'The Crown' season 5 trades historical thrills for bitter royal divides
National Post, 20 November 2022
Diana's royal vendetta makes for the show's ugliest season yet
Admiration for “The Crown” — the award-winning Netflix dramatization of the life of Queen Elizabeth II — does not follow ineluctably from constitutional devotion to the Crown. Some monarchists keep aloof. I am a fan.
I was definitively hooked in the first season, when the young Queen Elizabeth, having gone to Kenya a princess, returns as sovereign. The climactic juxtaposition of the new Queen, the dowager Queen Mary and an aged Winston Churchill recently returned to the premiership is, I would submit, the finest sequence filmed in the history of moving pictures.
The fifth season began streaming last week and there was some apprehension before its release. The season is set between 1991 and 1997, but before the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It was the “War of the Waleses,” with the prince and princess in a feverish race to the bottom for bad behaviour. To rehash the least lovely aspects of Charles’ character so soon after his accession as King seemed untimely, if unintentional.
Far from fireworks, though, the show’s fifth season is comparatively boring. Boring, at least, according to the standard of C.S. Lewis, who observed that sin is utterly common, while virtue is creative, imaginative and truly fascinating.
Destruction holds a certain fascination, too — hence the rubbernecking at traffic accidents — but the two fascinations are not equal. The 1990s were a decade of destructive royal deportment.
The great fire at Windsor Castle in 1992 and the aging, soon-to-be decommissioned Royal Yacht Britannia provide the material metaphors for the conflagration in the royal family’s marriages and discussion about whether the Queen, who had been on the throne for 40 years, should give way to the next generation.
“The Crown” has Queen Elizabeth confessing to the Queen Mother that 1992 was the “worst year of my reign, and quite possibly my entire life.”
It was at her Ruby Jubilee that Her Majesty delivered the annus horribilis address, lamenting a year in which three of her four children saw their marriages dissolve, the Windsor Castle caught fire and Andrew Morton’s book, “Diana: Her True Story,” marked the opening of a frontal assault on the royal family by Diana and her courtiers.
The details of the all the horribleness no longer attract the attention that they did then. Partly, it is the passage of time. Diana tragically died; the Queen survived. Within five years of Diana’s death, the state funeral of the Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee drew a line under the horribleness of it all.
Stability and decency returned, and there was precious little wisdom to be gained from it all. The War of the Waleses taught us what everybody already knew, namely that self-indulgence — against which Queen Mary severely warned in the first season — collapsing into cruel and vindictive behaviour would bring pain all around.
We now know much more than we did back then. The excruciatingly embarrassing phone recordings of the prince and princess were obtained by unethical and illegal behaviour, a scandal that shuttered some of the leading tabloids of Fleet Street. The grand old “auntie” of the British establishment, the BBC, was itself compromised by fraud and deceit in its “Panorama” interview with Diana. There was much horribleness to go around.
I was a graduate student at Cambridge in 1995, and I recall the whole nation gathering to watch the broadcast. With malice abundant, the BBC aired the interview on the Queen’s wedding anniversary, Nov. 20, 1995. That juxtaposition was not masterful but malevolent, seeking to vomit up the serial Windsor adulteries against the Queen’s own fidelity.
This Sunday would have been the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s 75th wedding anniversary. That they got within hailing distance of it was the answer to that horrible decade.
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