I love The Crown. Unapologetically. Every season. Every episode. Peter Morgan is a genius. I love the history, the characters—yes, the characters. I love the human frailty, the flaws, the struggle, the failures, the successes. All of it. For better and for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health! Blah, blah, blah. I love it. I know it’s fiction. I know there’s truth in fiction. I know the devil is in the details, and all of that. I still love it. I love it the more so for the way it makes me think and the way it challenges my own as well as others’ prejudiced, oversimplified, and conventionally accepted notions about what it means to be in the royal family.
Season Five—and I’m only three episodes in—has already got me thinking about the system itself. I think this is appropriate, given that the second episode is titled, The System. There’s a speech from Jonathan Pryce, in character as Prince Philip, and delivered in a dialogue with Elizabeth Debicki, as Princess Diana, which eloquently expresses the general meaning of the System. “You’re not a novice anymore,” he tells her. “You’re long past the point of thinking of us as a family. That’s the mistake people make in the beginning, but you understand, I think, it’s a system. And we’re all in this system. You, me, the Boss. The cousins, the uncles, the aunts. The lepers.” (That’s a joke between them about Diana’s name for Kensington Palace, ‘the leper colony,’ where there’s no privacy.) “For better or for worse,” Pryce as Philip continues. “We’re all stuck in it. And we can’t just air our grievances and throw bombs in the air as in a normal family, or we end up damaging something much bigger and something much more important. The system. So the tip I want to give you is this. I mean, just…. just be creative. You can break as many rules as you like. You can do whatever you want. You can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness. As long as you remember the one condition. The one rule. You remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family. In public.”
Debicki-Diana challenges him: “You mean silent?”
“Yes,” he answers, quickly and unhesitatingly. “Don’t rock the boat,” he implores.
“Ever. To the grave.”1
And it must have sunk in, for Debicki-Diana, how earth-shattering her actions in secretly smuggling narratives to Andrew Morton would prove to be.
In the System, there are ways to make yourself happy. You can do lots of things that other people do. Hobbies, lovers, friendships. Adopting/fostering dogs and cats. Curling up on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn. Whatever. Just don’t rock the boat. Don’t betray the family. Don’t double-cross the Boss. (It’s interesting how Dominic West as Prince Charles double crosses ‘the Boss’ in the first episode. The real Charles rocked the boat in his own way!)
No news is good news for the System. Two of the longtime ‘leper colony’ residents, Prince Richard and Birgitte, Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, never made serious headlines at any time in their multiple decades of working for the System. As a grandchild of King George V, the Duke of Gloucester is a first cousin of the late Queen, and Birgitte is his Danish-born wife. They wake up, get dressed, and clock in to do the most boring duties on the Court Circular. (I don’t think the Gloucesters ever get to christen ships with a bottle of champagne, which really sucks for them because if I was a royal, that’s the only kind of duty I’d ever want to do.) And yet they never complain, they never speak, they never rock the boat. They are two of the most boring people alive. Eventually, they will die and no one in the public will feel that they knew them at all. A kind-hearted, eloquent, compassionate obituary will be written for the Duke of Gloucester in the Telegraph, but anyone seeing that bit of newsprint will think, Oh, that’s sad. Sorry for his family. Most of you are probably asking, “Who in tarnation is the Duke of Gloucester?” (Medieval history buffs might think I’m referring to Richard III, also titled Duke of Gloucester before becoming King.)
The Gloucesters are an admirable couple; I don’t doubt it. The fact that the media never talks about them—except to bring up the Duke’s “controversial” advocacy for windmill energy2 or the fact that, for royals, they are comparatively poor since they can barely afford to keep ownership of the Duke’s inherited manor—means, of course, that they don’t rock the boat. They play the game. Silently. It is, after all, the one rule of life in the System. Do as you like, just keep your bloody mouth shut.
Ironically, though, it is the rule breakers like Diana who generate the most money and sympathy for the System. Diana and her legacy are a double edged sword for the monarchy. She is both good and bad for it. She’s the one people “love.” That’s why the Royal Collection still displays her dresses at Kensington Palace; it’s also why there is a statue of her in the Sunken Garden, at the same palace.3 Her sons (you may have heard they are on the outs these days) briefly united to unveil that statue in the summer of 2021. Diana’s memory is everywhere stamped on the monarchy, and thus it will always be, especially when her son William is on the coins in the United Kingdom and its 14 Commonwealth realms. Diana is a permanent shadow of the System itself. She won’t be forgotten anytime soon, either when William is king or when her grandson George wears the Crown.
None of this, of course, is what Diana the person wanted. Diana the person wanted what most of us want—to be loved. Well, she is loved, but the love of millions who can never touch you is not the kind of love that I’m talking about. I don’t doubt that she was flattered by all the adoration, but when it comes at the heavy price by which she was taxed, it must have felt more like a curse than otherwise. That woman couldn’t go to the gym without it becoming a paparazzi chase. The poor creature never got to stand in line at Starbucks. Hounded in life, hounded to death, and obsessed over in death, forever more—there is no rest. Diana is in that league of women who at once taint and give unrivaled sympathy to the System. She’s Anne Boleyn. She’s Catherine of Aragon. Hell, she’s even Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Actually, Sophia is a great comparison with Diana! Sophia, too, was tragically unloved and scorned by her husband, King George the First, and Sophia found a love affair outside the marriage, but paid the ultimate price for it. Not death, but rather she spent the rest of her days in house arrest and was denied any access to her children. (So more Catherine of Aragon than Anne Boleyn.) I wonder sometimes, if Diana were alive today, or had she survived that car crash, how fulfilling would her life be, and would anything have changed in terms of the paparazzi hounding her, or the media leaving her alone? At least in dying, she had a release. Of course, I’m not saying it’s better that she died. Not at all. I would never suggest that anyone or anything she left behind is better off without her. I’m merely ruminating on the misery she had to endure, and the inescapable fact, like it or not, that death released her from it….because I’m not sure anything else could have released her…. As Pryce-Philip (Prince Philip as portrayed by Pryce) says in the series, they were all trapped in the System. All of them—Philip, Diana, Charles, ‘the Boss,’ the aunts, the uncles, the cousins. For better or worse. And they had to make do, playing the game and respecting the System.
Some of those aunts and uncles and cousins manage to do quite well in the System, or on the fringes of it. The Gloucesters, of course, but also someone like Lady Sarah Chatto. Her mother was Princess Margaret, but she, Sarah, grew up almost in a regular way. I won’t say ‘normal,’ because that’s such a meaningless word. But regular, you know, like riding your bicycle to art school and traveling a little bit and falling in love with a B-list actor, and getting married and having two sons, and just living quietly and comfortably, with a house in town and a house in the country, and just happening to have the Queen as your aunt. The King, formerly Prince Charles, is Lady Sarah Chatto’s first cousin, but this is so far below the common radar, it’s actually quite bizarre (I won’t say crazy) that I even know anything about this woman. Lady Sarah lives outside the System, but still respects its One Rule. It’s impossible that she doesn’t benefit from the connection. Yet, to her credit, she endeavors not to. It is what it is, but she doesn’t flaunt it. She simply, to use British, gets on with it. Keep Calm and Carry On.
It has to be hard for someone like Prince Harry, who grew up at the center of the System. Even as the “spare,” he still grew up totally in the spotlight. Harry is living the pain that cursed Margaret as she too was shoved aside in favor of elder sibling and those being born in direct line to the throne. Unfortunately for Harry, he’s not just an ordinary “spare.” He’s also Diana’s son. He’s far too big, for lack of a better word, to ever live quietly (let alone silently) as does a Lady Sarah Chatto or a Duke of Gloucester. No matter what happens, the media will never back off Prince Harry. Parliament could take away his dukedom; he could be dropped from the Privy Council. It wouldn’t matter. The media would plague him to the ends of the earth. Harry would have to go live in a monastery to be fully left alone. Even then, there would likely be at least one devilish monk who would smuggle out news about him.
People all over social media love to bash Harry and Meghan. The op-ed writers listen to every single episode of Meghan’s podcast only to tear it to pieces. I think it’s quite remarkable that Meghan has the stamina to do a podcast at all. She could so easily stay silent, play the game, christen the ships, and unveil plaques up and down and all around the British Isles. They abandoned “working royal status” in 2020, citing a wish for “financial independence.”4 Yet with all the financial abundance they’ve built up—what with a mansion in Oprah’s neighborhood and polo under the sunny skies and mild weather of California—they remain in some ways trapped. They broke away as far from the System as they could, and still…still…they live guarded…shielded…trapped.
His mother smuggled audio notes out of the palace, through a friend who peddled those tapes on a bicycle, to get her story written. Harry just flat out got his own book deal. He broke the One Rule (boy howdy) but remember: It’s the rule breakers, the noise makers, who generate the sentiment and perpetuate the interest in the System. People will buy Harry’s book. Lots of people will buy it. Even those who hate him. The twitterverse will always jump at the chance to be snarky!
Words from the script of The Crown, season 5, episode 2: The System. Words by Peter Morgan.
The Telegraph (UK): https://archive.ph/WJZDA. 10 December 2011.
The BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-51047186. 24 June 2021.