Bon Voyage to The Crown

With the holiday break, I was able to catch up on some TV watching, including the final episodes of The Crown.  It’s a terrific series, one whose flaws have been dissected from various quarters, certainly including those (not me) whose expertise in things Royal bring into question, or even into doubt, some of the renderings of this most interesting, complex family and of history Brittania over the more than half century time span depicted in this series.

At the end, the series leaves Her Royal Highness to ponder and puzzle the question of sacrifice and self.  Was it worth it?  Was it still worth it as she completed her decades of service with her death in the fall of 2022?  What was lost in her service to Great Britain – service who, in just the longevity alone, will likely not be equaled?  Ending the series with the wedding of Charles and Camilla, the writers and directors made no elaborate effort to interrogate larger questions of the worthiness of the Crown in the early years of the 21^st century.  Was it moving along with Queen Elizabeth herself toward old age, if not decrepitude?  Could the Windsor family, with internal and external pressures, make the major pivot to bring this monarchy, surely the most important one in the world over the past century’s time, to “relevance?”  Alluringly, the series ends with, as we know, another two decades to go in this Queen’s reign and, with it, the waiting, the painful waiting of Prince Charles.  And, of course, we know that more drama would yet come, including the events that ruined Prince Andrew’s reputation and status and, even more notable, the separation of Prince Harry and his American, biracial wife, Meghan, from the royal orbit.  And so the series ends on a cliffhanger, with viewers left to fill in the meaning of the last two decades, not only in the grand and banal doings of this royal family under the constant spotlight, but also in the relationship between the creaky monarchy and modern Britain, on the island and in the world.

As to the last series of the season itself, so much intrigue, so little time.  The much-maligned first half of the final season is taken up with the variegated dramas of Princess Diana.  But to call these episodes, as many have, overly melodramatic and oddly stylistic is, I think, to miss the point that she was truly larger than life.  The series, to me, did an admirable job of interrogating both the elusive Diana, the troubled relationship between her and her long-suffering (?!) husband, her emerging efforts to find a new life under unimaginable scrutiny and, after all, in her young 30’s.  The episodes also helped frame her connection with the stage upon which she was thrust (and, to be sure, thrusted herself in various ways).  That she died when she did was, in addition to being a terrible tragedy, left Britain’s citizens, and so many of the rest of us, bewildered (was she in love with Dodi?), bereft, and frankly akimbo.  The great counterfactual is what would become of the royal family in both its extravagance and in its struggle toward meaning and prominence in a complex world, a world in which Princess Diana (and next the two boys, becoming men) would always have the glamour, the attention, and in many ways the impact.  Someone will someday write that novel or make that movie that imagines totally this counterfactual and looks (in a way akin to the Last Temptation of Christ) to what might have been.

To me, the most interesting episode in this last season was the one involving Queen Elizabeth and her relationship with Tony Blair.  The Clintonesque charisma of the prime minister meets the wise old monarch and beyond mere jealousy there is the fascinating dynamic of the two single most important Brits interacting, tangling, and figuring out their place, and their empire’s place, in the world.  I thought the ending was much too tidy, with PM Blair getting his come-upings in a speech before a crowd well within the wheelhouse of Her Royal Highness.  But within the confines of what you can do in an hourlong episode, it was interesting and fueled more thought.

Viewing this as not much of a Royal watcher, and not even a reader of biographies and other missives about the Windsor family or of British monarchs generally, I was nonetheless aware of the limited scope of the series, and also of its resort to the usual methods of drama and narrative to tell a story that is neither principally historical nor analytically.  Still, the Crown nudges folks interested in leadership in a difficult world to think more about a rather large counterfactual, and that is what if there was no Queen Elizabeth, or if her tenure had been merely ordinary, or . . . one can fill in so many “what ifs.”  Inescapably prominent as well, even if looming only in the background of the series, is the place of a monarch of extraordinary cultural, if not so much constitutional, relevance in this troubled modern world.  If there had not been a seven-decade-long reign by the remarkable Queen Elizabeth, would we have wanted the invent one?  And what does her rein truly portend for, barring a possible upending of the whole apple cart, another half century that may be marked by two most intriguing kings, now Charles and next William?

(These are hardly scholarly reflections, but, fwiw, here is a paper by Tom Ginsburg (lead author), me, and political scientist, Barry Weingast, that reflects upon the place of a constitutional monarchy in nation-states.)