Is there anyone in the world so pathetic as Elizabeth II? Aside from us 300 million-odd schmucks who will soon be under the thumb of El Hugo Chávez del Norte. But, seriously, one has to feel sympathy for a ninety-year-old broad condemned to wander the earth pretending that she’s important.
It wasn’t always that way, of course. Once Elizabeth was young and reasonably beautiful, and somehow taken “seriously” by millions of people. Netflix, in cooperation with someone or other, is taking us back to those years via The Crown, which, in its first season treated us to a near-granular take on Liz II’s early years on the throne, the “Churchill Years,” more or less, because Winston returned to the premiership in 1951 and managed to hang on until 1955, though he was really too old for the job in the first place.
I have a pretty strict rule against aristocratic shit—I have never watched a minute of Downton Abbey—but with Trump headed for the White House and Pretty Little Liars still on hiatus, I was desperate for distraction. Besides, an intelligent depiction/deconstruction of the decline and fall of an ancient and outmoded institution might have some dramatic possibilities.
Episode 1 gave some hope, though not a great deal. We begin with the old King, George VI (Jared Harris), getting pumped up and girded for battle—actually, Liz’s wedding—by swapping smutty limericks with the royal somebody—probably “Tommy” (Pip Torrens), his private secretary, who will gradually emerge as a major behind the scenes playa in Buckingham Palace intrigue.
But that’s all to come. Right now, Princess Liz (Claire Foy) is marrying Prince Phillip Mountbatten (Matt Smith). It’s 1947, so long ago that the British Empire still looked like the British Empire. India, though clearly departing, would not be gone for another two years. Western colonialism and “civilization” were still considered to be one and the same, and, just as American slave owners were actually surprised when their slaves ran away during the Civil War, Brits believed that everyone, except for a few ungrateful wretches, liked being subjects of the British Crown. Who wouldn’t? We’re so lucky!1
Later, things get a bit ugly when we’re shown George VI undergoing an operation, and a royal lung (the left one, I believe) drops horribly in a pail. George is operating on borrowed time, but nobody does the stiff upper lip thing like the King of England, or so we’re encouraged to believe. It’s time for him to start grooming Liz for the royal responsibilities that will soon be descending on her pretty little head—quite unobtrusively, of course, because no one does “unobtrusive” like a royal. In particular, he shows Liz the royal dispatch boxes, labeled simply, and proudly, “The King”, which the Cabinet carefully packs with royal reading matter. “They put the ones they want me to read on top,” he explains, “and the ones they don’t want me to read they hide on the bottom”, implying that he reads them all.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, this is pure balderdash. George VI, again not to put too fine a point on it, was a dummy, pure and simple. He didn’t read the dispatch boxes. Queen Victoria was famous for it, but George VI was no Queen Victoria. He was, quite carefully but quite deliberately, kept out of the public eye for fear he might say something stupid—which he unquestionably would if allowed to speak at all.
Liz, at this point, has spent most of her time indulging in the most royal of prerogatives, horsing around—though mostly with a royal equerry rather than an actual horse—but the sight of the royal dispatch boxes seems to sober her—though I don’t remember her actually reading anything. Still, she comes through like a thoroughbred when she and Phillip are sent on a royal tour to Africa, wowing the locals, or so we are led to believe, who are of course thrilled to spend hours sweating in the sun in order to watch a young white woman ride around in a big car. The Mau Mau Uprising, the most recent in a long list of rebellions against British rule, was taking place at about the same time, suppressed by British in their traditional ruthless, racist manner, but we don’t get to hear about that.
We don’t get to hear about a lot of things. While The Crown purports to give us the inside story of life at Buckingham Palace2, it’s a gossip’s notion of the inside story, the notion of someone who takes all trappings of royalty seriously, who thinks that all this petty backbiting and maneuver are important because the people involved are “royalty”, or at least “close to the throne”.
To give us a break from all of this, The Crown throws in a good deal of “inside politics” as well, though sucking up pretty fiercely to Churchill, who was well past his prime—77 and half senile when he took office, and in his thinking about half a century out of date. For his service in rallying Britain in the early days of World War II Churchill did as much as any man ever did to “save” civilization, but by 1945 he was a man without a purpose, rather like the royals themselves. And, in the end, rather like The Crown itself. Funny how art imitates life, isn’t it?
Afterwords
Frederick Engels, writing in the nineteenth century, predicted that in the event of a general European war, there would be “crowns by the dozen rolling in the gutter and no one to pick them up,” which is exactly what did happen after World War I all across Europe, and what should have happened in Great Britain as well. But, because Britain had been the richest nation in the world, and because she was on the winning side when the general war did come, the British crown “unnaturally” remained intact. And so, for a hundred years and counting, these people have been walking about, riding horses, waving at crowds, living in palaces, riding in yachts, shooting at grouse, as if their lives had an actual sense and purpose rather than constituting a grotesque dumb show—supported largely, I guess, by both the media and the “people” as a sort of sedative against the ennui of actual existence. Perhaps the saddest thing is, this “royalism” is almost as prevalent over here as it is over “there”.
Years ago, Ringo Starr endeared himself to me by saying “I don’t think we need kings and queens in this country any more.” Yo Nextflix! Why don’t you try being as smart as Ringo?
For still more bile, check out Christopher Hitchens, aka “Mr. Bile”, explaining just how big a prick George VI was. And don’t even get him started on Edward VIII! Don’t even get him started!3
- This sort of thinking was standard in Britain’s “white” colonies like Canada and Australia, even though they functioned as independent nations. Memoirs of Canadians and Aussies who grew up in the fifties attest to the sense of shame and humiliation they experienced in the sixties when they finally realized how much they had been exploited by the “mother country”. ↩︎
- Buckingham Palace doesn’t even look like a palace. There’s nothing extravagant or playful about it. Instead, it looks like the mausoleum of a particularly unpleasant Roman emperor. ↩︎
- Eddie, Georgie’s older brother, had to resign the throne because he was determined to marry American slut charmer Wallis Simpson, becoming the Duke of Windsor. As Hitch is pleased to tell you, Winston Churchill made a complete ass of himself defending Edward. The Duke shows up in The Crown rather as the royal family’s acerbic gay uncle, making vaguely smutty wisecracks about this and that and “explaining” that royalty’s “magic” lies in its mystery. The Duke’s “abdication”, as it was called, was “the biggest story since the Resurrection” in the estimation of quintessential newsman H. L. Mencken. Mencken, a bit of an Anglophobe due to his German heritage, must have enjoyed the whole thing enormously. ↩︎
