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.
