Season 2 of “The Crown,” the sumptuous and seductive period drama about the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the British monarch, drops on Netflix this week, and it begins with a royal marriage in trouble. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, has been straying—a lithe and supple ballerina is involved—and Elizabeth is distraught. “I think we both agree it can’t go on like this,” the Queen says, in a buttoned-up, clenched-jaw showdown aboard the royal yacht, moored in Lisbon harbor. “The exit route which is open to everyone else”—divorce—“it’s not an option for us,” she continues. “So, what would make it easier for you to be in, not out?”
The peculiar pressures of a royal marriage—a union in which there is an element of public ownership in addition to private commitment—are the enduring subject of “The Crown.” The show departs from the official public record in detail: the real Prince Philip’s affairs are long rumored, if not actually confirmed by a spokesman from Buck House. But, in spirit, the narrative’s veracity seems unimpeachable. If the intimate scenes of their marriage at happier moments are inferred by the show’s writer, Peter Morgan, they are eminently plausible. Which reigning monarch hasn’t shooed a horde of intrusive, liveried footmen out of the royal bedchambers while inviting her early-rising husband to lay off his calisthenic workout and return between the sheets for a bit of the old blue-blooded rumpy-pumpy?
The real-life outcome of the drama imaginatively delineated in “The Crown” was marked in Britain, last month, with the release of photographic portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip on their seventieth wedding anniversary. Theirs has turned out to be the longest-enduring marriage in the history of the British monarchy. The Queen, who is ninety-one, five years younger than her husband, is also the longest-running sovereign: sixty-five years and counting. In the images, shot by Matt Holyoak at Windsor Castle, the royal couple are pictured against a platinum-colored background, which casts a flattering light upon the Queen’s similarly-hued corona of hair. Philip, by contrast, is gnarled and craggy, with still-dark strands plastered rakishly across his liver-spotted cranium. In the statistically unlikely event that their marriage should last another decade, Philip will look perfect against an oak tree, the symbol of an eighty-year marriage. (Get to ninety years of wedded bliss and you’ve apparently achieved granite.)
The union of the Queen and Prince Philip has, at least for the past half-dozen decades or so, been presented to the British public less often as a love affair than as a partnership held together by compromise and sublimation—the sometimes-resigned submission by its dual participants under the strictures of one institution, marriage, within the strictures of another institution, monarchy, within yet another institution, Englishness as such. Renunciation is required, to a greater or lesser degree, in any marriage, and all the more so when your face is on the currency. Or, until the past quarter century, your close relation’s face. In “The Crown,” as in life, Elizabeth thwarts the relationship between Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend, a royal equerry, who was divorced. “As your sister, I would have been perfectly happy for you to marry Peter,” Elizabeth tells Margaret in the first episode of the new season. “It was the Crown that forbade it.”
If divorce was always off limits for this Queen, the Crown long ago gave up trying to lash together sundered royal marriages. Of Elizabeth and Philip’s four offspring, three are divorced; and when Prince Charles ascends to the throne—if he ever does, which sometimes he must wonder—it will be with a divorcée consort, the Duchess of Cornwall, by his side. Rather than forbidding divorce, the contemporary Crown must embrace it. Which brings us to the latest in royal unions: the announcement, at the end of last month, that Prince Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles, is engaged to marry Meghan Markle. Markle—whose impending royal title is yet to be determined, but who is bound to become the Duchess of Somewhere-or-Other—is a thirty-six-year-old American actress, whose first, brief marriage ended in divorce four years ago. Harry, who is fifth in line to the throne, would have had to ask his grandmother’s permission to marry Markle even if she were not divorced, according to rules dating back to the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. Reports are that permission was readily granted—the Queen, like the country she heads, having, perforce, mellowed on matters marital over the decades.
Even those observers of the British monarchy who have disdained to join in the enthusiasm over royal weddings past—who may, as bolshy teens, have made a point of boycotting the televised nuptials of Charles and Diana, in 1981; who may have listened for the rattling of the tumbrils upon the marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, in 1986; who honestly can’t remember what they were doing on April 9, 2005, but are certain it wasn’t watching the civil nuptials of Charles and Camilla; and who helplessly snarked their way throughout the last big blowout, the wedding of William and Kate—may be finding themselves uncharacteristically enraptured by the Windsor-Markle marital merger. In part, this may be because it’s legit the only bit of non-terrible news that’s happened in the last year. But there’s more to it than that. This is a royal wedding for non-royalists, even for anti-royalists.
First, there’s Prince Harry, who was for years the royal family’s reliably renegade junior member. Having been obliged, at the age of twelve, to walk behind his mother’s casket under the eyes of two and a half billion television viewers, Harry became the laddish hellion who, at twenty, dressed up as a Nazi for a costume party, and who, five years ago, was snapped naked while playing strip billiards in a Las Vegas hotel suite with a group of friends, new and old: nobs gone wild. But, like his namesake, King Henry V—whose partying as Prince Hal was immortalized by Shakespeare, just as Prince Harry’s has been by TMZ—Harry seems to have undergone what appears to be a sincerely sought self-reckoning. Earlier this year, he spoke with unprecedented frankness about the self-destructive behaviors that resulted from being obliged to suppress grief over the loss of his mother, and his efforts to overcome them. More recently, Harry spoke of the need to “modernize” the British monarchy. “Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be King or Queen?” he said in an interview this summer. “I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time.”
Then there’s Markle. If part of the modernization of the monarchy consists of a Prince being able to marry a woman who, presumably, once thought she’d found her prince already, there is another important way in which Markle’s arrival reconfigures what Prince Philip reportedly calls “the Firm.” Not only is she American, she is also of mixed race: Markle’s mother is African-American, and her father is white. In 2015, she wrote a powerful essay about her biracial identity, and what her mixed heritage has meant for her throughout the years, for the U.K. edition of Elle magazine. Whatever else Markle brings to the gilded royal table in terms of glamour, intelligence, and charm, her experience of racial prejudice is unprecedented among members of the royal family. At a time when racial bigotry and nativism is on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic, the coming to prominence at the heart of Britain’s First Family of an American woman whose ancestors were enslaved could not be more welcome, or more salutary.
The United States shed the British monarchy coming up on two hundred and fifty years ago, and for good reason. Yet current events call to mind the immortal words of King George III, as rendered by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in “Hamilton,” which began previews last night at the Victoria Palace Theatre, in London: “What comes next? You’ve been freed. Do you know how hard it is to lead?” When the President of the United States commits daily offenses, small and large—including, only last week, taking to Twitter to propagate the vile, racist emissions of a minuscule British political party so extremist that even Nigel Farage, the nationalist founder of the toxic far-right party, UKIP, felt moved to remonstrate—the notion of a hereditary head of state who has been instilled from birth with a sense of duty to the nation suddenly starts to seem like not such a bad idea. At least Harry only dressed up as a Nazi.
And, so, a modest proposal? In 1995, shortly before the announcement of her divorce from Prince Charles, Princess Diana gave an extraordinary interview on British television, in which she said that while she did not expect ever to be Queen, she hoped to be “a queen of people’s hearts.” For those of us horrified by the President’s imperial, autocratic instincts—by his apparent wish to reinstate a feudal system with himself at its apex, attended by a small court of plutocrats who, like him, have been even further enriched by Republican tax reform—might we not claim Harry and Meghan as the monarchs of our hearts? Might they not serve as paradoxical avatars of our own hopes for a more open, more international, more unified, and fairer world? Yes, the British monarchy is outmoded, inherently inequitable, and more than a bit silly. And yet one cannot help but wonder whether it would really be worse for our nation to be represented by a young king who is dedicated to a life of public service, rather than by an old fool whose life has been dedicated to scamming the public into serving him.
