intimately to them, something they can admire, trust in, and emulate.
* * *
Some of the most compelling drama in the series highlights the burdens that Elizabeth bears and that she imposes on her nearest and dearest in her unyielding resolution to maintain the prestige of the monarchy. It’s a perennial question—whether it’s fair to expect other people to suffer for one’s own principles. Often the person whose principles demand the suffering gets more out of the situation than the person doing the suffering. The wealth and lifestyle enjoyed by the other members of the royal family are no small compensation for their sacrifices, but the queen enjoys greater perks and more authority than they do.
By the end of the first season, the show was suggesting that the cost to Elizabeth herself might be too high. In the final scene, we see the queen sitting for an official photograph; she is told to erase all traces of her individual personality from her face and pose as “Gloriana,” a hint that her persistent choosing of the sterner virtues over more humane values and of her position over everyone around her might be turning her to stone.
The petrification theme was originally introduced by that enigmatic character the Duke of Windsor. The former Edward VIII, who famously abdicated the throne for the woman he loved, is a fascinating foil to Elizabeth in both seasons. Elizabeth has been warned that the smallest deviation from protocol could start her down the road of “willfulness” and “individualism” that ended in the abdication. She might be pulling out a thread that could unravel the entire garment.
Prince Philip (Matt Smith) and Queen Elizabeth (Claire Foy) [Coco Van Oppens / Netflix]
Through most of the first season of The Crown, I kept wondering why the theme of “The Abdication” as the disaster to be avoided at all costs, the original Fall and expulsion from the original Eden, had so much resonance. And then the penny dropped. “The Abdication” for the British royal family is just like “The Divorce” for so many of us children of the 1970s. It’s the original tragedy that tore our world apart and must not be repeated. The timing actually makes sense. The British aristocracy embraced its own sexual revolution 40 years ahead of the one that eventually reached the American suburbs. Read the novels of Evelyn Waugh or the real-life adventures of the Mitfords and the rest of the 1930s smart set Waugh was satirizing, and you encounter a strangely familiar world: sexual adventurism suddenly commonplace in a generation whose parents still found it shocking, adults in reckless pursuit of their own happiness in disregard of their children’s welfare, divorce courts rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.
Given this context, the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip is a kind of anachronism. As the two of them agree at the start of the new season, they are living under unique constraints: “The exit route which is open to everyone else—” “Divorce?” “Yes, divorce. It’s not an option for us. Ever.” “No.” At the time that makes their marriage look like what Philip calls it: “A prison.” But ultimately—or at least by the end of the second season—their relationship looks not only more admirable but even more interesting than the relationships defined by the new ethos of pursue what you want and never mind the old rules. That in itself is an argument of a sort for the principles, ideals, and taboos that the monarchy is supposed to exemplify.
Elizabeth Kantor is the author of The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After.
