After seven years, six seasons, 60 episodes and enough airtime to last you continuously from now to next Sunday, Netflix’s mammoth, popular and sort-of acclaimed series The Crown ends with the release of the last four episodes today.
That takes the saga up to 2005, so the reign of Queen Elizabeth II still had another 17 years to run, but writer Peter Morgan and the series’ makers have decided enough is enough. Discretion has shrouded the final years, though they do give Her 80-year-old Maj, played by Imelda Staunton, intimations of mortality, and even visitations by her younger self in the shape of Claire Foy, the young queen in seasons one and two, and Olivia Colman’s mother of the nation from seasons three and four.
So what has the show taught us that we did not know already? Precious little if you are a royal watcher, a digester of biographies of the Queen, a lover of gossip or the sort of devotee who chooses to sleep out on the Mall the night before jubilees and coronations. For the less overinformed, perhaps there has been a drama whose high-end production values and distinguished acting by an array of mainly British talent has given the illusion of authenticity.
All has been couched in the language and mores of contemporary soap opera. In which case – fancy that! – even the falsities have the ring of expected truth. Useless for historians and biographers to trawl through events that never happened but might have done. After all, the British and international media have spent decades enlightening us as to the nature of the institution and its members. We know how stuffy the palace was, or what caused the break-up of the fairytale marriage of Charles and Diana and the tragedy of her death, the stoicism of the Queen and the ironical nature of the Duke of Edinburgh. Morgan gets no closer, but maybe just a bit more inventive.
Will the series change views of the monarchy and its future,? That seems doubtful. Cynical and satirical attitudes, even among royalists, are largely baked in. We chatter and tease each other about their foibles and latest gaffes, but that does not lead to republicanism.
The series never really covered the institution’s weak points: its wealth and property, its privileges and entitlement. It’s entertainment, not really there to change minds. It was preaching to the converted not the convertible.
The feat of centring the drama on the Queen was challenging, not least because so relatively little is known about her inner life or her real opinions about anything. She was essentially and deliberately a void around whom recollections may vary. She was someone to whom events happened, who met vicissitudes with very little show of visible public emotion, and that does not necessarily make for good drama, or even dramatic authenticity. Did she really dislike Margaret Thatcher, or Tony Blair? Was her favourite prime minister really Harold Wilson? It is probable that even they themselves did not know.
There were few occasions when she let her hair down in public. One was perhaps the media reception at Windsor Castle at the start of her golden jubilee celebrations in 2002, when she impishly teased individual executives from the national press: demanding to know where the crossword was in the newly redesigned Sunday Telegraph because she could not find it any more. That was the occasion when Polly Toynbee asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he ever read the Guardian: “No fear,” he said.
To lighten the load and point to larger truths, dramatists have to invent. Morgan did that. One might question the idea of the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales in corporeal form haunting the Queen, as she does briefly in series 6, but even Shakespeare invented the odd ghost to haunt Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III.
The Crown was a child of its time. More than a century ago, the journalist Walter Bagehot wrote that secrecy was essential to the monarchy: “Above all things our monarchy is to be reverenced and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it … Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Its occupation, he said, should be grave, formal, important and never exciting: “nothing to stir eager blood, awaken high imagination. Work off wild thoughts.”
Bagehot must be spinning in his grave – but that was then. He never had to worry about ratings, and he had never heard of Netflix.
Stephen Bates is a former Guardian royal correspondent and the author of Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best-known Brand and The Shortest History of the Crown
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