The Crown

Around here it is all about “The Crown”,  the terrific metonymic television series about Queen Elizabeth II recently launched into its third season.  It is brilliantly made, with superb acting by many people, including conspicuously Olivia Colman as the Queen.  (Claire Foy, who played the younger Elizabeth in the first two season, was also excellent.)  It is fully deserving of binge treatment, and if left to myself I would have probably finished off the series in a day; but that is not my spouse’s style.  The strict rationing is probably good for me, and certainly keeps Buckingham Palace in my unconscious thoughts throughout long days. 

 Queens au pair

This third series has a certain amount of particular interest for me.  It begins with the first premiership of Harold Wilson, immediately following my own years in Oxford.  I vividly remember many of the events its portrays, which are in my mind associated with the beginning years of my professional career.   Furthermore Wilson himself was a Jesus College man, certainly the college’s most prominent political alumnus, and he showed up there from time to time.  Also, it occurs to me that Ms. Colman somewhat resembles my mother in one of her distinctive facial expressions.  This invites me to participate in all the oedipal scenes involving Prince Charles a little more authentically.

PM Harold Wilson at the site of the Aberfan disaster

My enthusiasm for this show involves a kind of inner betrayal.  I have always been somewhat annoyed at the common American fascination with royalty and decayed aristocracy.  The enthusiasm of the Founders of our nation for republicanism was directly proportional to their loathing of hereditary monarchy.  But a decade had not passed until we were busy creating an ersatz aristocracy of our own, and we have never stopped. Think of all the seedy European bluebloods who infect the pages of Henry James novels.  Lord Grantham of recent “Downton Abbey” celebrity, is presented as a sympathetic character when in fact he is a jumped-up fortune hunter on Lend-Lease life support.  Once upon a time in this country Wallis Simpson was more admired by American women than Helen Keller.  But still…

I once personally met the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.  I believe it must have been exactly sixty years ago, when we were all younger, and when Americans were a little rarer in Britain and consequently somewhat less despised.  It was in a reception line; the Queen merely gave us a wan smile, but the Duke made a conceivably witty remark concerning the inadequacy of British heating.

            As a medievalist, I have to say that English majesty has been somewhat wanting over the centuries.  It is mainly downhill after King Alfred, a man of fine moral character, whom any humanist must admire for his emphasis on education.  I also want to give high marks to Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Victoria, and George VI.  Needless to say, recognition of achievement is not in every instance synonymous with approbation of moral character.  But the incidence of royal mediocrity is quite high, as immortalized by Byron’s line about George III: “A better farmer ne’er brushed dew from lawn.”

It is quite odd, of course, to be watching an historical drama about people who are still alive and, if not quite kicking, at least still experiencing the motion of the molecules.  The actual Crown today is in one of its periodic states of crisis.  The Royals got a pretty good run out of their latest dynastic wedding, but now the bloom seems to be fading from the bush so far as Meagan Markle is concerned.  It seems not to have taken her very long to have exhausted her historical role as multicultural specimen and to have discovered that Buckingham Palace is not really much fun for a Valley Girl.  The Duke is ninety-eight and retiring, the Queen ninety-three and tiring; but everybody loves her to death and is understandably worried by the prospect of her moving on.   Prince Charles, entering his eighth decade of humiliation, a good deal of it elective, has decided at last to engage the full force of his septuagenarian vim and vigor.  Unfortunately one of the first tasks he must take in hand is sorting out his truly disgraceful younger brother Andrew.  Andrew was never a really close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, he tells us in a widely viewed interview that redefined moral opacity.  He seldom stayed in one of Epstein’s palatial homesteads more than three times a year.  And as for the woman who insists that he repeatedly bedded her when she was seventeen years old, it is all an inexplicable fabrication.  The photograph of him with his arm around her waist?  Photoshopped. 

            Since it’s a classic he-said-she said situation, we must perhaps give him the benefit of the lout.  But the fact is that she said it under oath and caution of perjury, and one is likely to arrive at a certain conclusion in pectore.  The whole episode is as sordid as it can be.   Its supporting co-star is Ghislaine Maxwell, tycoon’s daughter, socialite, dear friend of the Prince, best friend and lover of Jeffrey Epstein, and the most notable go-between or female pimp since Ovid’s Dipsas.   Dante’s Venedico Caccianemico is pursued through the Malebolge by “horned demons armed with heavy scourges”.  Ghislaine Maxwell’s pursuers are BBC reporters with microphones and video cameras.  That’s part of what is called changing social mores   It is no longer possible to pursue Jeffrey Epstein, hanged in his jail cell unhousele’d, disappointed, unaneled and, apparently, widely unknown.  Among the cast of hundreds who barely knew him are Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.  Prince Andrew is now under orders to keep such a low profile that, were it not for his Adam’s apple, he would have no profile at all. One of my favorite and probably spurious “quotations”—it has been attributed to many people from Gladstone to anonymous society matrons—involves a Victorian spectator’s reaction to a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra: “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen!”   So one looks forward to the television treatment of all this in season eight or ten, but in the meantime it’s a real headache for the real Crown.