The latest season of The Crown (Season 4), spans the history of the British royal family from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, a sensitive period for the stringent moralities of the monarchy. The crown is considered a divine entity by the people of the United Kingdom, and fearful colonizers by the rest of the world. From where we stand today, its reputation hangs by a thread and we are gaining more insight into whether the royal family deserves the pedestal it rests on.
Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales, became a global sensation, not for the things she did, but for the way she was. She had a human element that was rare in her kind - the aristocracy. The British crown's reputation rests mostly on its public appearances today. The family is what we would call an ornamental entity - a nominal head, from where Netflix's The Crown's Queen Elizabeth II asserts at various stages in the show her right to do nothing, the right to not opine. In Season 4, we witness a dramatised disagreement between the Queen and the infamous Tory harbinger of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcherism did not quite agree with Elizabeth, from what we see on The Crown, and at one point in the show, the Queen encourages the Buckingham Palace press secretary to "leak" the story of her disparaging of Thatcher's politics to the press. British news outlets, vultures as they have always been known to be, pick up on the controversy and stir up a storm in a teacup - they go as far as to construe a disagreement at work between two women as a 'constitutional crisis'.
Perhaps it is the same intensity of the British press' interest in the private lives of any and all-powerful people that irritate the royals so much at being "dramatised" on screen. Peter Morgan's portrayal reels us into the lives of these semi-divine entities who want to be considered larger than life and then deconstructs their stories to show us that they are just like us, with an unnatural amount of material wealth and power in their possession. And the infeasibility of this arrangement would likely threaten any powerful family.
Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla Parker Bowles have deactivated their royal Twitter accounts to avoid a recurring backlash from the entity on which their wealth and power rests - the public. The Charleston House inhabitants now have every reason to fear that the Prince of Wales would be asked to stand aside when the crown is passed down, making his son the monarch. The portrayal of members of the royal family on fictionalised television series makes us realize the limitations of their powers, and perhaps that is a threat to powerful families such as theirs.
Queen Elizabeth II has been on her ornamental throne for over 65 years now and in her life as the longest-reigning monarch in the history of Britain, she has witnessed wars, disasters, Royal deaths and divorces, numerous scandals and political turmoil. It seems only fair that the showmakers used her story to delve into the very bed-chambers of Buckingham Palace. The historian and royal expert Robert Lacy, who is also the historical consultant of the show has claimed in his book “The Crown: The Inside History” that the show has dramatized the monarch and moulded it into an entertainment package which has never been done before.
“There’s no doubt that The Crown has changed our perception of the monarchy”, Lacy is quoted saying to BBC.
He argues that it has given the audience a closer look into the Royal family. The Royal family themselves in the past had taken measures, albeit less dramatic like allowing BBC to cover the family as they go on with their daily lives, in order to appear closer to the British public, as portrayed in the third season of The Crown. However, how much of it has yielded results? The monarch, with her family, is still alien to the general public. Ancient rules and laws of titles and greetings (which befuddles young Diana Spencers even before her marriage to Prince Charles) make them far apart from the general public. With this alienation, comes sensationalization. It seems astonishing to the British citizens that “humane” incidents like marriages falling apart and breaking families can affect even the seemingly “perfect” family who are removed from the everyday commonalities living in what seems to be a fairytale.
The Crown’s apparent sneak peek into the royal family also threatens to fuel the anti-monarch sentiments is which growing slowly, but gradually among the new generations even when none of the political parties in power has anti-monarch agendas currently (other than a few individual republican politicians), a 2018 survey showed that 25% of youth aged between 18 to 24 and 23% of the population aged between 25 to 34 openly oppose the Monarchy. These are also the age groups who are the most ardent customers of Netflix. The show portrayed how the family lives a life of privilege whose expenditures are maintained by the tax-payers of the nation. The show also portrayed that there was no heed to control this expenditure even when the country was in the middle of a recession under the Thatcher administration. This is what makes the episode about a man named Micheal Fagan whose unemployment drove him to break into the palace, into the queen’s private chambers, to talk to her seem like a jerk of the nation’s lived reality from which both Thatcher as well as the Royal Family were far removed.
Peter Morgan and Netflix have really struck a chord among the myriad fictionalization of the royal family on screen. There is a method to its madness. With its meticulous recreations of real-time events and its apposite dialogues, 'The Crown' is undoubtedly a compelling work of art. And it makes a point - it took four seasons to get the point across, but it's not lost on us.
Cover Image from Radio Times
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