The Broadway Six Queens Appear in "Ratatouille the TikTok Musical"

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All My Six Posts!
Over-Analyzing All the Historical References in Six- “Ex Wives,” “No Way,” “Don’t Lose Your Head” “Heart of Stone” “Haus of Holbein” “Get Down”
The Tudor Crown Inspiration in Six’s Logo; The Tudor Fashion Elements of the Costumes in Six (with Painting References)
Six the Musical Wives 1-3: Historical and Modern Costume Inspirations; Six the Musical Wives 4-6: Historical and Modern Costume Inspirations
The Ladies in Waiting of Six: Historical Inspirations and Costumes; Details from Six Costumer Gabriella Slade’s Instagram Takeover
The Early Costumes of Six the Musical: From Edinburgh to Cambridge to London
Updated Six the Musical Costumes for Broadway!; The Shoes of Six the Musical
The Alternate Costumes of Six the Musical; How the Six Alternates Change Their Styling for Each Queen
Virtual Dance Workshops and Q&As with Different Six Cast Members!

I haven’t written about Six the Musical in a while now, huh? I should really finish out that historical references in the Six songs series at some point, lol. As part of my general need to cover everything to do with this Tudor inspired musical, I wanted to share a few quick screenshots from the Six Queens’ appearance in Ratatouille the TikTok Musical!

In case you haven’t heard about it, Ratatouille the TikTok Musical is a tribute to the 2007 Disney/Pixar film created by various users of the social media platform TikTok, with individual people all over the world contributing songs, choreography, costume and makeup design, set concepts, and other elements. Although Disney is notoriously quite protective of their intellectual property, they somehow got on board with this and allowed it to happen, even posting a submission of their own featuring a Disney Channel star on the DisneyParks TikTok. In a statement, Disney said, “We love when our fans engage with our stories and we look forward to seeing these super fans experience the [Ratatouille] attraction when it opens at Walt Disney World next year.”

A virtual benefit performance of the show was staged on New Year’s Day, with Titus Burgess starring as Remy the Rat. Six co-writer Lucy Moss, who also co-directed several of the productions of Six (making her the youngest woman to ever direct a Broadway musical) was tapped to direct it.

I bought a ticket to see the musical on a whim and didn’t actually know too much about it before I saw it; I certainly didn’t realize Lucy Moss was directing it! However, I quickly figured out that Six had something to do with the show, as the entire Broadway cast of Six is in the show! There are also two key tributes to the musical within it.

Here’s how Lucy Moss described the show to the New York Times, “The thing that’s really interesting about the original TikTok materials and submissions is that the aspiration for it was so broad. Despite being on a format on the cutting edge of tech and the most Gen-Z thing in the world, people were aspiring to be like a classic musical. The challenge of doing that in the least theatrical space ever — online — was trying to remain true to that aspiration. The aim is a Zoom reading or an online concert that drank 20 Red Bulls and spit on the screen.”

Someone on YouTube brilliantly put together all the Six portions of Ratatouille the Musical into one video.

All the Six Queens are credited as “Rat Queens,” even though they are really just rat backup singers/dancers and aren’t be queens in the story. This is a clear reference to their roles in Six, which tells the stories of Henry VIII’s six wives in a feminist way. All the actors in Six are referred to as “queens” generally and the Six fandom is known as the Queendom.

The Queens hilariously backed up Adam Lambert as Emile as he sang “The Rat’s Way of Life” with brilliant dancing and singing. A few had short lines as well. They closed out the song with an extremely distinctive pose in which they use their fingers to imitate putting crowns on their heads.

The Broadway Six Queens and swings do the distinctive Crown hands pose.

The Broadway Six Queens and swings do the distinctive Crown hands pose.

The Broadway Six Queens (and the swings) perform with Adam Lambert as Emile in “A Rat’s Way of Life.”

The Broadway Six Queens (and the swings) perform with Adam Lambert as Emile in “A Rat’s Way of Life.”

The Crown Hands appear in the first song “Ex-Wives,” specifically during Catherine of Aragon’s solo (and maybe in a few other places in the show, but it’s been a minute since I’ve watched the whole thing). You can see it in this video of the Six performing at the Olivier Awards at around 2:08.

Carrie-Anne Ingrouille choreographed the musical and was apparently quite the stickler for this pose in particular. When I took a dance workshop from UK Tour Six member Lauren Byrne (blog post here), she said “In the show, it’s horrible because you’re sweating buckets and you don’t want to touch anything to your face – but then the choreographer comes and is like ‘NONE OF YOU WERE TOUCHING YOUR FINGERS ON YOUR CROWN HANDS’ –so she’s really picky about it.”

The Broadway Six queens in the scene where Linguini turns on the light in the kitchen and finds rats everywhere.

The Broadway Six queens in the scene where Linguini turns on the light in the kitchen and finds rats everywhere.

Remy singing the first line of the first verse from “Ex-Wives” to yell at Linguini.

Remy singing the first line of the first verse from “Ex-Wives” to yell at Linguini.

That looked like the last time we’d see the Six queens in Ratatouille, but fortunately, we were blessed with another cameo in the scene where Linguini turns on the light in the kitchen and finds rats EVERYWHERE. The queens gave us extreme close-ups of their shocked rat faces and it was FANTASTIC.

Finally, the last Six reference in Ratatouille showed up when Remy tries to yell at Linguini after the press conference. He sing-yells “Listen up, let me tell you a story” but is quickly cut off by Linguini. This is the first sung verse line in “Ex-Wives,” the first song in Six, performed by Catherine of Aragon. You can see this at about 1:07 in the Australia cast’s performance of Ex-Wives to the right.

Ratatouille the TikTok Musical was honestly astonishingly good. This was just a one-off one hour benefit performance, but I sincerely hope the rights issues with putting it together get worked out and it actually goes on to become a real full length musical. Even my super skeptic husband said he’d be willing to pay full price to see it in person in the future!

And that’s your random Six update, enjoy. :)

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E7 The Hereditary Principle

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Princess Margaret in The Crown, on her way to see her new therapist.

Princess Margaret in The Crown, on her way to see her new therapist.

  • To be totally honest, I’ve been dreading blogging about this specific episode since before the season even dropped on Netflix. Early reviews called out the inflammatory plotline of this episode, which blames the Queen Mother for her mentally disabled nieces being put in a hospital and hidden from their family. This characterization does not conform with actual historical evidence, but ends the episode with pictures and birth and death dates of both of the actual women discussed here, implying that it IS the true story. Obviously the show is a drama, and people who watch it should realize that without being explicitly told that the series is not a documentary, but I personally think The Crown went too far in this episode.
    I have chosen not to include pictures of Nerissa or Katherine Bowles-Lyon here in this blog post, as it does not seem that they were capable of consenting to photographs. If you’d like to find photographs of them, you can easily Google them and find them elsewhere.

    The story according to the Crown: During her first therapy session, Princess Margaret finds out that she has two mentally disabled cousins - Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon. She checks the Burke’s peerage records with her sister, the Queen, and they find that both cousins were listed as deceased. Margaret drives her friend Dazzle to the psychiatric hospital where the sisters live, has him go in undercover to meet her cousins, and discovers that they (and several other more distant relatives - named Idonea, Etheldreda, and Rosemary) had been in the mental hospital back in the 1940s . When Margaret goes to speak to her mother about this, it is revealed that the Queen Mother was aware of situation and had kept it a secret from her daughters for their entire lives. She justified this action by claiming that it was done to preserve the integrity of the royal family’s bloodline after her husband became king. Margaret’s therapist reveals to her later that the gene responsible for the cousins’ disability did not run in the royal family line at all.

    The actual story: In April 1987, The Sun broke the news that the Queen had two mentally disabled first cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, who had lived in a mental institution for almost 50 years, although their deaths had been recorded in the records of British aristocracy (Burke’s Peerage and Debrett’s handbook of British noble families) decades before (Source: Maclean’s - April 20, 1987). Nerissa had died in 1986 at the age of 66 and had been buried near the hospital in a grave with a plastic marker. The story also reported that three other cousins of the sisters (Idonea, Etheldreda, and Rosemary) had actually been placed in the same hospital on the same day as Nerissa and Katherine; Rosemary died in 1972 but Idonea and Etheldreda were still in the hospital with Katherine when the story broke. (Source: UPI). The Royal Family gave only a very brief statement on the issue, saying that the Queen was aware of the situation but that it was a private matter for the immediate Bowes-Lyon family.
    The therapist’s words about the genetic disorder not actually running in the royal line is completely correct, as I’ll discuss in more depth below.
    The entire frame story of Margaret discovering the sisters, getting Dazzle to go into the hospital undercover, and confronting her mother appears to be entirely invented. For the record, I don’t have any problem with a frame story like this being concocted to tell the story; my big issue is that The Crown lays blame at the feet of the Queen Mother and makes her sound like a friggin Nazi with lines about “the purity of the bloodline,” when in real life, she had nothing to do with it and didn’t even know that her nieces were in a psychiatric hospital until 1982.

bowes lyon family tree.png

  • Here’s a quick break down of all that.

    • The genetic disorder - Nerissa and Katherine had a genetic disorder that passed down from their maternal grandfather, Baron Clinton (Charles Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis). Three of their maternal cousins, Idonea, Rosemary, and Ethelreda, also had the same disorder. I could not find any records that actually named what this genetic disorder was; in the 1930s-1940s, they were simply called “imbeciles.” Their defect left them unable to speak and with a mental age of about three.

      I could not find any family tree that showed all the people relevant to this discussion, so I made my own. This is obviously a very simplified and abbreviated version just to show the relationships of the royal family to the cousins discussed in this episode, but I hope it helps elucidate the situation. As the therapist says in the episode, the gene that resulted in Nerissa and Katherine’s condition came from their mother, who was not a blood relative of the Bowes-Lyons. Thus, the gene at issue had absolutely nothing to do with the royal family’s genetics.
      The show depicts them as knowing who the royal family is and knowing that they are their family. Although the 1987 article from Macleans states that Katherine “has no knowledge of her royal connections,” the 2011 documentary “The Queen’s Hidden Cousins” quoted a nurse who worked with the sisters as saying “If the Queen or Queen Mum were ever on television, they’d curtsey – very regal, very low. Obviously there was some sort of memory.” (Source: Daily Mail)

      • In The Crown Podcast episode on The Hereditary Principle, head of research Annie Salzberger gave a bit more detail about the sisters’ condition. (Source: Podcast episode transcript)
        “We don't have Katherine's files, but we have Nerissa’s, and Nerissa is diagnosed ‘imbecile’. That's the official term. Now that doesn't kind of equate to anything today. So then we had to try to read through records to understand how they described any symptoms of this illness or physical aspects to it, or it was just mental. So, so her record state that she quote ‘makes unintelligible noises all the time, is very affectionate, and can say a few babyish words’. And then staff also described Katherine as ‘alert’. ‘She understands what she's being told, but she only communicates pointing noises and smiles. She is severely mentally handicapped, but has no physical disabilities’ that, um, their family relative describes them as ‘lovely children’, ‘like frightened does’ and that we know that they recognize each other, but they don't recognize other family members, which really interested the doctors.”

    • Was it a cover up? It’s a bit unclear. Nerissa and Katherine were sent away to Royal Earlswood Hospital in 1941, when Nerissa was 22 and Katherine was 15. Although the show portrays the cousins’ commitment as resulting from George VI’s rise to the throne and the royal family’s need to keep them hidden away, in reality, they were placed in the hospital nearly five years after Edward VIII abdicated.
      Lady Elizabeth Anson, a niece of Nerissa and Katherine’s, spoke to The Sun at the time and said that the family had not actually attempted to conceal the sisters, but that her grandmother (the sisters’ mother) was often careless with filling out her forms for Burke’s and Debrett’s.
      It is possible that the Bowes-Lyon family may have been unusually wary of any allegations of mental illness, as 1800s gossip rumored that a Bowes-Lyon child born with significant physical disabilities was kept locked away in their ancestral seat at Glamis Castle (yes, the same Glamis from Shakespeare’s Macbeth). The Smithsonian Magazine wrote about “the monster of Glamis” in 2012 and looked at lots of historical accounts of various Victorians stumbling around trying to find the secrets of the castle, but it does not seem like there’s any hard proof to indicate that this was ever anything more than a story.

    • Did the Queen Mother know? The Sun also noted at the end of the article that the Queen Mother only learned about Nerissa and Katherine’s survival around 1982. When she found out about them, she sent them money with which to buy candy and toys.

    • Did the Royal Family neglect the sisters? The Daily Mail reported in 2011, at the time the documentary “The Queen’s Hiddens Cousins” aired, that Nerissa and Katherine’s last reported visitors were in the 1960s.
      A general manager for the East Surrey Health Authority said to the Associated Press in 1987, "Both sisters had regular visits from their families up until the early 1960s when one of their closest relatives died. Since then, they have had few visitors. My understanding is that Katherine had no regular visitors.” (Source: Vogue). Records indicate that the closest thing either sister had to a family visit in the 1980s was when a reporter from The Sun pretended to be a relative to get in and take pictures of Katherine for the article breaking the story. One former nurse also said they did not receive birthday cards or anything at Christmas (source: Express).
      However, Express also reported that the queen was upset about the documentary’s allegations that her cousins were neglected, saying that they were false. A statement from an anonymous source “close to Buckingham Palace” said: “The Queen is very, very upset at the thought that this programme is being made which is just not true. Both Katherine and Nerissa were visited very regularly by their family but neither could speak, and throughout their lives had the thinking age of four years old. They were unable to recognise visitors, often becoming hugely distressed as they struggled to work out who was with them. They also both regularly received presents, especially at Christmas, a fact disputed in this supposedly factual documentary. Neither sister knew who the presents were from but they enjoyed the moment of receiving a lovely gift. If Channel 4 had bothered to get the facts right and ask people who knew the true story, this would be a different matter. They just didn’t ask anybody and came up with this upsetting nonsense which brings nothing but hurt.”

  • The Crown DID actually cast people with real disabilities as Nerissa, Katherine, their cousins, and the others living at the hospital. I haven’t found a ton of information on this, but it has been discussed briefly in The Crown podcast. (Source: The Crown podcast transcript). Episode director Jessica Hobbs was very adamant that Nerissa, Katherine, and all the other residents at the Royal Earlswood be represented by actors who had similar conditions. Casting director Kate Bone apparently went to lots of different groups, institutions, and hospitals to find people with mental disabilities who would be interested in acting in the show. The show specifically brought all these actors into the set the day before so they could get familiar with it and be comfortable with the location. Hobbs said in the podcast, “We just wanted to make sure that there weren't going to be triggers of distress or might be uncomfortable for them or frightening. So that was, you know, it was just a whole process of how we worked towards it. It was one of the two best days I've had onset in my life because at the end of it, you could just, the crew were in awe basically. These people were amazing and they loved it. And that was for me, the big thing.”

    • Hobbs also went on to discuss the fact that the institution itself was not necessarily a bad thing. She said: “I didn't want to make a moralistic judgment. I didn't want to say ‘it’s a Dickensian institution, it was appalling’. It was all, you know, my mother worked in mental health before I was born, but she was a nurse at an institution. So I’d heard the most wonderful stories about the way people were and what they did and who they thought they were on different days and how you could communicate. And I just wanted to make sure that there was also love and the way that people were portrayed on set and that there were, there was connection between carers. There are extraordinary carers that have worked over the years. It was just finding that balance. The story for me was that that the family shut them away because they were ashamed and worried about being tainted. And I think that that's just historically, what we've continued to do as a community. But I also think we haven't provided help and support for those families who need extra help. So these situations have come about because of the way we've approached it as a community.”

    • There has been a bit of discussion online about whether the episode is exploitative of people with disabilities. I won’t venture an opinion on this, but it does sound like The Crown crew really did attempt to portray all the residents of the hospital with dignity and care. And this is a super low bar, but just by casting people with actual disabilities in this role, they’re doing better than a lot of the entertainment industry, where it’s still very standard practice to cast non-disabled actors. Bustle did a great job exploring the scope of this issue in this article in 2019, but this issue still really exists today, as shown by the recent outcry over Sia casting a neurotypical actress as a nonverbal autistic character in her upcoming film Music.

  • Sidenote: I’m pretty sure it would be fantastically unethical for a therapist to disclose the medical history and records of third parties to her patient, but I guess the story had to be kicked off in this episode somehow.

Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones with her dog Rolly.

Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones with her dog Rolly (Credit: PA Images).

Now that the big controversy over this episode has been discussed, let’s move on to over-analyzing the episode from its start.

  • At the beginning of the episode, Princess Margaret appears to be up to her old tricks, getting ready for a fun night to the sounds of “C’est Si Bon” by Dean Martin (a 1962 recording of a 1947 song). But as this episode will make clear, Margaret is now 54 (as will be confirmed by a newscast later in the episode), and her party hard lifestyle is starting to catch up to her. Throughout this opening scene, she’s smoking and coughing in a way that’s similar to how her father coughed before his death (which we saw in S1E2). A butler takes away her dog and a handsome younger man bikes up to her house and rings his bell to get her attention.

    • I couldn’t find much detail about any of Princess Margaret’s dogs, but we know that she did own several terriers and spaniels as an adult. A cavalier king charles spaniel Rolly was probably the most famous of these, as he took a few engagement pictures with Margaret and her fiance Anthony Armstrong-Jones in February 1960. (Source: Pets by Royal Appointment, By Brian Hoey)

    • There’s coverage of the royal variety show at the Palladium on the tv in the background. The Queen and Prince Philip are seen in full formal dress, with the queen sporting a tiara. This appears to be the November 1984 Royal Variety Show, given Margaret’s age and the timing of her surgery later in the episode. Fun fact: The Queen and Prince Philip actually didn’t attend the 1984 royal variety show; the senior royals at that event were, instead, the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana (the only royal variety show she ever attended).

      • I would like to talk about all the tiaras in The Crown more in depth in the future, but for now, I’ll just note that the tiara the Queen is wearing at the Royal Variety Show scene appears to be her favorite, which is known as the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara. You can go read more about it at The Court Jeweller, who has in depth entries on almost every tiara and jewel worn by the Queen. As you can see in the photo comparison below though, it’s not….necessarily a very good replica. It looks far too metallic and dark, while the real tiara is very bright and glittering in photos. It also looks like it may be a tiny bit too tall? It sits very differently on Olivia Colman’s head than the real one does on Queen Elizabeth’s.

      • The fact that Margaret is not at this big event and is instead partying at home subtly begins the episode’s theme of Margaret increasingly moving to the margins of the royal family, rather than being at the center (this will come up again a few more times). In real life, the last time she had been at a royal variety show was 1968, a decade and a half before this episode is set. She’ll attend the variety show in 1990 as well.

Upper Left: The Crown. All other photos: Queen Elizabeth in real life wearing similar white dresses.

Upper Left: The Crown. Upper Right: Queen Elizabeth in similar dress (Credit: Eric Vandeville / Getty).
Lower Left: Queen Elizabeth in similar dress (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty)
Lower Middle: Queen Elizabeth (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

Left: Olivia Colman on The Crown; Right: Queen Elizabeth II wearing the real Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara.

Left: Olivia Colman on The Crown; Right: Queen Elizabeth II wearing the real Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara.

  • Somewhere else, we see the television on at a psychiatric hospital of some sort, full of adult patients milling around in a large room. As God Save the Queen plays on the television set, two women in particular stand up to attention and salute. They are seen taking their medicines, but don’t utter a word.

  • Margaret dances to David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (1983) with her man friend while literally wearing dark red shoes (“put on your red shoes and dance”). Her friend is quickly revealed to be Derek “Dazzle” Jennings, who tells her that he’s greatly enjoyed spending time with her, but implies that their time together must end. Dazzle specifically calls her “ma’am,” indicating his relative youth and his respect for her status. In real life, we know that Margaret really did have all her friends call her “Ma’am” and was a stickler for etiquette.

    • Margaret has been dressed in similar dresses the entire season - structurally simple a-line dresses in bright colored prints and jewel tone colors. However, from what I can tell, the historical Margaret really only dressed like that when she was actually at her house on Mustique. I scoured through lots of photos of her fashion from the 70s and 80s, and in general, she dressed far more conservatively and more like her sister when she was going about in England and at formal events. The decision to dress her this way throughout most of Season 4 seems to indicate that she’s still living in the past and wishing for her days on Mustique with her young and sexy boyfriend Roddy Llewellyn

    • Derek “Dazzle” Jennings was a real friend of Margaret’s who was 16 years younger than her. He was very popular and had a wide circle of friends including various celebrities, but in 1984, took the orders and became a priest. He was “famously” gay, just as Queen Elizabeth says later in the show. Author Noel Botham claims in his book Margaret: The Last Real Princess, that Margaret was actually infatuated with Dazzle and “used any excuse to place herself near him,” but that she did know about his sexuality and was aware that nothing was likely to happen between them. Overall, their relationship was far more spiritual than romantic, as Dazzle did really try to convert Princess Margaret to Catholicism (as is shown later in the show), and they stayed friends until Dazzle’s death in 1994 (contrary to what The Crown shows).

Upper Left: The Crown, all other photos: the real life Princess Margaret

Upper Left: The Crown; Upper Right: Princess Margaret (Credit: Bettmann / Getty).
Lower Left: Princess Margaret (Credit: Georges De Keerle / Getty).

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Prince Edward’s 21st birthday party contrasted with a quieter party at the psychiatric hospital.

Prince Edward’s 21st birthday party contrasted with a quieter party at the psychiatric hospital. Both scenes from The Crown.

  • In the next scene, Margaret dresses more to match her sister (as she did in real life) for a lunch between the two- and bemoans her lack of luck with men. She specifically notes that Colin Tennant had said that she and Dazzle should be kept apart for public safety. We’ve seen Colin Tennant, Baron Glenconner a few times in the show; he married Margaret’s friend Lady Anne at the beginning of S2E4 Beryl and was also seen on Mustique in S3E10 Cri de Coeur, also with Lady Anne (who introduced Margaret to Roddy Llewellyn, both in the show and in real life). In real life, Colin bought Mustique and was the one who gave a plot of land on the island to Princess Margaret as a wedding gift.

    • I love that it’s Queen Elizabeth who had to specifically tell Margaret that Dazzle was “a friend of Dorothy.” This is slang for “gay” which dates back to at least World War II, and was used as a way for gay men to identify themselves without putting themselves in danger at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It’s unclear exactly where this term came from, but some think it was a reference to the Wizard of Oz books and films, whose themes and colorful characters resonated with the gay community at the time. Judy Garland herself, who played Dorothy in the most famous film version of the Wizard of Oz, was an undeniable gay icon.

    • Margaret initally can’t believe that Dazzle is gay, noting with surprise “He looked at me with great adoring eyes. “ Elizabeth calmly responds, “I think you’ll find that ti’s because you’re a royal princess and he’s a raging snob.” Their conversation is interrupted when Margaret begins to cough up blood, which must have terrified the two women, as this is how their father first found out about his illness in S1E1 of the series (although in real life, he was not diagnosed with lung cancer until 1951).

  • Next is a very brief scene of Margaret undergoing exploratory surgery and news reports about her condition. In real life, this surgery removed an “innocent” portion of her lung, which has been interpreted to mean “non-malignant.” Margaret was never actually diagnosed with any form of cancer. We later see her recovering at the hospital, dressed fabulously in a very colorful blouse while using a nebulizer to breathe. Note that there’s a tea set laid out in the hospital room near her (which seems very on brand).
    The news reports that Princess Margaret smoked 60 cigarettes a day. This is accurate to life. She allegedly gave up smoking briefly after the operation, but within 3 months was back at it (although she’d reduced her consumption down to 30 cigarettes a day). The princess would not fully give up smoking or drinking until at least 8 years after her lung surgery in 1985. (Source: Daily Mail)

    • We get more shots at the hospital and the two unknown adult women watching the news about Margaret’s condition on TV. They look incredibly distressed by Margaret’s health.

  • In the next scene, we see snippets of two birthday parties - Prince Edward’s 21st birthday with the royal family at the palace and Katherine’s birthday at the mental hospital. Even though we haven’t been introduced to the older women yet, this juxtaposition clearly connects them to the royal family, shot by shot. The fancy tiered cake at the palace juxtaposes with a tiny cake at the hospital, with a single candle on top.
    Philip gives a speech for his youngest son Edward’s birthday, noting that he didn’t actually want to have a 3rd and 4th child but his wife won them in a negotiation in an argument (on a yacht, in Lisbon, in a storm - specifically referring to scenes going back to S2E3’s Lisbon. He goes on to say that while the eldest two came out of duty, the younger two came out of joy (not pleasure, as he initially said). Charles and Anne, the eldest two, laughingly refer to their younger brothers as “the b team.” Philip also pretends to forget his son’s name right before the toast, which leaves Edward unamused.

    • At Edward’s party, Margaret is dressed in a solid color dark blue shirt which is a bit more toned down than most things she’s worn this season, perhaps indicating how unwell she is feeling. She sits with her sister and they reminisce over Edward’s christening, when the two of them held their babies in a photo; this refers to the very last scene of Season 2 and the final shot of the S1-S2 cast of the Crown.

    • In the background, Edward hysterically receives both a trombone and a scuba helmet and messes around with them, to the delight of the younger royals.

The final shot of Season 2 of The Crown at Prince Edward’s christening.

The final shot of Season 2 of The Crown at Prince Edward’s christening.

  • Margaret asks the Queen to give her more responsibility as a royal, as she plans on giving up men, cigarettes, and perhaps even alcohol (as she waves another drink away). She specifically says, “Your sister needs to stay afloat with a sense of meaning.” This calls back to Margaret’s previous requests for more work in S1E8 Pride and Joy and S3E2 Margaretology, which has resulted in first, Winston Churchill taking away Margaret’s deputization to do the queen’s work while the queen is away on tour due to Margaret’s over the top ways, and later, the Queen and Prince Philip deciding that Margaret is too impulsive and unreliable to be given more responsibility.

  • Unfortunately, in the next scene between the two sisters, Margaret’s request is quickly denied and she actually has her last remaining responsibilities as counsellor of state taken away. As Margaret said to Elizabeth, “it can’t be good news or you wouldn’t have brought Lurch.” (referring to the Queen’s private secretary as the Adams Family butler). As Charteris explains, by law, only 6 people can be deputized to act for the monarch at a time, and now that Prince Edward has come of age, he is replacing poor Margo in that role, as he is higher up in the line of succession.

    • The 1937 Regency Act allows the monarch to have a list of six senior royals, known as Counsellors of State, who can be called on to deputize for the sovereign in an official capacity. This is known and has been standard practice since that time, so I sincerely doubt Princess Margaret would have actually been taken surprise by this change. In recent years, the list has been trimmed down even more to only 4 people - both Princess Anne and Prince Edward have now been replaced as Counsellors of State at this point by Prince Charles’s own sons. (Source: Royal.uk)

    • Margaret’s argument about why she should remain counsellor of state - “I have the maturity, I have the wisdom; Edward’s a boy. He’s an immature useless boy.” - is very similar to her mother’s own lament back in S1E8 Pride and Joy, in which she says her experience as queen by her husband’s side was wasted after the king’s death and the crown passed to an immature girl (her own daughter Elizabeth).

    • Elizabeth, who’s trying but is honestly a bit oblivious to other people’s troubles, as usual, says that now Margaret will have more time to pursue her own interests. Margaret tells her bitterly, “I don’t want more time. Time it scares me. It fills me with dread. I want something to fill it with.” She says her friends worth knowing won’t have anything to do with her, and the charities don’t want her now that they have princess Diana (as she is “younger, nicer, prettier”). Her complaints about Diana getting so much attention echo Princess Anne’s previous statements in S4E4’s Favourites and Charles’s in S4E6’s Terra Nullius.

  • We see a very quick order of the garter ceremony in which …presumably something important happens, but the show certainly doesn’t tell us. The queen is in her order of the garter robes, but Edward wasn’t inducted into the order of the garter until 2006. Is there a counsellor of state ceremony? I couldn’t figure this out, so if you know, please tell me.

  • Margaret then flies off to her property on the private Caribbean island of Mustique, which is run by her friends Colin Tennant and his wife, Lady Anne Glenconner. She emerges from the plane slowly (refusing an offer of help from some sort of helper) while wearing a wild jewel-tone patterned dress. This contrasts with her arriving at Anne’s house already passed out in the car from drinking in the early, pre-Roddy moments of S3E10’s Cri de Coeur. Anne meets her in a white jumpsuit covered with brightly colored flowers, looking very concerned. She asks Margaret “Is everything alright,” and gets a brisk “no” in response.

    • I actually wish Anne had a bit more to do in this series than accompany Margaret and look concerned. She’s fascinating in her own right and published her memoir last year (Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown) to great acclaim.

  • Margaret continues to hangs out on Mustique looking incredibly sad, not really listening to Colin as he drones on about the island’s board of directors, doing cross word puzzles that come in over the fax machine, and dreaming of seeing Roddy Llewellyn swimming in her pool. For the record, I will never forgive The Crown for only giving us one episode featuring the gorgeous Harry Treadaway as Roddy; the show portrayed their relationship as a very brief fling, but in reality, they dated for eight years! They had been together for about three years, actually, before the tabloids broke the story, and were together until 1980 sometime. Queen Elizabeth refused to invite him into her home. Fun fact, Llewellyn released a self-titled pop album in 1978. (Source: Vanity Fair). They only broke up when Roddy fell in love with someone else and got married. They still remained friends, and Margaret became friends with Roddy’s wife as well. How much fun would it have been to see all that portrayed in The Crown?

    • It is possible that Margaret missed Roddy as much as is portrayed in the show. Lady Anne said in a documentary that after Margaret’s funeral, the queen came up and thanked her for introducing Margaret to Roddy, as he made her very happy.

    • FUN FACT: Princess Margaret actually totally did crossword puzzles. I found a fantastic little article published in The Canberra Times in May 1954, noting that Princess Margaret won “a prize of three guineas worth of books for a correct entry in a weekly magazine crossword puzzle.” The editor in charge of the contest actually thought her entry was a joke at first, but confirmed its veracity with Buckingham Palace. Margaret was 23 years old at the time.

Top: Colin Tennant and his wife Lady Anne Glenconner on The Crown. Bottom Left: Colin, Margaret, and Anne. Bottom Right: Colin and Anne.

Top: Colin Tennant and his wife Lady Anne Glenconner on The Crown. Bottom Left: Colin, Margaret, and Anne (Credit: PA Images). Bottom Right: Colin and Anne (Credit: Slim Aarons / Getty).

Top: The Crown. Bottom: the real life Princess Margaret with various friends.

Top: The Crown.
Bottom Left: Margaret with friend (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).
Bottom Right: Margaret with friends (Credit: Lichfield / Getty).

  • Prince Charles comes in to visit Margaret and finds her in the pool. We get a great shot from Margaret’s point of view looking up through the water at Prince Charles and Anne. They walk about a bit and talk together. Charles’s gardening interests (previously discussed in Fairytale and Favourites) come up again as he points out all the gardens at Margaret’s estate (which, of course, were put in by Roddy). Charles also mentions that Diana is pregnant again, but that the couple continues to quarrel all the time.

    • Charles actually was pretty close to his Aunt Margot in real life. Prince Charles did and still wears double breasted suits very much like this. Margaret puts on a dark loose dress and hair turban to walk with her nephew, which resembles many things the real Margaret wore at Mustique.

    • Uh, apparently only Margaret’s nephew and niece care about her in CrownWorld, and her adult children give zero shits about her, as we’ve NEVER seen them, even though at this point in the story, her son David would be 23 and her daughter Sarah would be 20. The longer I think about this fact, the more it weirds me out that they apparently didn’t even make an appearance at Edward’s 21st birthday party, even though they would of course be close to their similarly aged cousin. David actually started lessons in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom with his cousin Prince Andrew at age 5 and Sarah was a bridesmaid at Charles and Diana’s wedding. So…they were definitely there, even if the show hasn’t even alluded to them since the moon landing (I’m fairly sure they attended the rocket launch party at Buckingham palace with their parents in S3’s Moondust as children, but they aren’t credited on the IMDB page for the episode. Will have to investigate).

    • I really enjoy the back and forth conversation of - “I’ve started to see someone.” “ Yes, we all know.” “No, not Camilla.” Charles doesn’t even pretend to be surprised that Margaret assumes he and Camilla are having an affair. Charles ends up suggesting that Margaret see a mental health professional as he himself is, or as Margaret calls them, “a head shrinker.” (Charles: “Aunt Margot, you can’t call them that”). Prince Charles really did go to therapy to help deal with his marriage problems for quite some time, reportedly 14 years.

      This apparently was all Princess Anne’s idea, by the way. Charles promised his sister that he would bring it up to Margaret, and mentioned that Anne actually found the professional he’s recommending to Margaret.

Top left: The Crown. All other photos: the real life Princess Margaret.

Top left: The Crown.
Bottom: Various pictures of Princess Margaret
Credit Left to Right: Keyston-France; Shutterstock; Slim Aarons / Getty

Left: The Crown. Right: The real life Prince Charles.

Left: The Crown. Right: The real life Prince Charles (Credit: David Cooper).

  • Anne Tenant comes back to England with Margaret and drives her to the therapist’s place. Margaret is doing her best to stay incognito, wearing a head scarf, big sunglasses, and a purple coat. She acts very stand-offish at the very idea of therapy, says that she finds the whole idea pathetic, and states, “Self pity won’t get you very far. You just have to get on with it.” Margaret ultimately does admit that she’s been feeling a little low and hasn’t been able to get out of her slump. The purple in her outfit appears to emphasize her intrinsic royalness, which will come up again and again in this episode.

    • Princess Margaret did see a therapist during her marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones, but I couldn’t find any indication that she’d seen a therapist later in life.

    • The therapist asked if any family members had mental illness, which introduces the sisters’ storyline. Margaret states that the Prince of Wales “has his ups and downs. But I wouldn’t say that’s a condition. That’s just marriage.” (continuing the season’s constant focus on Charles and Diana’s struggling marriage). She also notes that “the duke of Gloucester got low from time to time. This appears to refer to Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester - the third son and fourth child of King George V and Queen Mary (and thus, Margaret’s uncle). I have only briefly researched Prince Henry since he’s only mentioned in passing, but he apparently was a rather nervous child with poor health and sometimes had nervous fits of crying or giggling. However, after he was sent to school (becoming the first son of a British monarch to attend school), he thrived and apparently become much more healthy and happy. As an adult, he apparently drank whisky excessively, which may be what Margaret is referring to here. He suffered a few strokes in the later years of his life, eventually ending up in a wheelchair and unable to speak.

Left: The Crown. Middle and Right Photos: the real life Princess Diana.

Left: The Crown. Middle and Right Photos: the real life Princess Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

  • Next, Margaret hangs out with her sister the Queen while an Easter egg hunt goes on in the background (the royals apparently do have a private family Easter egg hunt) and tells her all about what she’s learned about their cousins Katherine and Nerissa. The Queen says she knew about their issues, but that they were long dead. The two women end up consulting Burke’s Peerage to look up the Bowes-Lyon sisters and find that Nerissa’s death date was listed as 1940 and Katherine’s was listed as 1961. In this scene, both women wear paisley prints in wildly different colors, showing their close relationship but also their significant differences.

    • Fantastic Queen-ism as Margaret pushes her button to summon help: “What are you doing, that’s my button.”

    • Margaret continues her trend of stubbornly denying her own ill health by insisting on climbing up the ladder to get the books off the shelf herself, refusing her sister’s offer of help.

    • Burke’s Peerage has been published since 1826 and features the ancestry and heraldry of “the Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Landed Gentry of the United Kingdom [and] the historical families of Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations.” These books are updated yearly. The firm also has published books covering “the Imperial, Royal and Mediatised families of Europe and Latin America, the Presidential and distinguished families of the United States, the ruling families of Africa and the Middle East and other prominent families worldwide.”

    • We get a few shots of various family members running around in the background, including an obviously pregnant Diana leading around a toddling blonde Prince William. Per usual, she’s dressed in an almost perfect homage to some of Diana’s actual pregnancy outfits.

    • Sidenote: How much time has passed in this episode? Prince Edward turned 21 on March 10, 1985 and Easter that year took place on April 7, 1985. Diana goes from looking not at all pregnant at Edwards’s birthday party to SUPER pregnant at Easter, in the space of a few weeks. That’s….impressive. In addition, Prince Harry was actually born in 1984, but that minor detail change doesn’t really change much in this story.

  • Margaret is next seen at Buckingham Palace doing a crossword puzzle and refusing to pick up the phone when Dazzle calls. She initially says she doesn’t want to see him, but apparently changes her mind, as in the next scene, we see the two of them driving in a car. Dazzle is praying in Latin and asks Margaret when she had last driven, as she is ….somewhat bad at it (she almost runs over a bicyclist on the way). Dazzle, who is training to become a priest at this point, feels weird about lying about who he is to get into the hospital and check on Katherine and Nerissa, but Margaret bullies him into doing so anyway, saying “You can always confess later, now go.” Margaret hides out in the car (in the rain) until Dazzle comes back, confirming that he met Katherine and Nerissa (who are very much alive) and also telling her that there are several other relatives living there.

    • I didn’t actually find any info on whether Princess Margaret actually could drive or not, but I did find this somewhat hilarious article on the driving habits of the royals in the process (apparently Prince Philip still was driving around on private land in 2019, even though he was almost 98 at the time, and uh, Prince Edward’s 11-year-old son was also seen driving on private land).

    • I like that even when Margaret is going on a covert mission where she doesn’t want to be seen or recognized, she dresses fabulously in furs and big gold earrings.

    • Nerissa and Katherine have pictures of the Queen (Claire Foy) and Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) by their bedsides and clearly know that they are their royals and their family members. I read a LT of articles about Nerissa and Katherine while writing this blog post and didn’t find a single one that mentioned them having photos. However, they did indeed stand and salute when they saw the royals on the screen.

Upper Left: The Crown. All other photos: The real life Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth.

Upper Left: The Crown.
Upper Right: Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).
Lower Left: Princess Margaret (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty)
Lower Middle: Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Credit: AP)
Lower Right: Queen Elizabeth (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

  • After this revelation, Margaret goes to her mother’s castle in Scotland. She pulls her mother away from her friends (including Lady Fermoy, Princess Diana’s grandmother) to confront her dramatically on a beach. Margaret is in the standard royal family Scotland uniform at this point (skirt, shirt, jacket, long coat, and headscarf). We haven’t seen Margaret dress like this much this season, but both she and her sister both commonly dressed like this in real life. The Queen Mother is in a blue and white dress with a cardigan and pearls that very much resembles the type of outfit the real Queen Mother wore her entire life.

    • Remember, we saw the Queen Mother tour and purchase her Scottish castle in S1’s Pride and Joy. This episode seems to constantly refer back to previous episodes. Everything in it points back to the mistakes of the past.

    • Margaret angrily shouts at her mother about five of their family members being “locked up and neglected.” The Queen Mother argues that Aunt Fenella (Katherine and Nerissa’s mother) was overwhelmed and that things were complicated around that time because of the abdication. Margaret then brilliantly yells, “Not everything that is wrong with this family can be explained away by the abdication!” which is totally true. As I previously mentioned, Katherine, Nerissa, and their three cousins were all placed in the hospital about five years after the abdication, so it’s unlikely that that actually played any role in their family’s decision to do so.

    • Margaret also yells that anyone in the family that doesn’t follow the rules and perfectly fit their role is rejected, underlining a constant theme throughout the show. We’ve seen Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, and Diana all really struggle with their roles as royals throughout the series.

  • Later, Margaret sits in her mother’s castle looking positively ill, wearing the same outfit and using a plaid blanket to keep warm. Her mother, dressed formally for dinner, comes in and tells her all sorts of things about how the abdication changed things, and claims “Their professionally diagnosed idiocy and imbecility would make people question the integrity of the bloodline.” As I’ve discussed, this is bullshit, as the genetic disorder didn’t run in the royal line.

    • The Queen Mother notably refers to “the children of my brother” and “their first cousins,” while Margaret quite specifically names them all as individuals. When her mother refers to "their imbecility,” Margaret, shocked, says “don’t use their words.” This calls back to the earlier moment between Charles and Margaret when he told her she couldn’t call therapists head shrinkers. Each younger generation seems to be trying to teach their older generations to be better in this episode.

    • “The hereditary principle already hangs by such a precarious thread,” she says, giving the episode its title. This refers to the entire concept of hereditary monarchy, in which the throne passes from one member of a ruling family to another member of the same family.

    • Several examples of mental illness in the Windsor family are given: George III, Prince John, “your uncle” (presumably referring again to the duke of gloucester, who I discussed previously in this post).

      • George III was famously the “mad king,” whose recurrent mental illness ultimately led to the establishment of a regency, in which his eldest son ruled as Prince Regent for the last 9 years of his father’s life. During these episodes, he was often manic and deranged, sometimes talking until foam actually ran out of his mouth. There are several theories as to what was wrong with George, including porphyria and bipolar disorder. (Source: BBC). He was the subject of a popular play (The Madness of George III), a film, and also shows up in the new Netflix series Bridgerton.

      • Prince John was the youngest child of George V and Queen Mary and therefore was also Margaret’s uncle. He began to have seizures when he was four years old and was diagnosed with epilepsy. John was sent to live at Sandringham House with his nanny and governess. He died in 1919 at the age of 13. At the time, no one really understood epilepsy and patients with epilepsy were often treated as though they were insane. His condition was not revealed to the public until after his death, so there was lots of speculation that he was being mistreated. (Source: Libby-Jane Charleston on Medium)

  • Margaret sits on the plane with a line of alcohol bottles conspicuously at her back. She may have tried to give up alcohol briefly, but is about to get right back to it. Back at her therapist’s, she ponders, “It’s all a family disease isn’t it? When they tell you you can’t marry, when they strip away your official role, when they side with your husband as your marriage falls apart, and now this. This final insult. That every diminishment, every rotten misfortune is written in my blood.” She then asks her therapist if she’s destined to be mad, at which point her therapist explains the actual origin of her cousins’ genetic disorder. Margaret ends up concluding that the girls never needed to be hidden away and what her family did to them was unforgivable.

    • This gorgeously delivered monologue (Helena Bonham Carter BETTER be nominated for a Tony for this episode) references her previous relationship with Peter Townsend (a big plotline in Season 1), the moment earlier in this episode when her role as Counsellor of State was given to Prince Edward, and the way that her family favored her husband Tony even when he was absent from her own birthday dinner and blatantly cheating on her (featured in S3E10 Cri de Coeur).

  •  In the next scene, Margaret fiddles on the piano while talking to Dazzle. Her therapist has suggested psycho therapy, meds, and increased exercise to help her. Dazzle urges her to convert to Catholicism and tells her how joining the church gave him a faith and helped him; how “submitting oneself to something larger” lifted the gloom and emptiness in his life. She rejects this idea, and states that she has already committed herself to a larger power - the royal family - and converting would result in her being kicked out of the family.

    • Margaret is in serious denial about her life and her family. She states, “My title, my seniority, my proximity to the crown – it is my happiness. It’s who I am. I don’t expect you to understand.”  When Dazzle points out that her family does terrible things to its outer members to protect itself, and that they only protect the center. Margaret insists, “But I am in the center! I am in the very center. I am the Queen’s sister, daughter of a king-emperor, and I will always be in the center.”

      • The “center” metaphor is very apt at describing Margaret’s situation throughout her life. Before her sister Elizabeth got married and had children, Margaret was second in line to the throne. With successive children and children’s children, she’s been pushed further and further away from the throne. At this point in her life, she is…8th in line to the throne, behind Prince Charles and his son Prince William, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Princess Anne and her children Peter and Zara Phillips. At the time of her death, she was 11th to the throne. The nature of hereditary monarchy is that those who aren’t actually the firstborn direct descendants of the monarch are continually pushed further back in line as more royals marry and have children. It’s just inevitable.

      • Margaret’s use of “king-emperor” hearkens back to her mother’s use of the term earlier in the episode. Her mother was in denial about the situation with Katherine, Nerissa, and their three cousins, and Margaret is totally in denial about her position here.

      • At the end of the scene, Margaret says they shouldn’t see each other again but asks, if he has a moment, for him to pray for her. As I noted earlier, the real life Dazzle really did try to convert Margaret to Catholicism. However, the two remained friends until his death in 1994. She was actually one of the last people he saw before his death.

  • Margaret, now feeling even more desolate and insignificant than ever, flies back to Mustique and gets a montage of party scenes. She’s seen in an acid yellow dress singing at a party, staring in her mirror, walking at a beach, and dancing by herself. She notably is back to smoking and drinking. She’s wearing brighter colors than ever in almost all these scenes, until the very end, when she’s sporting a much simpler and quieter printed dress. The episode ends with Margaret sitting alone at her pool (which of course, reminds her of Roddy and all that she’s lost), staring at her toes in the water and looking desperately sad and alone as the sun sets behind her.

    • The lyrics Margaret sings (from Fallin’ by Connie Francis) are on point as usual. “Yeah I was riding high, but then my ivory tower toppled and I tumbled from the sky. I got a feelin’ like I’m fallin’ and you’re the reason why.” The party music and noise is overtaken by the same sort of mystical music Diana has been getting all season (the instrumental arrangement is specifically “Voices”).

      • Her toes are specifically painted red, which calls back to the red finger nail polish she was wearing in S3E10 Cri de Coeur when she’s crying after her affair with Roddy was broken in the press and he tried to comfort her.

 

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E6 Terra Nullius

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All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 6 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

Top: Bob Hawke on The Crown; Bottom: Bob Hawke in real life

Top: Bob Hawke on The Crown; Bottom: Bob Hawke in real life

  • The episode opens with politician Bob Hawke (about to become Australia’s prime minister) speaking to a reporter on TV, who asks him about Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s forthcoming tour of Australia. Hawke notes that he doesn’t consider this a very important part of his job and expounds on his republican views and his desire to have an Australian head of state. He refers to the queen as a “pom,” which is an Australian slang word used to refer to Brits. It’s not entirely known where this term came from, but the most common theory I found spouted about the Internet is that it’s short for pomegranate and refers to the red cheeks that visiting Brits and new British immigrants to Australia get from the heat and sun there (source: Country Life).
    In the show, Hawke also refers to the royal family by saying “You wouldn't put a pig in charge of a herd of prime beef cattle — even if it did look good in a twin set and pearls.” In real life, Bob Hawke’s widow and others stated that he would never have said such a thing about the Queen. This uproar over this portrayal is discussed in this article from The Daily Mail, which also includes a video of the real Bob Hawke talking about Charles’s visit to Australia; what’s interesting, is the interview’s beginning is almost identical to how it’s shown in The Crown (where he says he’s met Charles and found him a nice young bloke), but where the show has Hawke going off and saying various rude things about the Queen, in real life, he was much milder and said, “I don’t think we’ll be talking about kings in Australia for ever more ... we would be better off as a republic. But I don’t think it’s a matter of great importance.” He then continues to talk about his larger concerns, namely, the welfare of people in Australia. (written quotes from that interview are included in this article from The Guardian)

    • Check out how closely the show captured the interview background of the 4 Corners news show just for this single one minute sequence!

    • Several articles also have reported that Bob Hawke was in fact a republican, but wasn’t nearly as keen on pushing the royals out of Australia as is shown in The Crown. The Australian stated, “The truth is that Hawke never saw the Charles-Diana visit as a chance to advocate a republic. Hawke always got on well with the Queen. He believed Australia should not become a republic until the Queen’s reign ends. This is a testament to the respect most Australians have for her.”

  • Next, we see Martin Charteris apprising the Queen on the results of the Australia election. The Queen describes Hawke as “the rough, tough former trade union negotiator and the proud holder of the world record for beer drinking.” Charteris said he won it by drinking “a yard of ale in a sconce pot in 11 seconds,” and then notes that Hawke was now a teetotaller.
    I found a truly delightful article published in the Australian Times that looks into Hawke’s beer-drinking record in depth that you should totally go read if you have a chance. That article explains the story far better than I ever could: “Oxford University is an institution steeped in quaint tradition, and even more so in the 1950’s when Bob was a student. Students take their evening meal in the dining hall of their college, and are required to attend wearing a gown. Back in Bob’s day, if you turned up not wearing a gown, you were subject to a challenge against the ‘sconce master’ of the college. “Sconcing” is a tradition unique to Oxford University, which demands a person drink a tankard of alcohol, usually ale, as penance for a breach of etiquette — such as forgetting to wear one’s gown to dinner! The story goes that Bob had to drink the yard of ale from a sconce pot faster than the sconce master, or face buying a round for all present. Being unable to afford to buy the round, Bob had no choice but to beat the sconce master. And beat him he did, setting a world record and carving a place in Australian history at the same time.”
    The Independent reported in 1994 that Bob Hawke gave up alcohol in 1980 and remained a teetotaller as long as he was prime minister.

  • FUN RIDICULOUSLY SMALL ROYAL REFERENCE: While talking to Charteris in her office, the Queen waters a flower in a pot. I’m not a gardener myself, but this flower looks to be a lily of the valley, which are in fact, the real life Queen’s favorite flower (source: House Beautiful). I could not find any evidence that the Queen actually keeps potted plants or waters them herself (please tell me if you do!), but she did take up gardening at 91 (Source: British Heritage).

  • The Queen emphasizes the importance of Charles and Diana’s visit to Australia here, implying here and later that it’s their job to persuade Australia to keep in the Commonwealth. In real life, it wasn’t viewed that way at all. The Australian quoted Sir William Heseltine (the Queen’s ACTUAL private secretary from 1986-1990; as I’ve mentioned before, in real life, Martin Charteris retired in the late 70s), as saying “The visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales to Australia, which features large in the series, I can attest was certainly not conceived as a weapon to ward off any move to a republic. It was one in the regular series of visits by Her Majesty herself and members of her family undertaken as one of the ways in which the family showed their devotion to the overseas monarchies.”

IMG_20201214_215757.jpg

Scenes from The Crown.

Diana in real life wearing a wide necked loose green dress similar to one on the show.

Diana in real life wearing a wide necked loose green dress similar to one on the show.

  • Content Warning: Eating Disorders. [italicized]

    We get a quick flashback to a lunch with the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne. All of them are wearing similar colors and prints, clearly emphasizing their familial connection, but in their own particular colors and styles. In this scene, it’s implied that Margaret tells the others about Diana’s bulimia (this isn’t explicitly shown, but we do see a quick montage of Diana binging and purging in the middle of the conversation and the royal ladies looking very shocked afterward); she would know best, as Margaret, Diana, and Charles, all lived in Kensington Palace at the time (although Charles spent quite a bit of time out at his home in the country, Highgrove). Margaret lived in apartment 1A and the Waleses lived in Apartments 8 and 9. You shouldn’t expect “apartment” to refer to anything small, by the way; Diana and Charles’s rooms covered three floors (Source: Marie Claire).
    To the royal ladies’ credit, they are completely shocked by the news of Diana’s bulimia.

    • These bulimia scenes are incredibly heartbreaking, of course. Diana spoke about her struggles with her eating disorder quite openly later in life. In one interview with BBC, she said, “I had bulimia for a number of years. And that's like a secret disease. You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don't think you're worthy or valuable. You fill your stomach up four or five times a day - some do it more - and it gives you a feeling of comfort. It's like having a pair of arms around you, but it's temporarily, temporary. Then you're disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and then you bring it all up again. And it's a repetitive pattern which is very destructive to yourself.” She attributed the bulimia to the struggles in her marriage, saying “The cause was the situation where my husband and I had to keep everything together because we didn't want to disappoint the public, and yet obviously there was a lot of anxiety going on within our four walls.”

    • Princess Margaret, who in the show, was the only one who spoke out openly against the marriage before it happened, saying that clearly neither Diana nor Charles wanted to marry each other, continues her trend as being the most observant member of the family by stating, “People do the strangest things when they’re unhappy”

      Content Warning end.

  • At the royal ladies’ lunch, it’s stated that it was Diana who wanted to take baby William on the Tour of Australia. This is not actually the case. According to her biography by Andrew Morton, she was ready to leave William behind during the tour until the then-prime minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser suggested bringing him along. Apparently it was portrayed as Diana’s idea in the press at the time though.

  • In the next scene, after a few very quick dialogue-less shots of Charles arriving to play polo with Camilla and her husband Andrew, we see Charles and Camilla laughing, drinking, and telling a bawdy joke together at a gathering of friends. Andrew Parker Bowles is in the crowd, with his arm leaned up on a sofa behind another woman (likely alluding to his own affairs). I think this is mostly to show how happy these two truly are together. Diana is conspicuously absent.

  • The gaiety of this scene contrasts sharply with the next shot, which has Charles and Diana miserably huddled next to each other on a sofa as they sit across from the Queen, Philip, and a counselor of some sort. Diana has her arms crossed and Charles has his hands clasped together (exposing his ever-present signet ring); their body language indicates that they don’t want to be there and don’t feel close to each other at all. DIana’s in a loose green dress with a wide neck; everything about it seems to emphasize how thin she is (it’s very similar to a dress the real Diana wore on the Australia tour. Couldn’t find a screenshot of the dress in the show, but I’ve included the real life green dress to the right). The Queen and Philip similarly have their hands gathered up separately, but they sit with their legs and body posture facing each other, signifying how close they are and only emphasizing the distance between the younger couple

Left: Emma Corrin on The Crown. Right: Diana in real life.

Left: Emma Corrin on The Crown. Right: Diana in real life (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

Top: Diana and Charles with William arriving in Australia. Bottom: Emma Corrin and Josh O’Connor arriving in Australia on The Crown.

Top: Diana and Charles with William arriving in Australia (Credit: Bob Thomas / Getty). Bottom: Emma Corrin and Josh O’Connor arriving in Australia on The Crown.

  • The Queen refers to her and Philip’s tour of the Commonwealth back in 1954, which we saw portrayed in S1E8’s Pride & Joy, and states that it was hard, but brought them closer together. This is hilarious considering that we saw them have a huge fight on that tour, complete with Elizabeth throwing things at Philip. I haven’t had a chance to write about the first and second seasons yet, but apparently their argument in Australia depicted on The Crown actually happened in real life (Source: Express).
    Elizabeth’s obliviousness towards her children (shown previously in S4E4’s Favourites) continues when Margaret wryly asks whether leaving her children behind for six months “might have had consequences” by saying “On what? The tour was a triumph.”

  • Diana’s outfit as they board the plane to Australia is similar to one she wore in real life, but with some key differences. In real life, she wore a navy blue and white striped cardigan; her cardigan on the crown has very colorful stripes that are almost childlike - emphasizing both her youth and her connection to baby William. We get a fight on the plane between her and Charles’s long-suffering private secretary Edward Adeane (who yes, was the son of Michael Adeane, who was private secretary to Queen Elizabeth from S1-S3, the one who Philip gave a clock and then promptly forgot about) about being separated from William for two weeks, but as I previously mentioned, in real life, she actually hadn’t insisted on bringing William along. William stayed primarily at Woomargama and the prince and princess visited him several times during the trip. This entire scene is basically just added for drama and to illustrate how different Diana is from the rest of the royals.
    One thing this scene does illustrate though, is Diana’s views on motherhood. She states, “the greatest service I can give the royal family is to be a living breathing present mother – to this child who will someday be king.” Insider has an article talking all about Diana’s approach to raising her sons which is pretty good, although it does repeat the tired, disproven story that Diana insisted on taking William to Australia. 

  • There’s a really adorable Town and Country article all about the effect William’s stay at Woomargama Station had on the little town. It’s just. So cute.

  • Next we see Charles and a very unhappy Diana getting off the airplane in torrential rain with baby William. In the show, a newscaster notes that in Alice Springs, they’d received more than a month’s rain in a week. Diana says goodbye to William tearily, as Charles snaps at her to get going.
    In real life, the whole Wales family arrived in apparently good spirits on a sunny day. A UPI article from 1983 confirms this, noting that the couple were greeted at their stop in Alice Springs “in brilliant sunshine.” I get why The Crown did this though, as in reality, there HAD been several days of torrential rain and flash floods that disrupted the entire area right before the royal couple arrived. In fact, the rain and floods were so bad in the area that the casino hotel that the couple planned to stay in was inaccessible except by helicopter; they had to make do with a motel that stood on top of a ridge. This wasn’t shown on The Crown, of course, but it would have been interesting to see. Commentators at the time claimed that the motel stay was a “royal first.”
    There was one contrasting report from The Age in 1983, which said “She seemed uneasy, even glum, and looked at the tarmac with downcast eyes throughout much of the brief airport picture session.” This is not demonstrated in photos of the event though. At the very least, if she was visibly unhappy, it wasn’t to the extent shown in the show. However, Diana was very good at hiding her feelings. Years later, she said to Andrew Morton (who wrote the biography Diana: Her True Story), “I’ve got what my mother’s got. However bloody you’re feeling, you can put on the most amazing show of happiness.”

  • The Crown also shows the royal family going essentially directly to a press conference to talk to a horde of journalists, where Diana stumbles over her words and accidentally calls “Ayers Rock” “Ayers Dock,” to titters in the audience and the ridicule of the prime minister (watching on his tv set). I couldn’t find any evidence that Diana actually made that large of a gaffe, but Charles DID joke that baby William was being fed “warm milk and minced kangaroo,” which um, angered some people (Source: Meaww).

  • Bob Hawke is shown briefly mentioning that there are protests in Canberra about the cost of Charles and Diana’s visit. I couldn’t find ANY evidence of this happening at the time. Please tell me if you do and I will HAPPILY add that information in here. Maybe I just wasn’t using the right magical keywords to appease the Google gods.
    I did find a bit about protests happening in New Zealand? The Telegraph says: “Nor was the couple’s two-week stay in New Zealand trouble-free. On their way to a banquet in Auckland their car was hit by an egg filled with red paint, and in Wellington a Maori bared his buttocks at the couple in a protest over land rights.”

Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II watching film from her 1954 visit to Australia in The Crown

Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II watching film from her 1954 visit to Australia in The Crown

  • We get a scene of the Queen reminiscing over her glory days while watching a film of her visit to Australia in 1954. These appear to be film strips of the real Queen and Philip, not Claire Foy and Matt Smith. Philip hears the music of the film and joins her. They talk a bit about the size of the crowds, citing that over a million people turned out to see them in Sydney. This will become important later.
    Philip asks why the Queen sent Charles and Diana to Australia, stating that the country was too important “to send out the understudy.” As I mentioned already, there weren’t any serious fears that Australia would get rid of the monarchy or any need for the royals to keep Australia in the fold; this was a planned, regular visit just like Philip and the Queen’s in 1954.

  • Later, we see Diana struggling with the heat at Ayers Rock (now known as Uluru) and unable to climb the tourist site. In real life, it appears that Diana hesitated because of her unsuitable dress and shoes, not due to heat or illness. The Sydney Morning Herald at the time reported “As she stepped off the plane at Ayers Rock, she looked down in horror. Her dress, buttoned down to the front, was immediately blown open revealing her petticoat and knees. From that moment, the Princess made constant but hopeless attempts to keep the dress closed."
    In reality, the royal couple did actually climb Ayers Rock. However, the show didn’t depict this, as Uluru is actually a spiritually important place to the Anangu (a name referring to several aboriginal Aaustralian groups); climbing of it was banned in October 2019 (Source: The New Daily). Although The Crown shot this scene in Spain, not Australia, and digitally added in the rock in post-production, the fact that they didn’t show them climbing the whole rock illustrates the series’ attempts at cultural sensitivity. Apparently some of the footage of this scene in The Crown also features archival footage of traditional land custodian Reggie Uluru; Netflix made a donation to a Mutitjulu community charity in return for this (Mutitjulu is an aboriginal community in the area and the home of Reggie Uluru).

  • Later, Charles complains to Camilla about Diana on the phone. This hearkens back to what Charles told his mother in S4E4 “Favourites,” namely, that he called Camilla when he needed cheering up. In this conversation, he refers to Diana as a child and says he misses Camilla’s adulthood.

    Note that he calls Camilla “my darling” on the phone. This will become important later.

Top: The Crown; Bottom Two Photos: the real life Charles and Diana

Top: The Crown
Bottom Left: Charles and Diana at Ayers Rock (Credit: TIm Graham / Getty).
Bottom Right: Charles and Diana at Uluru (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

Left: The Crown; Right: the real life Charles and Diana

Left: The Crown
Top Right: Charles and Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).
Bottom Right: Charles, Diana and baby William (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

  • We get another argument of Diana arguing with Edward Adeane over her need to see William. In real life, the royal couple visited William in Woomargama several times throughout the trip. It appears that these visits were always planned.

  • After the royal couple arrives at Woomargama, The Crown shows Diana and Charles playing happily with William in front of photographers, recreating a famous picture from the time.

  • Next is a scene of Charles and Diana out at Woomargama talking about William while their baby naps, the one thing they seem to have in common at this point in the episode. Charles notes affectionately that he was “crashing and bashing into everything” and also calls him “a mini tornado.” This is very accurate to real life. Charles once recounted a similar event in a letter to a friend, noting that he and Diana had enjoyed watching William crawling around “at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction” (Source: Elle).

  • Their conversation about their relationship is very beautifully done, like a scene from a play. The showrunner of The Crown was, of course, originally a playwright.  Charles acknowledges how unhappy Diana is; Diana asks him how she’s supposed to feel about his relationship with Camilla. She specifically refers to the bracelet incident (which was shown in S4E3 Fairytale), his wearing “CC” cufflinks Camilla gave him, and a picture of Camilla falling out of his diary on their honeymoon. The cufflinks and picture incident were both mentioned in Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words,” which was based on extensive interviews with Diana herrself.

    • At the climax of the confrontation, Diana points out that Charles and Camilla are perfect for each other and asks angrily “So where do I fit in?” Charles responds, “You fit because you are my wife. And I love you.” This conversation echoes reports from many of Charles’s friends that Charles did, in his own way, actually love Diana, at least in he early years of their marriage. The lines indicating that they are in fact, very similar and both need more encouragement and appreciation, also echo reports from people who knew both of them. By the end of the conversation, they recommit to their relationship and promise to encourage and lift each other up more. Charles’s last line in this scene is “Happy Easter, my darling,” which, you’ll note, is exactly what he called Camilla just a few scenes earlier.

    • I do greatly enjoy that they’re literally celebrating Easter by hanging out and playing with sheep.

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana

Left: The Crown
Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

Top: The Crown; Bottom photos: Diana and Charles

Top: The Crown; Bottom photos: Diana and Charles

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana

Left: The Crown
Right: Charles and Diana (Credit: David Levenson / Getty).

  • The next few scenes show the couple at their best, happily greeting crowds in a variety of different Australian cities, most notably Sydney, where they’re positioned right outside the opera house. Diana’s outfits are very similar to what she wore in real life, but not always exact copies, as you’ll see above.

  • Although I couldn’t find figures on the size of the crowds at the time (except in Melbourne, where 200,000 turned out), everyone seems to think that this tour signified the start of Diana-mania.
    The Telegraph reported: “On a more serious note, police in Australia had vastly underestimated the size of the crowds that would turn out to greet the couple. A senior officer famously said: ’We haven’t seen this in royal tours here before. It is more akin to Beatlemania.’ Thus was the phrase ‘Dianamania’ coined by the tabloid press. The couple often ran late because of delays caused by the crowds, leading to a frenetic atmosphere among those waiting in the heat. Children became separated from their parents in the crush, hundreds of people fainted, flowers and flags were thrown at the couple, and police became seriously concerned about crowd surges. Police numbers were increased by 25 per cent. By the time the couple visited Tasmania ten days into their tour, local police were warned by their counterparts in Canberra to step up crowd control because of ‘an element of hysteria’ that had been evident in crowds in Sydney.

  • Content Warning: Eating Disorders. [italicized]

    Although The Crown shows the crowds exciting and invigorating Diana, in real life, she found the attention overwhelming and exhausting. Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote a biography about Prince Charles, said “For her part, Diana was upset by the disproportionate interest in her, especially when she realized that it was disturbing Charles. She collapsed under the strain, weeping to her lady-in-waiting and secretly succumbing to bulimia. In letters to friends, Charles described his anguish over the impact ‘all this obsessed and crazed attention was having on his wife.’” This strain become most publicly apparent when Diana burst into tears in the midst of a crowd at the Sydney Opera House; the scene was caught by photographers, but apparently overlooked by Charles at the time.

    Content Warning end.

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

  • The beautiful scene of Charles and Diana dancing recreates some very famous photos of the couple dancing together in Australia, in pretty much the exact same outfits. I did find actual video of their dancing; although they dance to “Can’t take my eyes off of you” in The Crown, it’s a different song in real life (I haven’t figured out which one, but if you do, please let me know!)
    Afterward, Charles joins Diana in her room. We know that despite their unhappiness, the couple did uhm, at least have some fun together after this 1983 Australia trip, as Prince Harry was born in September 1984.

  • In the next scene, Charles is having breakfast and is told that Camilla is on the phone; he refuses the call. On The Crown podcast, actor Josh O’Connor said that he had been instructed to think of Camilla as sort of like a bad habit that he’s trying to quit - every time he says “this’ll be my last camilla” and yet he always ends up going back to her. This seems to show one of his attempts to leave Camilla behind. (In the podcast, the actor acknowledged that this was an incredibly reductive way of viewing an actual person, but said it was a good tool for him to understand the situation. Emerald Fennell, who plays Camilla, was NOT a fan of this approach when she heard about it).

  • They have a wonderful appearance on a radio show in which Diana says, “I don’t think of myself as royalty, first and foremost I’m a wife and a mother, that’s what is most important thing to me.” This is very similar to something she said in real life: “Most importantly, [my role is] being a mother and a wife. That's what I try to achieve; whether I do is another thing, but I do try.” (Source: Little Things). In The Crown, she also notes “his favorite cuddly toy used to be a whale. Now it’s a koala.” In real life, she really did tell a reporter that William had a koala he loved now. I didn’t find anything referring to his formerly loving a whale, but this was likely chosen because Charles and Diana were Prince and Princess of Wales.

  • In the next scene, we have the coolest shot following a woman getting out of a pool, getting out, and going over to the edge of the building’s roof, where she joins others waving down at Diana and Charles, surrounded by gigantic crowds of people. This is an incredibly effective way of signifying the Diana mania. Diana is shown talking to many people in the crowd in a very friendly, interested way, illustrating her real life talent at connecting with people. Diana really was swarmed by a crowd at one point. Again, she’s wearing an outfit incredibly similar to what Diana wore in real life.

    • Footage of Diana in the crowd is shown on TV as the Queen and Princess Anne watch during a joint uniform fitting. Anne smartly notes, “There’s a problem that nobody expected,” pointing out that Diana’s intense popularity (drawing “bigger crowds than [the queen] got back in the 18th century or whenever”) was sure to upset Charles. “You and I both know how much Charles craves attention, reassurance and praise – it was supposed to be his debut. Instead, it’s Diana’s.” Anne also bitterly notes that people are commenting on “what a natural mother [Diana] is,” hearkening back to her words about being constantly compared to Diana back in S4E4 “Favourites.”

  •  Anne’s prediction is quickly shown coming true in the Australian scenes. Charles appears at a polo match and the crowd calls to ask where his wife is, saying “we only came to see princess Di.” Charles ends up falling from his horse, which can’t have made him happy, and people chant “We want Di! We want Di!” In contrast, Diana is off posing with some swimmers, and then greeting some sick children to uproarious acclaim.

  • The final straw for Charles seems to come when he speaks at a dinner; his comments about Diana are greeted with laughter as Diana blushes at the compliment prettily in the background. He takes this badly and interprets it as "her pulling faces.” During their fight, Diana points out “Thanks to me, people have shown up.” Charles shouts, “People are laughing in my face, booing the heir to the throne, booing the crown.”

    • During this whole scene, Diana wears a red dress with sparkly polka dots on it which combines two real life dresses. She’s also shown wearing the Spencer Tiara, her family tiara. As the blog The Court Jeweller has noted, the tiaras on The Crown unfortunately tend to be just enough larger than the real life things to look slightly absurd.

Top Left and Bottom Left: The Crown; Top Right and bottom right two: Charles and Diana

Top Left: Charles and Diana in The Crown; Top Right: Charles and Diana
Bottom Left: Diana in The Crown; Bottom Middle: Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty). Bottom Right: Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

Top: The Crown; Bottom: Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Hazel Hawke, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana

Top: The Crown; Bottom: Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Hazel Hawke, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

  • In the next scene, the royal couple meets the Australian Prime Minister and his wife. The PM talks to Charles and tells him that if Diana hadn’t been with the prince, Australia might have shaken off the royals (which must have done GREAT things for Charles’s insecurity). Hawke notes, “That superstar may have just set back the cause of republicanism in Australia for the foreseeable future.” (remember though, this wasn’t a real concern either for Hawke or the royals at the time.

    • The PM also makes reference to “terra nullius” (Latin for nobody’s land), which is what George III called Australia when the British first arrived. This seems to refer to Charles and Diana’s efforts to strike out new territory in their marriage and ultimately failing. Their attempts to save their relationship are based on basic misunderstandings about each other’s characters, just as Britain’s takeover of Australia was based on (deliberate) misunderstandings about that land and the people there.

    • The costumes are pretty close to how they really were in real life, although the PM’s dress is different in shape. My one big quibble though is that in the show, Diana’s anxiety over the state of her marriage and Charles’s anger towards her popularity is obvious on her face; Diana was well known for putting on a good face when she was miserable, which is partially why it took so long for the public eye to realize that the marriage wasn’t a fairy tale.

  • After this, we get a montage of quick scenes of the couple touring in New Zealand just like the one we got earlier in the episode showing them around Australia. However, although the earlier montage was very happy and showed the couple’s increasing closeness, this montage only emphasizes how unhappy both of them are. We get some shots of Diana staring in the mirror with dark circles under her eyes and crying while lying in bed. The tour ends with the couple getting off the plane in England in the rain and getting into separate cars that are literally heading in separate directions; Diana goes to Kensington Palace while Charles goes to Highgrove.

  • Diana instantly calls the queen and asks to see her. This is a super quick scene, but while talking on the phone, Diana is shown wearing a white nightgown and a robe with ruffles all down the sides, which match the ruffled curtains behind her. Kensington Palace is clearly HER home that she designed and loves; she is the one that belongs here.

Upper left, The Crown. Every other photo: The real life Princess Diana.

Top Left: The Crown.
Top Right and Bottom Left: Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).
Bottom Middle: Princess Diana (Credit: Mirrorpix / Getty).
Bottom Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Kypros / Getty).

  • Diana arrives at Buckingham Palace in a green and red tartan dress with a big white collar that calls back to similar tartan outfits she wore at Balmoral in S4E2 The Balmoral Test and during princess lessons in S4E3 Fairytale. Since I’ve already pointed out similar real life tartan outfits in my blog posts on those episodes, I looked at real life Diana outfits with a similar neckline and similar coat this time instead; there are plentiful examples.
    The Queen watches at the window for her arrival, which both hearkens back to the way she saw Diana at Balmoral in S4E2 and also illustrates her anticipation of why her daughter-in-law is there. She walks in quickly and never takes off her big dark blue coat during the entire scene. In the story, this is clearly because she’s too upset to even consider it. Thematically, it seems like she wants to go somewhere else, away from her marriage; she already has her coat on and is ready to go. The coat actually covers up the tartan for most of the scene; in the screenshots I’ve found of it, the dress appears black.

    • Diana refers to the Queen as “Mama,” which clearly startles Elizabeth. Diana really did call the Queen “mama” in real life, as does Prince Edward’s wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex and Prince William’s wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Source: Marie Claire). Note that when the Queen sits down, she’s backed by pictures of Charles’s investiture as Prince of wales from S3E6 Tywysog Cymru, which indicates her long-standing connection to her son vs. her shorter acquaintance with Diana, and also refers back to the first time we saw Charles really struggling with his role as prince of Wales in the series (we did see him struggling with his father’s expectations of him back in S2E9 Paterfamilias, but not quite in the same way).

    • Diana begins by saying that she’s come to the queen because she’s struggling. The Queen, sitting in front of a table full of positive coverage of Diana, asks why, as she’s just had a triumph in Australia; echoing her language about her own 1954 tour earlier in the episode (which then, illustrated her indifference toward her children). Diana responds by saying that she didn’t consider it a triumph if at the end of it, she and Charles are “wretchedly unhappy” behind closed doors and then goes on to say, “He resents me, resents the attention I get.” The Queen asks why he resents her and Diana says she doesn’t know, and that’s why she’s come to ask his mother.
      The Queen ends up taking offense at Diana’s words and asks if she’s saying that Elizabeth and Philip have been terrible parents (which Diana strenuously denies), hearkening back to the earlier conversations with Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. She then notes that she herself also struggles to understand Charles too, but that “us sitting here sticking knives in him isn’t helpful either.”
      Elizabeth also quietly notes that perhaps Diana is playing to the crowd a bit too much and overdoing it, saying “We do all know when we’ve played to the gallery excessively.” Diana agrees slightly, but also says that she’s doing the best she can, as she was thrown into the deep end of being a royal with no help or assistance (in real life, she was even less prepared than she was in The Crown. She was certainly never given any princess lessons like those shown in S4E3 Fairytale). Diana then emphasizes that all she wants to do is play for the team and be part of it, but feels resented by most of the family, and begs for the Queen to help her by showing her love, approval, and acceptance, saying that she believes the rest of the royals would follow suit.

    • In real life, the Queen and Diana were relatively close at the beginning of her marriage to Charles, as Diana came to call on her for advice several times. Eventually though, the Queen began to really dread Diana’s visits, as the princess would often cry during them. (Source: Reader’s Digest). I don’t know of any specific incidences regarding the Queen being startled by Diana hugging her though; I couldn’t find any references to it.

    • The Queen tries to dismiss Diana but her daughter in law ends up hugging her for a long, sickening moment, as the queen stands there in shock, unsure what to do. Diana tells her that love and acceptance is all she wants from her, all that ANYONE wants from her, and at that, the Queen promptly flees the room. People generally are summoned into and dismissed from the Queen’s presence, so this signifies how rattled the Queen actually is to just leave herself.

  • The episode is bookended by another luncheon scene with the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne, in which the others react with shock to the news of Diana hugging the Queen. Anne actually says “I feel sick.” Although people rarely hug the queen and it’s generally seen as a breach of protocol, the Queen doesn’t actually seem to mind it when it happens. After Michelle Obama rather famously hugged the Queen in 2009, the Guardian reported that at least four other people have been known to hug the queen: a community activist named Alice Frazier who met her on her U.S. tour in 1991, Prime minister of Australia Paul Keating in 1992, Prime Minister of Australia John Howard in 2000 (although he disputes this), and Canadian cyclist Louis Garneau in 2002. The queen did not object or seemingly mind the hugs on any of these occasions. There have also been numerous photos of the Queen being kissed on the cheek by various family members (including Princess Anne). Since the royal family is obviously more reserved in public than they are in private, it’s certainly likely that they would hug at their own private family gatherings.

    • There are also lots of photos and reports of the younger royals, Princess Diana, and even Prince Charles hugging fans.

    • It seems like the Queen really did think that Diana needed to just get on with it and deal with her unhappy marriage (source: readers digest). The Queen was from a different time in which it was pretty much expected that you’d ignore the problems under the surface and carried on (see, how the Queen approached most of her marital problems with Philip in Seasons 1 and 2 really quietly). Diana was clearly not made for that life and didn’t want to hide how miserable she was.

Left: Olivia Colman in the Crown Right: Diana on the tour of Australia

Left: Olivia Colman in the Crown
Right: Diana on the tour of Australia (Credit: David Levenson / Getty).

  • The fact that in this scene and in her scene with Diana, the queen is dressed in a very similar print to one Diana wore in real life does seem to indicate that she heard her and sympathized with her, but wasn’t sure how to help her or what to do. She appears to still be considering her experience with Michael Fagan from the previous episode, as she points out that the crown stays relevant by changing with the times, and perhaps Diana has a point.

  • The Queen Mother has a particularly heartless moment in which she calls Diana an immature child and notes that Diana, like Philip, will someday give up her struggles and bend, and when she bends, she will fit. When the Queen asks – “what if she doesn’t?” – Princess Margaret says, not unfeelingly, but prophetically, “then she will break.” This ties Diana and Philip together again, and points to Philip’s struggles with his role as the Queen’s consort seen throughout season 1 and 2.

  • Alas, the Queen Mother and Diana really didn’t seem to get along very well. The Queen Mother was extremely close to Charles and also seemed to be predisposed to dislike Diana, as her lady-in-waiting Lady Fermoy was Diana’s grandmother (who testified in court that Diana’s mother was unfit to care for her children) and generally didn’t get along with Diana (Source: GoodTo, quoting Andrew Morton’s biography).

  • The very last shot of the episode has Diana back at Kensington Palace, blending in with the ruffled curtains in her ruffled nightgown, sitting at the window just as she did in S4E1 Gold Stick, back when she was a young teenager full of hope and excitement about Prince Charles visiting her sister. She looks very young and very alone and lost, very much like the child the Queen Mother just called her. Keep in mind, at this point in the story, Diana is only 21.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E5 Fagan

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queen and fagan.jpg

The Queen (Olivia Colman) wakes to find Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke) at her bedside, in The Crown.

[I really don’t want to make y’all wait any longer for this post, so I’ll add in more photos later this week!]

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 5 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

  • The episode starts off with news announcements about Michael Fagan breaking into Buckingham Palace, asking “Is anyone safe?” The Queen watches the TV quietly, in a brown and red paisley outfit. The print is rather confused looking, indicating the Queen’s personal inner turmoil over the entire situation. The announcements end with the thesis of basically the entire episode: “How did he get in, and what did they talk about?”

    • In real life, we have no idea what they talked about. The Queen has never spoken about it. Fagan has given numerous statements to the press over the years, but his stories have changed several times, so he’s not exactly a reliable witness.

  • After the credits, the story jumps back three months prior, where we see Michael Fagan waking up in his flat to Thatcher speaking on his radio (he tells her to f off). He walks about his dingy, water-damaged apartment and looks sadly at empty bunk beds and pictures of his kids and their drawings. He wraps himself in a yellow and white floral blanket and stares out the window.

    • The show made sure to actually shoot all scenes set at and around Fagan’s flat at an actual housing estate that still exists today. The director of the episode noted on The Crown podcast that they really didn’t need to change anything about the estate to match the early 1980s except remove the satellite antennas.

      • American note: Although estate sounds very grand to many of those outside of the UK, inside England, “housing estate” usually refers to high density, multiple-story tower block public housing. These estates are usually administered and run by a ruling council, as shown later in the episode.

    • Thatcher is really an ever-present figure throughout this episode. Her voice and stories about her policies show up in Fagan’s apartment several times on radio and TV, play in the background at the unemployment office, and her picture is proudly displayed in the MP’s office. This illustrates the effect of her harsh economic policies on Fagan’s entire life.

    • The events of this story have been foreshadowed for a few episodes now. Thatcher’s cabinet questioned her economic policies in Episode 2, The Balmoral Test, and The Queen noted the huge rise in unemployment in Episode 3, Favourites. The Falklands War also began in Episode 3, in which it was noted that Argentina entered the war partially to distract from their own interior economic problems. It’s clear that Thatcher is doing the same thing here, as the civil unrest the Queen discussed in episode 3 has now turned to overall patriotic fervor.

Left: Tom Brooke as Michael Fagan in The Crown. Right: Michael Fagan in real life.

Left: Tom Brooke as Michael Fagan in The Crown.
Right: Michael Fagan in real life (Credit: James Mullin / Shutterstock).

  • As he rides his bus past Buckingham Palace on the way to the job center, “Boys Don’t Cry” by The Cure plays in the background. This 1979 post-punk/new wave song likely came out when Fagan was still doing well, living with his wife and kids, and working regularly. The lyrics are very on point here, as the song talks about a man who has given up trying to regain his lost lover and hides how sad he really is. Similarly, Fagan’s wife has left him, but he makes no attempt throughout this episode to try to win her love back; his focus is, instead, seeing his children. The music in this episode is really important, as the songs are almost entirely modern rock/punk songs about male disillusionment and sadness. We haven’t heard songs like this in the show before, as we haven’t focused on a commoner male character before like this, who’s at such an incredibly low point in his life. I feel like the most similar situation we’ve seen to this before is when we saw Princess Margaret breaking down in S2E4 Beryl to “Angel Eyes” by Ella Fitzgerald, but even that is from a specifically female point of view.

    • Fagan wears essentially the same outfit the entire episode, a distinctive dingy green and red coat over various blue shirts, which looks VERY MUCH like a coat the real life Fagan wore. If you pay attention to this episode, you’ll see that the background in both the estate and Buckingham Palace shows a lot of red and green; the Queen wears a lot of red, green, and blue as well. This seems to illustrate both their similarities and their differences.

    • The job center is super crowded with long lines of people who look similarly tired and dispirited. He’s here to collect his jobseeker’s allowance, which is available in the UK to adults who are unemployed and actively seeking work. To get the benefit, the jobseeker must appear at the center in person every two weeks to certify that they are still actively seeking work. This is actually still the policy in the UK, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic, those receiving jobseeker’s allowance have been excused from sign on attendance since March 2020.

    • Fagan gives a lot of cheek to the woman at the job center about how she asks him the same thing every two weeks and how she should know who he is now, but tbh, I just feel sorry for her. She probably deals with hundreds of people a day and couldn’t possibly remember them all. It is a bit ironic that he jokes about how he worked with the Olympic Committee and the United Nations, as that is TOTALLY the type of people we would normally see on The Crown. This intense focus on the real world away from the royals and the top echelons of power is new to the show, except for a few episodes that focused on specific disasters affected the common people, like the smog in Season 1 and the Aberfan disaster in Season 3.

  • The rest of Fagan’s day is dedicated to working a “cash in hand” job painting a room, where he quips that the paint color “beige 28” is the color of his life. Conveniently, he’s wearing a beige shirt when he says this. Afterward, he goes to a pub, where he clearly is looking out for his wife. He tries to talk to her about their flat (we find out later that she’s the listed tenant on the flat, so he can’t get any money to fix up the flat without her involvement), but she brushes him off, saying tonight. She also brushes him off when he asks about the kids. This brush off frustrates him and he takes out his anger on her new boyfriend, calling him a Twat. His wife and her new boyfriend both throw the fact that the new guy works for a living and looks after his kids in Fagan’s face, which angers him even more. who taunts him by saying he’s the one who’s caring for Fagan’s children. This almost escalates into a fight, but bystanders manage to pull the men apart before they actually come to blows.

    • This sequence ends with the ska song “Monkey Man,” a cover by The Specials (originally by Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals). A Monkey Man, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “a weak or gullible man, especially one subservient to women generally.” This ties in with Fagan’s feelings of helplessness about his life, particularly when it comes to his family. The songwriter has said that the song was actually inspired by a girl he loved who left him for another man, which is…very on point for the situation.

  • The shots of Fagan’s housing estate, complete with bars at the windows, switch quickly to the metal Buckingham Palace gate - once again juxtaposing the upper class royal setting of the Palace with Fagan’s lower class, realistic life. The director of the episode said on the Crown podcast that he really wanted to make it clear when the episode was in “Faganland,” quipping that Faganland is also known as “real life.”

    • In the Queen’s regular audience with Thatcher, Thatcher’s in her power blue color and the Queen is in a lighter blue (once again matching Fagan’s usual colors- this will happen throughout the flashback in the episode). Thatcher brags a lot about the war in the Falklands.

    • In the next scene, the Queen and Philip are walking to an event together (past some bright yellow flowers that are reminiscent of Fagan’s sad yellow floral comforter), and Philip notes that they should “roll out the red carpet” for Margaret Thatcher, as she pushed ahead with the conflict in the Falklands even when no one else supported it, and it’s turned out to be a huge success. “She’s finally doing what we’ve been waiting years for someone to do …lead this country firmly and decisively after years of incompetence and mismanagement.” The Queen also complains that Thatcher brought up palace security again, which angers her, saying “Do you want our walls to be built even higher? Or the public to stand ten feet further back at engagements.” This foreshadows Fagan’s break-in to the palace while also establishing the theme of the Queen’s need to meet regular people.

    • The Queen says, “I take great pleasure in meeting members of the public and have learnt so much from them. You remember the lesson Lord Altrincham taught us.” They meet up with Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother at a Garden party, where they meet “regular people.” This hearkens back to S2E5 “Marionettes,” in which Lord Altrincham criticized the queen in his newspaper and advises her to become more transparent and inclusive of regular people. The Garden Parties replaced debutante presentation parties (which were only reserved for the very rich and noble) and are still held three times a year at Buckingham Palace and once a year at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Scotland (although they were cancelled this year due to COVID-19). You can see that the Queen IS really trying to reach out to her people, but as becomes apparent throughout the episode with the juxtaposition of her life with Fagan’s, she’s still incredibly out of touch with the lives of regular Britons. It’s also rather funny that they all put on gloves before shaking hands with the regular people, as if they don’t want to actually touch any commoners.

    • Princess Margaret cares far less about meeting regular people than the Queen and specifically checks with Martin Charteris that they don’t have to have actual conversation with anyone. Margaret’s dislike of the whole thing was also demonstrated in the earlier S2E5 episode, in which Margaret complained to Philip about meeting commoners. In that episode, we also saw that the Queen Mother didn’t particularly like the idea either, but she is silent here. Ironically, Margaret wears drab green and red, matching Michael Fagan’s outfit most closely, but I think the use of the colors is juxtaposed to show their differences here, not their commonality. The royal band is also wearing red uniforms and green hats, which again, matches

  • The lines of colorfully dressed, respectable, happy commoners at the garden party eager to meet the royals contrasts sharply with the drab despair of the unemployment line at the job center. Thatcher’s voice echoes over the radio in the background (in a distinctly dystopian way, although this of course, is just from a radio broadcast); she’s talking about her up-bringing “we were taught to work jolly hard. you were taught to improve yourself. you were taught self-reliance.” This is a pretty tone-deaf message when there are clearly no jobs to be had for so much of the country. As Fagan said in an earlier scene, everything in here feels pretty beige and dull and dreary. Fagan is again back here to collect his check, and quips sharply to the worker that he works as james bond, who (quite rightfully, in my opinion), calls him a twat. He asks who he can complain to, and she says he should go contact the MP, who can contact the parliamentary ombudsmen. This is ultimately the comment that sets his whole plot in motion. The worker then shuts the window in his face, which seems symbolic of a lot of the bureaucratic obstacles he’ll face in this episode.

    • We get another shot of Fagan in his sad, empty apartment, watching footage of a military parade on TV and listening to Thatcher speaking on the radio, defending her economic policies again by describing her actions as some sort of tough life.

  • Fagan’s next at his MP’s office; he’s waiting for him to arrive because frankly, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. He tries to talk to the MP “about the system,” calling it “unfair and a disgrace.” He calls Thatcher “devil woman” and complains that he doesn’t have any work to do because she’s spending money on the war instead of using it to build houses he could paint and decorate. The MP seems rather stand-offish from the beginning, insisting that he supports the war and not really listening to Fagan’s concerns. Fagan lays out his central frustration in a simple question: “Why would you spend over three billion pounds on a war against total strangers rather than looking after your own family?” This points to his views of the country as a family and as its responsibilities to its citizens.

    • Fagan calmly points out that the MP hasn’t actually noted his concerns, and hasn’t taken any notes the entire time, and ultimately forces him to write down /something/. Fagan says that having Thatcher’s picture in the office makes it feel like “we’re in turky or iraq,” which adds to the previous dystopian like feel of Thatcher’s voice over the unemployment line.

    • Finally, in frustration, after a few minutes of arguing about the workings of democracy, the MP tells Fagan that the Queen has a private audience with Thatcher every Tuesday and quips, “Why don’t you drop in at Buckingham Palace and tell her? “

  • And we’re back to the Trooping the Color, which we saw previously in S4E1 Gold Stick. This shows the passing of time, the Queen taking the salute from her troops (which we’ll circle back to later), and refers to various lucky members of the public getting to attend the event, again illustrating the royal family’s attempts to connect to the public and ultimate failure at doing so.

  • Then a sharp cut from the “regular people” at the trooping the color, sitting in rows watching the event, to people waiting in rows at the social services office. Again a cut from bright outside light and music to a drab, dreary office setting. Fagan’s in a terrible situation here, we find - as Social Services won’t let him see his children until he fixes up the water damage in the flat, he can’t get money or help to fix the flat from the Council or social services because he’s not listed as the primary tenant on the flat, and his wife, who IS the primary tenant of the flat, won’t talk to him about it (as we’ve already seen happen in the pub). So he’s completely prevented from seeing his children at all. The office worker tells him he needs to talk to the estate council, but as Fagan has already told him, the council pointed him to social services, so he’s left without anyone to help him.

  • On his way home on the bus, he passes by Buckingham Palace and abruptly gets off, looking up at the palace through the barred gates. He then manages to get in by jumping over the fence, climbing up a drain pipe, and crawling through an unlocked window. He sees a few guards but manages to avoid them pretty easily. He then basically just wanders around the palace, trying various door handles and even sitting on the throne at one point. He enters a room full of gifts (notably with a portrait of the queen there, staring at him) and downs half a bottle of wine pretty quickly, managing to knock over a vase in the process. He manages to get into the Queen’s bedroom, but it’s empty. Eventually, a maid sees him and rushes to the security office, sounding the alarm.

    • Fagan really did sit on the throne. He said in an interview with The Independent in 2012, “It was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears; I tried one throne and was like 'this one's too soft'. I was having a laugh to myself because there was one right next to it, so I tried another.”

    • The creators of this episode said on The Crown podcast that it was kind of unbelievable how easy it was for Fagan to get into the Palace, and that if it HADN’T happened in real life, no one would believe it.

    • If you’ll note, the carpet throughout Buckingham Palace is red, calling back to Philip saying they should roll out the red carpet for Thatcher.

    • Fagan wasn’t the first intruder at Buckingham Palace. A young teenager named Boy Jones repeatedly broke into the palace to stalk Queen Victoria, stealing the queen’s underwear and food. He kept breaking in even after being imprisoned for three months, and eventually was deported to Australia.

  • The entire sequence where Martin Charteris reports on the break-in to the Queen and Philip is pretty funny. Philip laughs at the intruder’s drinking a bottle of wine valued at six pounds. Philip is also very proud of remembering the vase that was broken, describing it as “a ghastly little pink thing with little blue worms all over it” and “a strange-looking duck.” The Queen quickly corrects him by noting the exact symbolism of the vase, naming the rivers of guyana and the national bird present on it, which is pretty damn impressive considering how many gifts she must receive every year. Her private secretary looks at her with pride over her recall of these little details.

    • The Queen (in drab green again) asks Charteris to keep the matter away from the Home Office, as she still doesn’t want her security measures raised. Her concern is “Buckingham Palace is too like a prison as it is.”

  • Fagan manages to make his situation worse when, after watching his kids play on a playground with his wife’s boyfriend, he jumps over the playground wall and tries to speak to his wife. The wife and boyfriend quickly motion the kids away, which seems only to enrage Fagan. The fight that almost happened at the pub earlier in the episode now actually happens on the playground, resulting in the boyfriend putting Fagan in a chokehold. Fagan leaps back over the wall (similarly to how he got in and out of Buckingham Palace the first time) and runs away, as his wife yells “Are you proud of yourself? Leave us alone. We don’t need you in our lives.”
    The incident at the playground results in a meeting with social services, who says Christine will have permanent custody of the kids and Fagan can’t have any contact with his kids, for their best interest. He doesn’t say anything in response but just looks distraught.

    • What do they know about Fagan that we don’t? Do they perceive him as dangerous to the children? I really haven’t found much information on Fagan’s family life. All the sources seem to confirm that his wife Christine had left him, taking their four children with her, but I can’t find any explanation of why.

    • After the fight, “Twenty Four Hours” by Joy Division” plays in the background, specifically - the lyrics “A cloud hangs over me, marks every move Deep in the memory, of what once was love.” This very sad song, which was recorded just over a month before the band’s frontman Ian Curtis committed suicide, talks about everything in the singer’s life slipping away from him.

    • In real life, Fagan was much more of a piece of work than he’s portrayed as in the series. He complained about his portrayal in The Crown, saying that they made him appear ugly and uncharismatic, but I’m really not sure why, as they actually made him appear sympathetic. In reality, he actually visited Buckingham Palace 12 times in the summer of 1982 and told his mother that he was visiting his girlfriend “Elizabeth Regina,” indicating a far more intense obsession with the Queen than was shown in the episode. Fagan himself told the Independent in one article that he couldn’t find a bathroom and ended up peeing on the corgi food. After his first break in to the palace, he actually was arrested for stealing a car (he was apparently trying to drive to stonehenge in search of his wife. was his wife in stonehenge? i don’t know. maybe it made sense in his head). He also claimed that the entire decision to break into the palace was the result of a prolonged reaction to taking too many hallucinogenic mushrooms several months before.

  • After the devastating social services meeting, Fagan returns to TV reports showing that the UK has won the Falklands war. Notably, the news reports that the queen has returned to Buckingham Palace. He looks out from his balcony incredulously, as all around his estate, people are celebrating the victory in the Falklands, singing “Rule Britannia” and chanting “Maggie Maggie Maggie! Oi Oi Oi!”

  • Next we see the Queen going about her evening in a very prosaic series of scenes. She watches the news eats dinner alone while wearing green, then gets ready for bed, wearing a blue and white floral robe and matching nightgown. We notably see her praying at her bedside; her faith hasn’t been discussed much in Season 3 or 4, nor has it really been addressed much since Billy Graham’s appearance in S2E6 Vergangenheit, but little moments like this do remind us that she is a Christian and takes her religion quite seriously.
    Meanwhile, Fagan breaks into the palace again, somehow avoiding guards as they change shifts and breaking a window to get in.

    • In the show, a maid walks past carrying a vacuum and later is shown vacuuming the carpet. I’ve seen people complain on Facebook groups and such that this is inaccurate, as there are some reports online that housekeepers are not allowed to use a vacuum in Buckingham Palace. However, The Atlantic reported that Buckingham Palace had a vacuum cleaner as early as 1902, which seems to contradict that report. In addition, The Crown actually has their own royal protocol advisor, Major David Rankin-Hunt, who worked for the royal family for 33 years. He’s very active in the show and often corrects things on screen that aren’t accurate for the royal household, like folding in people’s pocket flaps and making sure their umbrellas are wrapped tightly enough and such. Since the vacuum cleaner is literally a plot point in the script (as it keeps the maid from hearing the Queen’s bell), I find it really hard to believe that Rankin-Hunt would overlook such a big thing if vacuums were really banned in the palace. It’s hard to know though.

    • The floral floor-length nightgown matches Fagan’s description of her outfit in real life: “Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints and it was down to her knees." This refers to a clothing brand called Liberty known for using floral prints.

  • As Fagan enters the queens’ bedroom, the queen sleeping says “morning bobo.” This refers to the Queen’s long-time dresser, Margaret “Bobo” Macdonald” who actually served her first as her nanny (which reminds me very much of Queen Elizabeth I’s relationship with her governess Kat Ashley, who rose to become her chief lady in waiting). We saw Bobo in the background a few times in Season 1 and 2, but the IMDB cast list for the show doesn’t show anyone playing that role in Season 3 or 4.

    • The darkened bedroom looks much more like the scenes we’ve seen of Fagan’s life this episode than the royal family scenes, which have all been in very bright rooms or outside in bright sunlight. Fagan actually seems to blend into the background as he moves about initially.

  • It’s been really confusing trying to sort out all the different stories about this that Fagan has given over the years, so I honestly just started to look at the police report to figure out what happened.

    • The police report from the time said that Fagan initially got into the palace by climbing over the railings and entering an unlocked window to a room which housed “the Royal Stamp Collection.” All the doors in that room were locked, so he quickly left it through the same window. He then climbed a drainpipe to get to the roof, took off his sandals and socks, and climbed across a narrow ledge to get through an unlocked window in an office of the master of the household which had just been opened for the day by a housemaid. He wandered around the palace for 15 minutes or so without being challenged by anyone. *In the show, the window was locked the second time and he had to break it to get in.

    • The police report notes that Fagan claimed to find his way to the queen’s apartments by “following the pictures.” In an anteroom of the bedroom, he smashed a glass ashtray and brought it with him, intending to slash his wrists in front of her. AGAIN, the show clearly makes him seem much more sympathetic than he was in real life. In the show, his bleeding hand is the result of his breaking the window to get in, rather than breaking an ashtray or slicing his own wrists.

    • In both real life and the show, Fagan opened the curtains upon entering the bedroom. In the show, he prevents her from calling for help, but in real life, she immediately pressed the night alarm bell (this is about 7:15 am). This unfortunately, occurred right after her police sergeant (who’s in the corridor at night) had just gone off duty; this is reflected in the show when Fagan says that there isn’t any officer outside of the room. There were a few servants on duty already. However, the footman who was outside walking the dogs and a maid was cleaning in another room with the door closed. Thus, no one actually noticed the night alarm bell at first. In the show, the maid doesn’t hear the bell due to the sound of the vacuum.

    • The Police report (which notably doesn’t say what Fagan is doing during this time) notes that the Queen next used her bedside telephone to ask the palace telephonist to send the police to her bedroom. The telephonist called the police lodge at 7:18 am. At 7:24, the Queen called again for help, as a police officer still hadn’t arrived. She eventually elicited the help of a maid, who helped her usher Fagan into a nearby pantry on the pretext of getting him a cigarette. At this point, the footman returned from walking the dogs and helped keep Fagan there by supplying him with cigarettes. The Queen “kept her dogs away as the man was getting agitated.” Eventually, a police officer arrived, and then another, and they took him away.

      • The show’s depiction of events diverges sharply from real life at this point. In the episode, the queen and fagan talk for a bit until she points out that he’s bleeding. As he goes to the powder room to clean up his cut, she rings the alarm bell, without any response. She tries to pick up the phone, but he comes back in the room before she can actually call anyone. They end up talking for several more minutes before a maid comes in with the tea and asks the queen if she’s alright (Major kudos, by the way, to the maid, who somehow doesn’t scream or drop the tea or anything). The queen responds calmly, “Yes, quite alright. But you might ask the policeman to come in."

      • The show DOES reference the whole cigarette trick by having Fagan ask the Queen for a cigarette.

      • I actually honestly wish they had followed the real life story a little bit closer, as I would have loved to see the queen trick Fagan into going to a pantry and protect her dogs from him. This show ALWAYS needs more corgis, In My Opinion.

    • The little scene between Fagan and the Queen in the bedroom is very well written and very sad. He says he wants to talk to her about what’s going on in the country, and that she hasn’t any reason to fear him. I’m not going to analyze the substance of their conversation too much, but it’s a really beautiful scene that ultimately brings out the queen’s compassion and sympathy for his plight. He begs her to “save us all” from Thatcher and says that she can actually do something. However, as we’ve seen emphasized throughout this show, the Queen really doesn’t have any power in political situations like this and can’t really do anything to help him besides talk to Thatcher, which ultimately does nothing.

      • Fagan comments that the palace is somehow “posher than you’d think but yet more run down,” as it has chipped paint, peeling wallpaper, and stains everywhere. He made a similar observation in an interview, stating, “It was very ordinary. I don't think they spent too much on decoration. Maybe it was due a redec?"

      • Within the scene, Fagan shows off his intelligence, noting that the palace is actually public property and that trespassing isn’t a crime if he doesn’t steal anything. At the time, trespassing was a civil offense, not a criminal one. He was not charged with trespassing, apparently to avoid having the queen come and testify against him.

      • There’s a very funny moment where Fagan says that Thatcher will put the Queen out of a job next; the queen dryly responds “Let me assure you; she is in an all too committed monarchist,” perhaps thinking of Thatcher’s obsequious curtsies to her.

      • The Queen tries to reassure Fagan by saying “Countries bounce back. People do. Because they have to. One of the most well crafted lines has Fagan saying, “First the work dried up, then my confidence dried up. Then the love in my wife’s eyes dried up, then you begin to wonder you know, where’s it gone, not just your confidence or your happiness…(trails off). They say I have mental health problems now. I don’t. I’m just poor.” As he continues, the Queen sits across from him naturally, a subtle reference to her regular audiences with the prime minister.

      • The Queen ultimately ends up connecting with him and slightly defending him from the officers. Their conversation ends this way:
        Queen: "Is there anything else you'd like to say to me?"
        Fagan: "No. Thank you.”
        Queen: "I do hope they don't make things too difficult for you, in light of all this."
        Fagan: “Thank you."
        Queen: "Well, goodbye." (Fagan stands and reaches out his hand to shake hers)
        Officers, barreling through the door to come help: "Don't touch her!"
        Queen: (to officers) “It's alright.” (she shakes Fagan’s hand) “I will bear in mind what you've said."

      • The handshake with Fagan, with bare hands and no pretense, thematically ties back to the earlier handshakes at the garden party, when everyone was wearing gloves and on their best behavior.

      • Olivia Colman does a great job of looking absolutely petrified of him initially, but in usual queenly fashion, quickly regains her composure as she speaks to him calmly. Her fear is only again evident at the very end of the scene, when after Fagan is taken away by the police and she’s finally alone again, she falls back into her chair, gasping and eyes tearing up, looking completely drained.

  • Then we’re back to where the episode started, with the news reports about Fagan’s break in. Margaret Thatcher watches the news with several stone-faced advisors, looking very distressed.

    • The episode makes it look like the final days of the Falklands War happened right when Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace, but that’s not quite true. Fagan’s first break into the palace was in early June 1982 and his final entry was on July 9. The British managed to retake all the islands on June 20, a few weeks earlier.

    • I’m really not talking about the war too much because I honestly don’t know much about it and I don’t want to be run out of Argentina in the future if I get something wrong. However, I do want to note that although Thatcher said in her first audience in this episode that there were no British casualties in whatever specific operation she was talking about, there were actually casualties on both sides of the war. Casualties included 255 British service members, 3 female British civilians of the Falkland Islands, 633 Argentinian service members, and 16 Argentinian civilians. The servicemen on both sides came from several branches of the military, including the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force.

  • The Queen does try to speak to Thatcher about Fagan, noting that he is a victim of unemployment and economic problems, which are not his fault, but ultimately is unsuccessful. Thatcher describes the high unemployment as “a necessary side effect of the medicine we are administering to the British economy” and dismisses the Queen’s questions of moral economy by saying, “If we are to turn this country around, we really must abandon outdated and misguided notions of collective duty.” *NOTE: I am only talking about the portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in this show; I have not done in depth research into her real life views on people. I do plan to read her biography in the future and go back and supplement these posts then, but unless I actually say “in real life” or something equivalent, I am always talking about the characters in the show and not the real people.

    • This line demonstrates that in her own way, Thatcher does care about the “common man” as much as the Queen, just in a very different way. When the queen notes, “Perhaps not everyone is as remarkable as your father,” Thatcher stoutly responds, "Oh you see, that is where you and I differ. I say, they have it within them to be." When the Queen brings up Fagan, Thatcher notes that he’s another matter, as he’s been diagnosed with mental illness and schizophrenia. She then quickly excuses herself, as she needs to go to the victory parade (which the Queen was notably not invited to).

    • This scene is set up to emphasize the distance between the Queen and Thatcher in these audiences, which is the same it’s always been, but looks further apart then ever, when compared to how close the Queen sat to Fagan during their conversation.

  • Later on, while watching the victory parade on the television with her husband (both of them dressed in similar shades of brown and grey), Elizabeth comments on Thatcher taking the salute from the troops instead of the sovereign. This did happen in real life and raised some eyebrows at the time. In 1945, after World War II, King George IV took the salute from the troops rather than Winston Churchill.

    • As the royal couple talks comfortably, Philip refers to Fagan as a lunatic and a fool. The Queen counters, “but in the best sense, like Lear’s fool.” Philip responds grumpily “Don’t get all Shakespearean with me.” This is a reference to a character in King Lear, which has a couple of interesting layers to it. In the time of Shakespeare, leaders often had fools, or court jesters, to amuse them. They played an important role though, as they are able to speak truth to power and confront their leaders in ways that no one else can. In addition, fools in that time often had mental illnesses, and were considered blessed by God. Within King Lear specifically, the fool serves as the king’s advocate but also his conscience, critiquing Lear’s faults. All of this is a very apt description of Michael Fagan, who has a mental illness and simultaneously served as the Queen’s advocate and critic.

    • We have one of the first really emotional moments this season from Philip when his face breaks apart a little and he says, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to protect you. I feel terrible.” The Queen reassures him in a very loving way, saying “but you're by my side all the time and do much more than keep me safe. but thank you.” They then exchange another quietly funny moment, as she observes, “I suspect Mr. Fagan is rather glad he didn't come through that window and land on your bed.” Philip laughs quietly and responds, “Yes, that would have been a rather different conversation.”

  • The show ends with a final look at Margaret Thatcher on the TV screen, waving happily to the crowd at her victory parade. The Queen looks at her with clear concern.

    • The credits run to the 1980 ska song “Whine and Grine/Stand Down Margaret” by The English Beat, which is specifically about the band wanting Margaret Thatcher to resign. At the time it came out, Uncut magazine described the song as “polite insurrection set to uptempo reggae and African hi-life guitar,” which is flipping amazing.

  • As the explanation in the credits says, Michael Fagan was committed after his arrest. He only spent three months in the psychiatric hospital. The second photo in the credits shows Michael Fagan saluting alongside four men; they don’t explain this in the show, but this actually shows Fagan with The Bollock Brothers. Fagan recorded a cover of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen’ with this punk band in 1983.

    • Over the years, Fagan has continued to distinguish himself with various petty crimes. He was notably imprisoned for four years in the late 90s after he, his wife, and their (now-adult) son were charged with conspiring to supply heroin. He lives in London now,

The Crown Fan Favorite Character Competition is Live on Facebook!

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

The wild card contenders are chosen, characters are seeded, and the bracket is compiled, so let's get this Crown Fan Favorite Character competition STARTED! I'm super excited to see who all y'all pick. :)

I won't be posting every day's bracket vote on this blog, but you can follow all the daily bracket shenanigans over on my Facebook page and vote there!

Today starts off with our #1 seed, S3-S4 Princess Margaret played by Helena Bonham Carter, vs. our #32 seed, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, played by Lia Williams in S1-S2 and Geraldine Chaplin in S3. Go vote for your fave over on Facebook!

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Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E4 Favourites

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All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 4 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

The Queen and Prince Charles in the gardens at Highgrove in The Crown.

The Queen and Prince Charles in the gardens at Highgrove in The Crown.

Top two: Mark Thatcher in The Crown. Bottom two: Mark Thatcher in real life.

Top two: Mark Thatcher in The Crown.
Bottom Left: Mark Thatcher with co-driver Charlotte Verney (Credit: PA).
Bottom Right: Mark Thatcher in race car (Credit: Fox Photos / Getty).

  • The 1,000 kilometer Paris-Dakar car rally starts off the episode in Paris 1982 with zero explanation, leaving any watchers who aren’t aware of the situation to be pretty clueless until Margaret Thatcher explains what’s going on in her meeting with the queen. Although we’ve seen Mark Thatcher very briefly in shots with his family in episode 1 of this season, it was in a very different context.

    • The actor who plays Mark Thatcher in the series reminds me very much of Alfie Allen from Game of Thrones and every time I see him I just go, “THEON!?” But no, this actor’s name is actually Freddie Fox. Which is fantastic and I love the alliterative look alike British actors. More please.

  • After Thatcher’s team rolls out of Paris, we get a quick switch to Thatcher arriving at Buckingham Palace, juxtaposing the scenes of mother and son in their cars. Margaret Thatcher is in a dark blue plaid for this meeting with the queen and looks thinner and more haggard than she has in previous episodes. The queen confronts Margaret Thatcher with the state of the country, pointing out that after three years with Thatcher as PM, the country currently has inflation at 12%, unemployment at 3 million, and riots and unrests in several cities. She tries to focus on work for a bit, noting, "It’s true, but there isn’t a magical system whereby you can just push a few buttons and twiddle a few knobs and everything will be alright. Of course i would like to reduce interest rates…[the queen interrupts to ask if she’s alright] ...but to do that, we first need to get the inflation rate down, and that means we need to cut public spending." Then, on the edge of tears, she says, “I would like to be very much tougher, but I can't go faster than parliament and the people will let me."

    • This brief conversation about the economy before Margaret breaks down over her son’s disappearance introduces several themes (unemployment, reduction of public spending, civil unrest over the economy) that is somewhat dropped for the rest of this episode, but will become extremely important in the next episode “Fagan.”

    • In addition, this conversation about the economy clearly places the queen in her role as “mother of the country,” concerned over her people’s welfare and advocating for them in the face of Thatcher’s economic reform. Thatcher is set up as the antagonist willing to do whatever it takes to reach her goals. However, as is about to revealed, this view of “the queen is caring and thatcher doesn’t care” is far too simplistic.

  • Thatcher begins to tear up, saying with embarrassment, “the very idea that the first time a prime minister should break down in this room and it be a woman.”

    • I honestly would be very surprised if the Queen in real life wouldn’t have already heard about Mark’s disappearance before her audience with Margaret Thatcher. As we’ve seen numerous times over the series, the royal family actively reads multiple newspapers and regularly follows the news both on the radio and on TV. And she’s the queen. She absolutely would have been briefed on that situation the MOMENT anyone knew about it.

    • The Queen quite matter-of-factly says, "It is by no means the first time a prime minister has broken down in here. This is drawing room, office, confessional, and psychologist's couch," and then offers her “paper hankies” (everyone else calls them “tissues,” Elizabeth, I promise) and a drink.

      • It’s hard to know which prime minister the Queen might be referring to here, but within the show’s story, we know that she rebuked Winston Churchill in S1E7 Scientia Potentia Est (when he hid his two strokes from her, while the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was simultaneously ill and out of commission), confronted Anthony Eden over his secret dealings during the Suez Canal crisis (S2E1 Misadventure), and passive-aggressively criticized Harold MacMillan for resigning in S2E10 Mystery Man. I should note though that, rebuked/confronted/criticized are all relative terms here, and we’ve never seen the queen get truly angry or upset with one of her prime ministers up to this point in the series. And certainly we’ve never seen a prime minister deal with a personal family crisis of this level before. It honestly reminds me much more of the West Wing plotline in which the president’s daughter is kidnapped than any story line we’ve seen in The Crown before.

    • During this scene, Thatcher is in her standard power blue color, but in a softer looser dress than her usual business like skirt suit, perhaps pointing her dual identities as prime minister and mother. The Queen wears a dark blue and purple paisley print dress in a similar dress shape with a pussy bow neck (which we’ve seen Margaret Thatcher wear before in this season and will see her wear again). The matching blue tones indicate the common motherhood between the two very different women.

  • The show portrays Mark Thatcher’s disappearance as happening roughly around the same time as the start of the Falklands War. In real life, Mark’s team (which included Mark, his French co-driver Anne-Charlotte Verney, and their mechanic) went missing for January 9-14, 1982. The initial events that led to the Falklands War did not occur until mid-March 1982.

    • All the historical accounts of Mark make him sound like a bit of a prat, honestly. His team was 31 miles off course when they found him, and it appears the whole thing was rather embarrassing to the real life Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister personally paid 2,000 pounds toward the search costs and also took care of Marks’ unpaid hotel bill (one third of which was for drinks).

    • The Crown portrays Mark as the navigator who gets his team lost. In real life, Mark admitted in 2004 that he had not prepared himself for the trip, but also blamed their loss on other teams incorrectly saying his team were 25 miles west when they finished the section of the race, when in fact, they were 25 miles east.

    • Margaret Thatcher’s characterization of Mark as “a very special child, the kind of son any mother would dream of having” seems a bit hyperbolic, as in real life, he didn’t go to university due to poor academic performance, failed his accountancy exams three times, had a series of short-term jobs, set up a racing company which performed badly financially, and caused his mother numerous headaches throughout her time as PM, as he engaged in shady and controversial business dealings with the Sultan of Brunei, a university in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. He also was convicted of funding a coup d’etat attempt in Equatorial Guinea, because OF COURSE that’s a thing that people do.

  • The frame story of the Queen’s plot this episode is set when Margaret Thatcher “without equivocation” names Mark as her favorite child. Elizabeth is Capital-A Appalled by this blatant admission of favoritism and tells Philip about it, who just laughs over the whole thing and says that every parent has a favorite. He then quickly, without any thought, says that Anne is his favorite.

    • We don’t know if Prince Philip would refer to Anne as his favorite in real life, but they do appear to be very close. Anne is their only daughter and appears to share a no-nonsense personality and a love for hunting and horseback riding with Philip. As we saw in the first episode of Season 4, Philip is depicted as being extremely proud of Anne’s equestrian achievements, including her participation in the Olympics.

    • Philip seems to think that the Queen’s favorite child is incredibly obvious, saying that “everyone knows” who it is, but he won’t tell her who he thinks it is. This scene is notably set next to their giant collection of framed photographs of their family, which has appeared throughout the series and somewhat shocks me every time, as they seem to have several shelves that are just full to the brim of them.

    • On The Crown podcast, show creator Peter Morgan says this episode was highly inspired by one royal watcher’s theory that Charles (1948) and Anne (1950), the Queen’s eldest two children, have a different relationship to their mother than the younger two children, Andrew (1959) and Edward (1963), as they were born years apart and at very different stages in her life. This theory makes a lot of sense, as the queen had both Charles and Anne before she ascended to the throne unexpectedly in 1952. That 9-15 year gap between the eldest two and the youngest two is definitely significant. It’s said she really was much more present during Andrew and Edward’s childhoods than her older two. Andrew was thought to be her favorite for quite a long time (that uh, may not be the case any more, as Andrew has been pretty much booted from the royal family due to his association with Jeffrey Epstein and you know, sex trafficking and sexual abuse). It’s said today that she tends to be closest to Edward, her youngest, and his wife Sophie (who is often chosen to ride in the car with Queen Elizabeth to church while other family members walk).

  • I am ashamed to admit that the ONLY reason I knew anything about the Falklands War prior to this episode was because of the 2014 Top Gear special in Patagonia, which ended uhhh rather badly when protestors in Argentina interpreted one of the license plates on the cars to be an insulting reference to the Falklands war. The show’s producers tried to explain to Argentinian officials that the license plate was real and randomly assigned, but the show’s cast and crew were ordered to leave the area immediately. There is some really terrifying footage of a mob throwing rocks and eggs at the crew’s convoy as they try to flee; the presenters had to stay behind in a hotel and were later snuck out of the country in some mysterious way. The whole situation got widespread press at the time. You can read all about it here.

  • From my research, it looks like the Falklands War really did begin just as uneventfully as is shown on The Crown, which Argentinian scrap metal workers arrived at Leith Harbour, South Georgia, and raised their country’s flag. This wasn’t an accident, as they were accompanied by marines posing as civilian scientists; the military junta which had been in power in Argentina since 1976 was having a lot of economic problems domestically and invaded the islands to divert attention from these issues. The junta did not believe that Britain would bother to defend the islands militarily but well, they did. And everything escalated.

    • In the show, the survey team walks down to the scrapworkers and the leader tells them quite clearly that they were on British overseas territory, they had landed illegally and needed to leave immediately and take their flag with them (traditionally, flags are used to claim land and establish sovereignty). The Argentine leader says in response that the British are the ones who are on the land illegally.

      • More signs that the initial confrontation between the Argentinian scrapworkers and the British Antarctic Survey Team was quite intentional: the raising of the Argentinian flag, the slogan “Los Malvinas son Argentinas” which one scrapworker paints on a shed made of corrugated metal (this translates to “The Falklands are Argentine.” Argentina has referred to the Falklands as Los Malvinas for years) , graffiti of a defecating pig on the survey team’s sign, the Argentines immediately bursting into “Viva Argentina!” after being confronted by the survey team, and later singing the Argentinian national anthem.

        • The pig graffiti is shown only very briefly, but may refer to the wild pigs which lived on the Falklands, which were routinely hunted by British and American sailors replenishing their provisions in the 1700s. (Non Sequitur: While researching this, I also came across the fantastic story of Tirpitz, a pig captured from the Imperial German Navy in 1914 after the battle of the Falkland Islands. When the Germans abandoned their ship and scuttled it, they abandoned the pig, but she managed to swim to the nearby British Royal Navy ships, where she was saved, brought aboard, and named Tirpitz after a German admiral.)

        • The Argentinian National Anthem they sing in the show starts off: “Oíd, mortales, el grito sagrado: ¡Libertad, libertad, libertad! Oíd el ruido de rotas cadenas, Ved en trono a la noble igualdad” which translates to “Mortals! Hear the sacred cry: Freedom, freedom, freedom! Hear the noise of broken chains, see noble Equality enthroned.” Interestingly enough, in the show, they then jump down to the NINTH verse of the song, “ya su trono dignísimo abrieron las Provincias Unidas del Sud,” which translates to “The United Provinces of the South have now displayed their most honorable throne". I guess this line just sounded more patriotic then the next line in the first verse?

        • I love that as the Argentine’s song fades, the next scene starts off with a look at the royal standard flying over Buckingham Palace, like a little hat nod to the whole flag/land claim controversy that just happened, but no one else knows about yet.

  • The whole favoritism discussion with Philip inspires the Queen to ask her private secretary to set up personal meetings with each of her children. The normally unflappable Martin Charteris looks…slightly taken aback at this request, but takes it in stride. Elizabeth also asks for a briefing document to be prepared on each child, which had me ROLLING on the floor laughing. “One would hate to be uniformed. or cold. or remotely remote.”

    • In this scene, Queen Elizabeth is wearing a strand of pearls. We know that Elizabeth’s first pearl necklace was given to her by her father, King George V. She wears them very often, so it doesn’t stand out as anything too unusual, but it does seem to indicate “family” here.

    • The episode’s frame story is a rather transparent ploy to introduce us to the queen’s younger two kids (who have only been in the background previously; I don’t think we ever have heard them speak before honestly) and check in on where all the kids are in their life, but the actual stories and scenes that come out in this episode are honestly some of the most affecting and chilling throughout the whole season, as they focus really on quiet talks between the royal family members about their roles and lives, rather than intense action.

This exact photo of Margaret Thatcher and her family appears in a quick shot in the show.

This exact photo of Margaret Thatcher and her family appears in a quick shot in the show.

  • The next shot in 10 Downing Street focuses on two framed photos; one of the family together (which looks to be this real life photo of Margaret Thatcher’s family) and one just of Mark Thatcher alone, indicating his place as the favored child. Margaret, Denis, and Carol all sit close together, wearing various shades and prints of brown and tan, as some of Margaret’s advisors talk to her about possible leads for finding Mark. A Swiss driver apparently saw Mark alive on the previous day, but now they can’t locate that Swiss driver; Denis notes with frustration that “they can’t even find the drivers who aren’t lost,” and concludes that he needs to fly out to join the search. In real life, Denis did indeed fly out to Algeria to help with the search.

    • The advisors then bring up the Falklands situation to Margaret Thatcher and note that the governor of the Falklands has asked for an ice breaking vessel to come to the island of South Georgia to evict the Argentine scrap metal workers. Margaret, who is looking increasingly gaunt and hollow eyed, doesn’t even look as her advisors as they bring this up, and her husband ends up quietly shooing them away. They conclude that they’ll bring it the foreign secretary.

    • Margaret’s apparent paralysis due to the disappearance of her favorite child is in sharp contrast to the way she interacts with her daughter Carol, who looks at her with concern and unease, as if she doesn’t know how to interact with her. Margaret doesn’t even acknowledge that Carol is in the room as she knocks back another glass of whiskey.

    • The theme of caring vs. not caring flips here, as it becomes obvious throughout the episode that the normally tough and seemingly uncaring Margaret Thatcher is very close to her son and is an absolute wreck while he’s missing. This is pretty historically accurate, as numerous people close to the PM at the time have said that this is the only time they saw her basically unable to function as a leader, completely consumed with worry over her son (source: The Crown Podcast). In contrast, the Queen, who is traditionally seen as the softer, more caring person in the Thatcher/Queen relationship, has a far more distant relationship with her children, to the extent that her asking to see each of them privately causes them alarm.

Left, Prince Edward in The Crown. Right, Prince Edward in real life.

Left, Prince Edward in The Crown.
Top Right: Prince Edward with Queen Elizabeth (Credit: PA / Getty).
Bottom Right: Prince Edward (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

  • The 18-year-old Prince Edward is introduced with a bit of a bang, as we hear him before we see him, bitching about traffic, clearly responding to a secretary telling him he’s late for his lunch date with the Queen. The Queen is in yet another loose long sleeved dress with a pussy bow and her pearls, but this time, it’s in a brown print, which goes with Edward’s tan tweed jacket, tying them together and also hearkening back to the Thatchers’ shared brown tones. Remember also, Edward is attending Gordonstoun in Scotland (where we saw Charles and Philip back in S2E9 Paterfamilias; Andrew also attended Gordonstoun); the tweed cloth (originally made in Scotland) ties him back to that. His youth is further indicated by his braces (which he really did have).

    • Edward says about the secretaries, with no trace of shame, “There’s a nasty, officious imperiousness and sense of entitlement to these people,” and then later in the scene talks about how Cambridge will be glad to have him regardless of his grades, and how the family deserves special treatment for all that they do for the country.

    • One of Edward’s first questions to his mother is whether he’s still getting his civil list money. The Queen raises her eyebrows at this but mildly says, “yes, all 20 thousand pounds of it.” Edward claims it mostly goes to secretarial expenses, but the queen counters that only 800 pounds of it goes to secretaries (indicating that she is far more savvy about her children’s finances than perhaps they realize). Edward waves off her concerns about the cost by saying the money is all put away in a trust, but doesn’t really answer.

      • Although the civil list was abolished in 2011, before then, it referred to the annual grant that covered the expenses of the Sovereign and the upkeep of the royal households (referring to the various departments serving the royal family). The civil list money did not cover transport and security for the Royal Family or property maintenance costs, which were covered by separate departments.

      • I’ve had a bit of trouble finding the details of civil list money for the royals in the 1980s, or any information on at what age members of the royal family would first be given a secretary, but I’ll keep looking and update this as I find out more.

    • Edward says he had a bet with his protection officer that the lunch would be poached salmon. Apparently the queen really does love salmon, and you can even find two of her former chef’s salmon recipes here. This offhand comment also indicates Edward’s close relationship with his protection officers; apparently he was so close to one of them that he’d call him up to tell him about good grades he got at school (Source: The Crown Podcast). Edward then talks about his experiences as guardian/head boy (a position he really had) and his experiences being bullied. We don’t know for sure if Edward was bullied, but Charles definitely had a lot of trouble at school. Edward seems clearly uncomfortable talking about it with his mother, in the show.

    • “Don’t Worry! I’ve met all the Cambridge admissions people, they’re going to make it happen. They’re no fools. It’s good for them too. A member of the royal family at Jesus college? just wait to see how the applications rocket.” When the Queen says this isn’t a very attractive attitude, Edward responds that it’s true, and it would be true with the marines, the City, or any other area of life he might fancy. “People will always want me. and what do you expect me to do about that? Say no? There has to be some upside to being who we are. And some return for what we do for the country.”

      • These few lines have so many real life Edward references in them.

        • Edward DID go to Jesus college at Cambridge, and his acceptance into the program was quite controversial due to his poor grades. I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely understand the British educational exam grading setup, but I do know that O-Levels are required exams usually taken at age 16 and are supposed to indicate readiness for more advanced “A-Level” classes. Edward received 9 O-levels and 3 A-levels. Apparently you also get grades for the A-Levels; generally, Cambridge would only accept students with straight As on their A-Levels, but Edward got a C and two Ds.

        • The Marines had paid 12,000 pounds of Edward’s Cambridge tuition in return for his serving for 5 years, but Edward dropped out of the service only a few months into his training course (his father was apparently VERY ANGRY about that).

        • I’m not entirely sure what “The City” means here, but i believe it usually refers to the city of london? I couldn’t find exactly what this refers to in Edward’s biography.

        • This is the most in depth look we get at Edward for the entire season, so I’ll quickly cover a few more highlights from his life in the 80s. After dropping out of the marines, he COMMISSIONED A MUSICAL from Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice for his mother’s 60th birthday. He then ended up getting a job at Lloyd Weber’s theatre company and worked as a production assistant for a few musicals. in 1987, he put together a television programme called “The Grand Knockout Tournament” in which four teams of celebrities and personalities sponsored by him, Princess Anne, and the Duke and Duchess of York (Andrew and Sarah Ferguson) competed for charity. They actually managed to get big names such as John Cleese, John Travolta, Meat Loaf, and Jane Seymour. The programme raised over a million pounds for its charities, but was roundly criticized by the press and thought of as pretty ridiculous and humiliating for those who participated in it. Apparently in one activity, players dressed up as giant vegetables and threw fake hams at each other? I desperately need to find and watch this.

  • We flip back to 10 Downing Street, where Carol Thatcher confirms that her father’s arrived safely in Algiers (and finally gets at least a thank you from her mother), and advisors update Margaret Thatcher on the state of the search. They note that they’ve narrowed the search slightly, but still have a search area of approximately 130,000 square miles, which they note, is larger than the entire United Kingdom. Although the PM acts like she really wants to just focus on her son, she is forced to pay attention to the Falklands situation, which continues to grow in scope. Another advisor reports that the HMS Endurance is on its way to South Georgia with a combat unit of Royal Marines and that the junta in Argentina has responded by sending out its own ice breaking ship and two missile-carrying corvettes (“corvettes” here refers to multi-purpose military ships, not cars); the foreign secretary has advised that the UK call off the Endurance and back off to avoid “unnecessary conflict” with Argentina while the situation is resolved diplomatically. Margaret is appalled by this suggestion, asking repeatedly, “You mean to do nothing?” and “How will it be well if we do nothing” and insisting that the Endurance must continue on, as British citizens far from home are in danger and must be protected. Her advisors and Carol (who has moved away from the table as important government business is being discussed, but is still nearby) share a worried glance, realizing that the PM is clearly projecting her concerns about her son onto this situation. The PM quickly moves back to worrying about Mark again.

    • The PM is in a dark blue outfit with almost a double breasted silhouette to it, with two lines of buttons down the front. This almost gives her a military look, which ties in nicely with her insistence on pursuing military action in the Falklands, despite her foreign secretary’s inclination to drop the matter. Also - it looks like every one of Margaret’s advisors is also wearing some blue in this scene. Carol, in contrast, is wearing a red and burgundy print with no blue, indicating that she’s an outsider in the government situation unfolding in front of her.

    • The “Do Nothing!?” conversation points to several things here: the Prime Minister’s characterization as a woman who needs to act, her worry as a mother over her son, and the repeated characterization of the Queen’s job as “to do nothing” (which has been discussed in depth several times throughout the series). It also foreshadows the Queen’s advice to Anne that will happen in the next scene.

      • This scene hearkens back to S1E4 of The Crown, “Act of God,” which is set before Elizabeth has even been officially crowned. In that episode, which features the famous smog that shut down London for several days, the new queen has an important discussion on her role with her grandmother, Queen Mary.

        Queen Elizabeth II : It doesn't feel right, as Head of State, to do nothing.
        Queen Mary : It is exactly right.
        QEII : Is it? But surely doing nothing is no job at all?
        QM : To do nothing is the hardest job of all. And it will take every ounce of energy that you have. To be impartial is not natural, not human. People will always want you to smile or agree or frown. And the minute you do, you will have declared a position. A point of view. And that is the one thing as sovereign that you are not entitled to do. The less you do, the less you say or agree or smile...
        QEII : Or think? Or feel? Or breathe? Or exist?
        QM : The better.

Top, The Queen and Princess Anne in The Crown. Bottom, Princess Anne in real life.

Top: The Queen and Princess Anne in The Crown.
Bottom Left: Princess Anne in equestrian competition (Credit: PA / Getty).
Bottom Right: Princess Anne (Credit: David Hartley).

  • Off we get back to the Queen visiting her children. Next up is Princess Anne. Elizabeth visits her at her home in the country, where they ride out together and talk over tea while sitting on a picnic blanket. Everything about the set up for this scene emphasizes how similar Elizabeth and her daughter are, but this illusion is quickly dispelled by their conversation, which reveals how different they really are.

    • The Queen coos over Anne’s horses and talks to them affectionately, as well as specifically addressing the stablehand by name. Olivia Colman has said in interviews that she doesn’t really like horses, but you would never ever guess by looking at her in these little scenes. Such a good actress.

    • The Queen starts out in a green skirt suit and changes into more comfortable green and tan riding gear, including a hairscarf. Anne also wears a hairscarf, but wears blue and white and a black hat over her scarf in an almost uniform look. It hearkens back to her equestrianism, which sadly, isn’t going so well at this point. It’s only slightly alluded to in this conversation, but Anne had a number of embarrassing falls from her horse in 1982 (when this episode is set) that were widely covered in the press, which helps explain her dark mood toward them right now. Their different styles and colors set them apart. In addition, the queen is sort of blending into the green background as they talk, while Anne is clearly standing out from it all, illustrating her discontent with her life.

    • The Queen coos about her daughter’s life being exactly what she wants, out in the country, with privacy, children, horses, and mud, but Anne instantly shoots this idyllic view down, saying acerbically that it isn’t the Eden the Queen makes it out to be. She specifically says that there isn’t privacy, noting bitterly that the press has got it in for her. The Queen rebukes her slightly for referring to the press as “bastards,” and Anne shoots back, “I told them to naff off once. and can you blame me? They’re so mean to me all the time.” This refers back to the incidents in which Anne fell off her horse and yelled at the press for photographing it. This article from Express has some of the journalists saying that Anne actually said worse things, but the press toned it down for print.

    • Anne states that she’s doing work in third world countries for real charities and real causes but that her work is being ignored in favor of Princess Diana, who gets attention for just wearing a new frock. In real life, Anne was president of Save the Children from 1970 to 2017 and during the 70s and 80s, travelled all over the world in support of the organization, including Kenya, Australia, and Gambia. Anne consistently tops the annual lists of “busiest royals” even today and appears at hundreds of official appearances and engagements throughout the year.
      Diana herself said in interviews that early on in her position as Princess of Wales, no one expected her to do anything but show up and look pretty. Diana’s huge popularity from the start of her engagement to Charles was really unprecedented and took everyone by surprise. Although there’s no evidence supporting any serious fallouts or problems between Anne and Diana, it makes sense that Anne might have been annoyed by the disparate press attention they were getting.

    • The Queen brings up rumors she’d heard of Anne having an affair with a bodyguard named Sergeant Cross. In real life, Sergeant Peter Cross worked as a member of the Royal Protection Squad for Anne for about a year starting in 1979. He later claimed that he’d had an affair with Anne and sold his story to the tabloids. Although this doesn’t come up again throughout season 4, Anne would later have an affair with an equerry to the Queen named Commander Timothy Laurence. A few of Laurence’s love letters to Anne were stolen in 1989 and given to The Sun, which published them. Anne would separate from her husband Mark Philips in 1989 and the two divorced in April 1992. Eight months later, she would marry Laurence. They’re still married today.

    • Anne has a deeply moving speech about how unhappy she is, how she used to enjoy being “the difficult one,” but now just feels reckless and angry and upset all the time. It’s hard for me to analyze this much, as we know that her marriage wasn’t terribly happy, but we don’t know much more about that. But it is really beautifully done, and demonstrates why this character is so adored by fans.

    • The Queen suggests that Anne wait out both her unhappiness with her marriage and her unhappiness with her life in general. Anne asks angrily, “Is that it? Is doing nothing your solution to everything?" This points back to the previous scene with Thatcher’s anger over doing nothing in the Falklands. Anne rides away from her mother, clearly still upset.

  • Next, we see news reports that Mark Thatcher has been found and is safely coming home. On the news, the PM says “Now of course, you are all used to thinking of me as prime minister. but what the last few days has shown me very clearly is that, above all else, I am a mother.” The Queen watches this report with a troubled expression, as if she’s not sure whether she could say the same about her role as queen vs. mother. Philip uses the opportunity to ask Elizabeth if she’s figured out who her favorite child is yet; she gives him a look of disdain in response.

  • Back at 10 Downing Street, the PM’s favoritism toward her son is revealed as she personally serves him a welcome home dinner. Mark continues to be a prat as he boasts about how he was never worried about his life, although his team members “were getting existential,” and wasn’t actually lost, as he always knew where he was. His father and sister look at him with a bit of shock, slightly appalled by his tone and response to the whole situation. Carol points out that he was off course and that his co-driver was taken to the hospital with heatstroke, but he claims defensively that the whole point of the race is that there isn’t a course and says his driver was being overdramatic. His mother encourages him, blaming his team’s fears about death on them being French and his co-driver’s “over-dramatic” heatstroke on her being a woman (this introduces Margaret’s thoughts toward anyone who might be considered “weak”).

    • The trend of spoiled sons commenting on their mother’s meal choices continues as Mark selfishly asks where the gravy is for his favorite dish, Toad in the Hole. Apparently English Toad in the Hole consists of sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter (in the US, it’s eggs baked into toast).

    • News announcers earlier mentioned that his father Denis embraced the helicopter pilot who spotted Mark’s team. This is in sharp contrast to Mark’s own ungratefulness toward his rescuers, which revealed in the dinner conversation as he gets home.

    • The costumes at the dinner table help illustrate the relationship dynamics at work. Mark is in a blue shirt with a yellow sweater tied around his shoulders. Margaret is in a matching gold and tan print. Denis is in blue and Carol is in a dark green print. Mark, Denis, and Carol are all somewhat relating to each other in the conversation and at this moment, but Margaret is clearly only focused on Mark at this point.

    • Carol, disgusted by the obvious favoritism toward her idiot brother, goes off to the kitchen, where her father comforts her, saying “it’s mothers and sons, that’s all.” He then refuses to answer the knock at the door, saying with a smile that it wouldn’t be for him, and that he and Carol are just support acts in the show.

    • Fun Fact: Olivia Colman played Carol Thatcher in 2011 film The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her role as Margaret Thatcher. I haven’t seen it so I can’t speak to whether it portrays Margaret and Carol’s relationship similarly or not.

  • The knock at the door brings Margaret Thatcher back to the Falklands War, as her advisor tells her that the Argentinian government seems likely to move ahead with an attack. She closes the kitchen door behind her to keep her family away from the government work at hand. After days of ignoring the conflict herself, she’s irritated to find out that the foreign secretary, the chief of the defense staff, and the defense secretary, are all out of the country at such an important time. She demands that they all come back to the country and see her the next day.

Left, Prince Andrew in The Crown. Right, Prince Andrew in real life in his royal navy uniform.

Left, Prince Andrew in The Crown.
Top Right: Prince Andrew in royal navy uniform (Credit: Bob Thomas / Getty).
Bottom Right: Prince Andrew in front of royal navy helicopter (Credit: Hulton Deutsch / Getty).

  • Next, Prince Andrew, who’s serving in the Royal Navy as a helicopter pilot, flies to Windsor Castle for lunch with his mother, buzzing close enough to the castle to startle the Queen at her desk, prevent her private secretary from finishing his phone conversation, surprise the Queen Mother in the garden, and wake Princess Margaret, still in bed. Andrew jocularly throws his helmet to a waiting servant and brushes away his mother’s concerns about him taking the helicopter out for just a mother-son lunch, saying “You’re the queen and I’m second in line to the throne. If we as much as break wind, it’s a matter of national importance.” Although I don’t know if he ever did land a helicopter on the palace lawn, Andrew was apparently quite found of practical jokes as a young man, so it’s in line with his usual behavior.

    • Note: Male-preference primogeniture still applied to the succession to the English throne in the 1980s, so Andrew and Edward both came before Anne in the succession, although she was older. In October 2011, the rules of succession were altered so that absolute primogeniture for royals born after the date of the agreement. So although Andrew and Edward both still come before Anne in the line of succession (although all of them are far down the line now, due to Charles’s children and grandchildren), Prince William’s daughter Charlotte, born after the change in rules, is higher up in the succession than her younger brother Louis.

    • Queen Elizabeth has her lunch with Andrew at a small, intimate table, which contrasts sharply with the large table and formal set up in which she met Edward and likely indicates the closeness of their relationship. The Queen is back in her family pearls and in a white shirt with a blue floral print, matching her son’s blue jacket, light blue shirt, and blue, red, and white tie (the tie colors may refer to his role in the military).

    • Andrew asks about what title he may receive in the future when he marries, which leads into a conversation about his current love interest, “the young, racy American actress” Koo Stark. Andrew says he isn’t seriously thinking about marrying her, but in real life, it seemed that their relationship was his most serious except for that with his eventual wife. Andrew then devilishly explains the plot of the “blue” film Stark appeared in to his mother, seemingly amused at her discomfort over the description of the sexual imagery and her question of whether the film was even legal. Although his description does sound a bit like pornography, it’s apparently considered more avante garde.

      • Andrew and the Queen briefly mention that the film was shot at Wilton House, owned by the Herberts; this is due to the fact that the director of the film was literally a Herbert.

      • Although all the facts in this conversation are actually true to life, I have to think that their inclusion in this story specifically point to Prince Andrew’s modern reputation as a pedophile. Although show creator Peter Morgan has talked numerous times about how he wants to portray these people as they were known in the 1980s, and not as we know they’ll end up, I have to think he’d make an exception for Andrew, as completely overlooking his current reputation and portraying him as a good guy could backfire publicly. I honestly…really don’t want to get into all the details of Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and the sex trafficking and sexual abuse allegations against him, because it’s a horrible situation that other people have researched and covered in far more depth than I possibly could, but you can read all about them over here at Town and Country. The Wikipedia article on Prince Andrew also has a very well sourced section about it all. The whole furor forced him to permanently resign from all his public roles, and honestly, he may someday get arrested for it.

    • The Queen ends up saying that she’d like to make Andrew “Duke of York” upon his marriage, as it’s a title traditionally given to the second eldest and has military associations. Andrew seems taken back and delighted by this idea, asking “as in the grand old duke of…,” which refers to an English children’s nursery rhyme.

      • Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
        He had ten thousand men;
        He marched them up to the top of the hill,
        And he marched them down again.

        When they were up, they were up,
        And when they were down, they were down,
        And when they were only halfway up,
        They were neither up nor down.

      • Why wasn’t Anne made Duchess of York upon her marriage? I’m not sure, but since Anne decided to raise her children without royal titles (although the Queen offered), she may have just refused. Or it may just be a patriarchal thing. I’ll research this more and update this if I learn something new.

    • Andrew, with a calculating look in his eye, also notes that the previous two Dukes of York both ended up becoming monarch. This refers to George V, who became Prince of Wales and then king after his older brother died, and George VI (Elizabeth’s father), who became king after his older brother abdicated. The Queen points out that in his case, not only would Charles have to die, but Andrew would also have to murder any of Charles’s children for him to ascend to the throne. Andrew then says, “The Duke of York has history in that department too. Richard III.” The queen, through a forced smile, laughs and says that Andrew is clever.

      • In reality, Richard III was never Duke of York, but was actually the Duke of Gloucester. His father was Duke of York and then the title next went to his elder brother’s son Richard. The young Richard, Duke of York, was one of “The Princes in the Tower” whose disappearance was pinned on Richard. As this show is incredibly well researched, I’m sure this inaccuracy was left in intentionally, to refer to both Andrew’s and the Queen’s relative lack of historical awareness.

    • The segment ends with Andrew asking his mother to ensure that if the conflict in the Falklands proceeds, Andrew is able to serve on the frontlines and isn’t barred from service just because of his role as prince. The Queen heartily agrees. In real life, the British cabinet, nervous about the Queen’s son possibly being killed in action, did ask that Andrew be moved to a desk job for the duration for the conflict. However, the Queen refused, and insisted that Andrew be allowed to remain with his ship, the HMS Invincible. During the war, Prince Andrew served as a helicopter co-pilot and flew on numerous missions.

  • Back in 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher is back in her usual power colors and looks much better than she has this entire episode, now that her son is safe and sound. She holds a cabinet meeting in which several of her cabinet members advise against taking military action in the Falklands, pointing out the unpopularity of her administration, the cost of such military action, and the fact that the country is still in a recession. However, Thatcher insists on pressing forward with military action to defend the Falklands. This all appears pretty accurate to real life. She took a big gamble on the Falklands War, which ended up bolstering her image considerably.

  • After Margaret asks for Carol to help her prepare dinner for the chiefs of staff, Carol finally stands up to her, confronting her with her obvious favoritism toward Mark and mistreatment of her. Margaret initially denies the favoritism, and then admits to it, claiming that it’s because Carol is weak. They discuss Margaret’s relationship with her mother and father as well; I’ve had a bit of trouble finding information about her father and mother online but will look into this more (probably through an audiobook biography when I get a chance) and update this later.

    • Carol is writing notes at a table, surrounded by papers, when Margaret comes into the apartment. It’s never mentioned in the show, but in real life, Carol actually worked as a journalist, first in Australia and then in the UK. She wrote a book about following her mother around on the campaign trail in 1983, wrote a biography of her father in 1996, and produced a 2003 documentary about him which featured the only public interview he ever gave. She didn’t actually live at 10 Downing Street, but it’s likely that she spent a lot of time there acquiring material for her book about her mother’s campaign, which is what seems to be shown in The Crown. It does seem that she really was there a lot in the run up to the Falklands Invasion, and did indeed help her mother feed her ministers.

    • Unfortunately, it appears that Margaret really did play favorites with her children. Carol spoke about it publicly, saying “I always felt I came second out of two” and “He was always more glamorous. In comparison, I was one-dimensional and dull.”

  • The last of the Queen’s private lunches with her children is with Charles at his new home in Highgrove. Charles himself is seen advising on the menu and fussing with the silverware on the table, further emphasizing how particular he is about things (something Camilla commented on in the previous episode). He shouts at Diana through a closed door about how she should come out and have lunch with the Queen, but the heavily pregnant Diana ignores him and watches TV instead (Bagpuss again).

    • Content Warning: Eating disorders, attempted suicide. [italicized]

      In real life, Diana had terrible “morning sickness” (hyperemesis gravidarum) and episodes of bulimia throughout her pregnancy with William. She also was dealing with horrible pressure from the press and depression. The depiction of her in The Crown is actually a bit tame here, as in real life, she actually threw herself down the stairs during her pregnancy.

      Content Warning end.

      In The Crown, Elizabeth says that she was lucky and that pregnancy didn’t seem to affect her. In real life, Elizabeth had some struggles with morning sickness, but nothing even close to the extent of Diana’s hyperemesis.

    • I talked a little bit in the previous episode’s post about how happy Charles-and-Diana seem to be represented by the color blue, while unhappy Diana is shown in yellow. In the scene where Charles is whisper-shouting at Diana through the door, he’s wearing a blue sweater and is surrounded by yellow walls (Remember: it’s Diana who decorated Highgrove). Diana herself is in a white nightgown with a blue floral robe, but clearly ignoring Charles so - she’s still trying at their relationship, but severely disillusioned.
      The Queen is again in her “family” pearls and green. She’s somewhat connected to her eldest son (who changes into a grey double breasted suit with blue shirt and tie), but there’s a big distance still between them. Charles is STILL known for wearing double breasted suits, by the way.

    • Charles shows his mother around the gardens at Highgrove rather pompously, expounding about his many gardens (which Camilla and Diana spoke about in the previous episode) and his plans for the whole place. He states that he wants the house, the land, and the gardens to express who he really is, and what he really is all about (notably never mentioning his wife or his soon to be born child). The Queen gently pokes fun at him, pointing out that his plans seemed perhaps a bit self-involved (“so the big idea is you”). Later, after he expounds on wanting an organic, natural garden, without any straight manicured lines, she playfully notes that the pool has straight lines and that the tennis court didn’t seem particularly organic.

    • Charles even says that he wants Highgrove to be his own Shangri La or Xanadu. Shangri-La is a fictional location described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” and is commonly used to describe an earthly paradise now. Xanadu was a secondary name for Shangdu, the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty of China, which was described in ecstatic terminology in a 1368 poem by Toghon Temur Khan and the 1797 poem “Kubla Kahn” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which is what Charles begins to recite). These literary references to various paradises pairs nicely with Anne’s earlier description of her own life as “not the Eden you think it is.”

    • Charles then starts to recite poetry, which seems to dismay his mother; she finds an excuse to talk about his wisteria soon afterward and stop him. This is the second time this has happened this season (Margaret Thatcher also recited poetry by Charles McKay to the Queen in S4E2) and also reflects back to Lord Mountbatten’s recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” in S3e5.

A pregnant and miserable Diana in The Crown.

A pregnant and miserable Diana in The Crown.

  • Over lunch, Charles talks about how unhappy Diana is, and how he doesn’t know how to cheer her up, specifically noting that she grew up in the country, so he thought she’d be happy there. In real life, Diana talked a lot about how much she loved living in the city and disliked HighGrove. This does contrast with what she said in S4E2 “The Balmoral Test” to Prince Philip. But then, she realized at the time that she was being tested, and may have exaggerated or lied about some of her true feelings as to the country.

    • Charles also complains about Diana being intellectually incurious, and not caring about his tutorials in Shakespeare and poetry. This further illustrates their very very different personalities and interests. He also specifically refers to writer Laurens van der Post visiting. In real life, Charles brought several books by Van der Post along on their honeymoon, hoping that they could both read and discuss the books together. This was not exactly Diana’s idea of fun.

    • The Queen rebukes Charles for his self-absorption, his close friendship with Camilla, and the way he’s treating Diana. When he says he talks to Camilla more when he needs cheering up, the Queen distinctly raises her voice at him, sharply saying “When you need cheering up? You’ve just bought your dream house, your Xanadu, that you and an army of sycophants are turning into the living embodiment of your soul. And your young, beautiful wife, struggling with pregnancy, has locked herself in a room upstairs and is refusing to come out. You know how I hate interfering. It’s not for me to tell a grown man what to do. But in your position I might be inclined to worry less about my own happiness and pay a little more attention to the well-being of the mother of my future child.”

    • Charles /almost/ seems to listen to his mother’s advice there, and looks up the staircase toward Diana’s bedroom while thinking, fiddling with his signet ring (remember, he gave Diana a signet ring of her own right before they married). However, he ends up turning away and going off on his own.

  • The episode’s main story with the Queen concludes with a few quick scenes. The Queen looking through family photos of her children at younger ages, gazing particularly at pictures of her father holding baby Charles in his arms, Philip (Matt Smith) playing tag with young Charles and Anne, Edward and Andrew as children, and a solemn young Charles dressed in the Eton uniform he tried on before his father decreed he was going to Gordonstoun instead. We then see her meeting with her mother and sister for an emergency talk, although we don’t see the actual conversation (note, all three women wear shades of brown and pearl necklaces in this scene, tying them all together). Finally, it all wraps up with a conversation with Prince Philip. Despite her attempts at subterfuge, Philip has known the whole time that she was meeting with all their children one on one, as they each called him to ask what was going on after receiving her invitations.

    • The Queen concludes that instead of Mark Thatcher, "it's our children that are lost, each in their own deserts." Philip dismisses this at first, saying roughly that Anne isn’t lost. The Queen mildly says that Anne’s marriage is lost, pointedly not revealing the other issues in Anne’s life that have been making her deeply unhappy. He then claims that Edward isn’t lost, but the Queen disagrees, describing him as “entirely lost, and bullied, and vengeful.” Philip agrees that Charles is lost, but says he always has been. She concludes with Andrew (who Philip quietly points out is her favorite), noting “I was shocked,” and then saying with foreboding, “If he doesn’t change…”, leaving the idea hanging in the air.

      • Sources do seem to think that Andrew is the Queen’s favorite child in real life.

      • The actual scene with Andrew is so subtle that I initially was left wondering why the Queen was left so worried about Andrew. I think she’s referring to his delight in freaking her out with the details of his girlfriend’s sexy film, his casual disregard to whether the film itself was legal or not, and his plain avarice and desire to be king, as evinced by his jokes about going Richard III on Charles. It’s all very under the radar and foreshadowy and I don’t think the story line would end with her so concerned about Andrew in 1982 if real life 2020 Andrew weren’t a screwup and possible criminal.

    • She asks Philip what their children’s unhappiness says about them as parents, noting that her mother had excused it by saying she shouldn’t blame herself, as she’s already mother to the nation. Philip agrees, and after hearing out her story about her regrets as a mother, firmly says that she is a perfectly good mother and their children, as adults, must now sort themselves out.

    • In this scene, the Queen is already ready for bed, wearing a nightgown and wearing no makeup, all pretense and pomp swept away as she talks about her regrets as a mother, saying she didn’t know how to be maternal toward Charles when he was a child and so let his nanny bathe him, while she watched. This story is based off of some of Charles’s own stories of his childhood. The underlying theme continues the show’s portrayal of the Queen as not really knowing how to handle emotion, previously discussed in detail in S3E3 Aberfan. Have to say, I really disagree with this line of thought. The queen may have been a bit more distant from her children then she would have liked as a mother, due to her responsibilities as monarch and the traditional child-rearing practices of both the royal family and British upper class society, but there’s never been any sign that she doesn’t know how to express emotion. There are pictures of her looking absolutely distraught at Aberfan, and she’s cried in public on numerous occasions.

    • The whole story overall does really underline the difficulties each royal child was facing in the early 80s, and highlights what Queen Elizabeth really gave up in order to be a good sovereign.

  • The episode ends with the British royal navy ships sailing off to the Falklands, carrying not only Queen Elizabeth’s son Andrew, but the children of thousands of other British citizens.

Vote for your Favorite Characters from The Crown this December!

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All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown

In addition to my blog posts, I've decided to continue The Crown love over on my Facebook page with a voting bracket to determine my friends and fans' favorite characters! This form of bracket is limited to 32 characters, so alas, I cannot include every character that's ever appeared on the show. Here's my tentative list so far. I'll have to figure out seeding, but I think it's likely that I'll put characters that were cast anew for S3-4 against each other in the first round. I do have a few characters on here combining the two actors into one, as the characters are important, but the actors' characterizations weren't different enough to really justify them having separate slots.

Here's my tentative list of bracket characters so far.

1. S1-S2 Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy)
2. S3-S4 Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman)
3. S1-S2 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (Matt Smith)
4. S3-S4 Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies)
5. S1-S2 Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby)
6. S3-S4 Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter)
7. S1-S2 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (Victoria Hamilton)
8. S3-S4 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (Marion Bailey)
9. Group Captain Peter Townsend (Ben Miles)
10. S1-S2 Louis, Earl Mountbatten of Burma “Dickie” (Greg Wise)
11. S3-S4 Louis, Earl Mountbatten of Burma “Dickie” (Charles Dance)
12. Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (Alex Jennings/Derek Jacobi)
13. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor (Lia Williams/Geraldine Chaplin)
14. Winston Churchill (John Lithgow)
15. Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam)
16. Harold Macmillan (Anton Lesser)
17. Antony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon (Matthew Goode/Ben Daniels)
18. Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins)
19. Princess Anne (Erin Doherty)
20. Charles, Prince of Wales (Josh O’Connor)
21. Diana, Princess of Wales (Emma Corrin)
22. Camilla Shand, later Parker-Bowles (Emerald Fennell)
23. Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson)

I’m also hosting a poll to determine the wild-card contenders for the last 8 slots! You can go vote for your favorite 3 characters from that list until 7:30 PM EST Monday over here.

The voting options are:

  • Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother (Eileen Atkins) 

  • King George VI, Queen Elizabeth II’s father (Jared Harris)

  • Edward Heath, prime minister from 1970-1974 (Michael Maloney)

  • Tommy Lascelles, private secretary to both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II (Pip Torrens)

  • Michael Adeane, private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II (Will Keen/David Rintoul)

  • Martin Charteris, private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II (Harry Hadden-Paton/Charles Edwards)

  • Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane) a noted artist who paints a portrait of the ageing Churchill Lord Altrincham (John Heffernan) a writer who penned a scathing criticism of the Queen

  • Patricia Campbell (Gemma Whelan) a secretary who works with Lord Altrincham and types up his editorial

  • Billy Graham (Paul Sparks) a prominent American preacher whom Elizabeth consults

  • John F. Kennedy (Michael C. Hall), the 35th President of the United States who visits the Queen

  • Jacqueline Kennedy (Jodi Balfour), the First Lady of the United States 

  • Dr Kurt Hahn (Burghart Klaußner) the founder of Gordonstoun, where Philip and Charles went to school

  • school-aged Prince Philip (Finn Elliot)

  • school-aged Prince Charles (Julian Baring)

  • Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States (Clancy Brown)

  • Edward Millward, Prince Charles's Welsh language tutor (Mark Lewis Jones)

  • Princess Alice, Philip’s mother (Jane Lapotaire)

  • Robin Woods, Dean of Windsor from 1962 to 1970 (Tim McMullan)

  • Roddy Llewellyn, Princess Margaret's boyfriend (Harry Treadaway)

  • Denis Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s husband (Stephen Boxer)

  • Michael Fagan, a man who enters the Queen's bedroom in 1982 (Tom Brooke)

  • Bob Hawke, 23rd Prime Minister of Australia (Richard Roxburgh)

  • Derek 'Dazzle' Jennings, a civil servant and friend of Princess Margaret (Tom Burke)

  • Michael Shea, the Queen's Press Secretary from 1978 to 1987 (Nicholas Farrell)

  • Prince Edward (Angus Imrie)

  • Prince Andrew (Tom Byrne)

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E3 Fairytale

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Top: Charles and Diana in The Crown at their wedding rehearsal Bottom: Real life Diana and Charles

Top: Charles and Diana in The Crown at their wedding rehearsal
Bottom: Real life Diana and Charles

Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown, wearing a recreation of Diana’s wedding dress. The recreation of the dress took four weeks and 600 hours to create. The costume is made of 95 meters of fabric and 100 meters of lace, with a 30 meter train. Although…

Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown, wearing a recreation of Diana’s wedding dress. The recreation of the dress took four weeks and 600 hours to create. The costume is made of 95 meters of fabric and 100 meters of lace, with a 30 meter train. Although they used different fabric to reduce creasing, the lace of the original wedding dress was recreated exactly. It’s pretty sad that we only saw it on screen for like, maybe a minute, because they did a brilliant job recreating it.

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! I’ll be /trying/ to write these posts up one episode at a time (although I may watch ahead a bit of my writing), so there won’t be spoilers for any main plot points of any episode except that which I’m covering in the post, although I may point out a little foreshadowing to later strife and such. So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 3 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

Content Warning: Eating Disorders. (I’ll include specific CWs on those portions of the post as well.

Upper left: Charles proposes to Diana on The Crown. Other three photos, Princess Diana in real life.

Upper left: Charles proposes to Diana on The Crown. Other three photos, Princess Diana in real life.

  • Content Warning: Eating Disorders [italicized]
    This episode starts with a content warning about the scenes featuring bulimia nervosa. I’m glad they included this, as these trigger warnings are often very helpful for people in recovery trying to avoid relapse, however, there‘s unfortunately pretty good evidence that it doesn’t help as much as we might hope, particularly for people who are currently battling an eating disorder. This article talks about the issues with trigger warnings for eating disorders in-depth.
    Content Warning end.

  • Quick source note: I’ve been referencing Diana’s biography “Diana: Her True Story in her own words” by Andrew Morton a lot. This book is really the closest thing we have to a Diana autobiography, as she authorized it and gave hours of taped interviews for it. We really have to keep in mind though, that Diana’s interviews for it were conducted in the early 1990s, years after most of the events discussed had taken place, and was looking back at everything with the hindsight of knowing that her marriage hasn’t worked out very well. She also very much had an agenda with the book, as she wanted to get her side of the story out into the world so that if she began the process of separating from Charles, she wouldn’t look like the villain. In the original tapes, she never mentioned her own affairs or many of her own faults in the marriage. Although the author did do a lot of outside interviews and research and filled in the gaps around that, the book must ultimately be viewed through a lens of caution to this bias. After I finish that book, I do plan to go read the authorized Prince Charles biography by Jonathan Dimbleby, which was put together under similar circumstances and with similar motives, and come back and fill his viewpoint in a lot of these blogposts.

  • The episode starts with a montage of Diana leaving Windsor Castle and all the women in the royal family sitting by their phones, waiting for the news of Charles’s proposal to Diana.

    • We see: The Queen looking at a box of mementos, Princess Margaret getting her nails painted, Queen mother sitting on a couch, and Princess Anne wearing a colorful sweater and sitting on a couch between two large dogs. Their respective phones are all placed very prominently as we see each royal.

    • A mouse runs across the front of the scene featuring the Queen Mother and has become VERY NOTORIOUS ONLINE. The Crown’s official Twitter account even acknowledged it by tweeting “Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series?” in response to someone’s screenshot pointing it out. There’s really no way to know whether the mouse’s cameo was intentional or not, as no one has spoken out about it, but I think it could be either. The relative neglect and decay of the palace has been mentioned before in Season 1 and 2, and it will come up again in a few episodes, when a visitor tells the Queen that the palace has a lot of peeling wall paint and such, so it really might have been a quite indication of that.
      The exact location of the mouse is hard to pinpoint, as it’s not clear where each of the family members are at in this scene, though. Generally during their lives, the Queen Mother lived at Clarence House and Princess Margaret lived at Kensington Palace. Princess Anne lives at her own house in the Gloucestershire, which is further demonstrated in Episode 4. Throughout the year, the Queen lives mainly at Buckingham Palace, is usually at Windsor Castle from March-April and on the weekends, celebrated Christmas/New Year at Windsor for much of her life but now is usually at Sandringham for the winter holidays, and spends her summer holiday at Balmoral. This episode starts in 1981 at Windsor Castle; although there isn’t a month specified, in real life, they got engaged in February. So presumably the Queen was at Buckingham Palace when she got this call.

    • As Diana drives away, Charles places a toy soldier in his hand by his phone. This seems like a reference to Lord Mountbatten. I feel like toy soldiers have appeared in The Crown before in Seasons 1-2 and I’m just not remembering the exact context. I’ll do a re-watch here soon and try to pinpoint the exact spot. I think there also was a brief moment with a toy soldier in Episode 1 of this season.

  • “It’s done. I did it.” - Charles to the Queen. What a romantic way of telling his mother he proposed. He did indeed propose to Diana in the nursery at Windsor Castle. He makes something of a big deal about not getting down on one knee to propose, as “i thought in terms of rank the prince of wales only knelt before the sovereign” (“it's a proposal of marriage dear, not a show of strength"), but in real life, he apparently did get down on one knee. She herself said that she nervously laughed at the request, thinking it was a joke at first, but said “yes.”

    • In the flash back to the proposal itself, Diana wears a red floral dress, and a bright blue cardigan with red, yellow, and blue detailing. Diana wore several red floral dresses in real life with distinctive collars like that. I couldn’t find any cardigan pictures quite like that, but Diana was very well known for wearing bright, often delightfully ridiculous sweaters, like a big koala sweater while she was pregnant.

    • In the biography “Diana: her true story in her own words,” based off of taped interviews with Diana, Diana said that she often said “yes, please” to Charles during their brief courtship, so her saying "yes please" in the show rings pretty true.

    • The entire phone conversation between the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne, makes it clear how relieved they are that he finally proposed but how generally appalled they are by how not romantic it was (“the nursery?”) and Charles’s tone deaf approach to the whole down on one knee question.

    • “Prostitutes and Australians. Isn’t that who lives in Earl’s Court?” Margaret is a delight. Also, apparently there was a pretty large population of Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans living in Earl’s Court at the time. It began to be known as “Kangaroo Valley.” It also was known for having a thriving gay nightlife in the 1970s and 1980s; unfortunately, some of those clubs were known for prostitution, as Margaret astutely notes. The fact that Diana so happily lived in this area of London illustrates an early openness and love of all people. She would later become close friends with numerous gay celebrities, including Elton John and Freddie Mercury (who supposedly took her clubbing dressed in drag to keep her anonymous) and was famous for showing great compassion to AIDS victims and actually hugging them, in a time when people were often terrified of touching anyone with HIV.

  • Diana, on her drive back to her flat in London, listens to upside down by Diana Ross, which is all about love messing with your head.

    • I said upside down
      You're turning me
      You're giving love instinctively
      Around and round you're turning me

      Upside down
      Boy, you turn me
      Inside out
      And round and round

  • Diana immediately swarmed by reporters and photographers outside her flat as she leaves her car, many more than last episode. She just ignores all their questions. This is both accurate to real life and also sad foreshadowing to her own end. Diana was eventually given a few security officers to protect her, but not until after the engagement announcement and her move into the royal family’s homes. There were considerable complications before that as the press followed her and hounded her everywhere. She was so desperate to escape them that she would play tricks by switching cars with one of her flatmates, or her grandmother, and at least once she climbed out the window.

Top and bottom left photos: Diana on The Crown celebrating her engagement with her friends. Bottom right: Princess Diana.

Top and bottom left photos: Diana on The Crown celebrating her engagement with her friends. Bottom right: Princess Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

The entry hall to the Jungle Bar and Nightclub in London, which I’m 99% sure served as the location for the clubbing scene in S4e3. This club is the reimagined, one building over set up of Annabel’s club, where Diana held her hen do in real life.

The entry hall to the Jungle Bar and Nightclub in London, which I’m 99% sure served as the location for the clubbing scene in S4e3. This club is the reimagined, one building over set up of Annabel’s club, where Diana held her hen do in real life.

  • Diana celebrates her engagement with her flatmates by dressing up, driving around town, and going dancing at a fabulous looking club that I’m nearly positive is The Jungle Bar and Nightclub in London. This club is actually a redesign of Annabel’s, an exclusive nightclub where Diana had her “hen do” (bachelorette party, for Americans), and is one building over from the original location.

    • Her biography by Andrew Norton said that Diana drove around town but didn’t talk about dancing. You can’t see her dress very well in the club scene but it’s sleeveless, with lots of ruffles, mid-calf length, and appears to be covered in light pastel flowers, mid-calf length. It looks very much like a ballgown she wore in later life.

    • This entire scene is set to the chorus of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen,” which actually came out on her album in July 1981 and as a single in 1982, so later than this scene is set place, but decently contemporary to the events. This is a really symbolic song inspired heavily by the death of Nicks’ uncle Jonathan and the death of John Lennon, which sounds really exciting and energetic and fun, but deals almost entirely with death. It’s yet another song foreshadowing Diana’s spiral and unfortunate end. Nicks has said that the “white winged dove” represents the spirit leaving the body on death. The “ooh baby ooh” section is meant to sound like a dove’s song.

      Just like the white winged dove
      Sings a song Sounds like she's singing
      Ooh baby, ooh, said ooh [repeated]

    • The scene ends with her friends uproariously singing “God Save the Queen,” but Diana said in her life that she had a premonition that she’d never become queen, even when Charles proposed.

Diana with her mother, Frances Shand-Kydd, both wearing their similar sapphire rings, at Wimbledon in 1993.

Diana with her mother, Frances Shand-Kydd, both wearing their similar sapphire rings, at Wimbledon in 1993 (Credit: Daily Mail / Shutterstock).

  • The next scene shows “a rather special box of chocolates” of rings for Diana to choose from. She apparently did choose her ring from a selection of them. She initially looks at an oval ruby ring surrounded by small diamonds. The jeweler explains that it’s from the Mogok valley, the queen asks if she knows where that is, and Diana responds “oh i’m rather thick at geography.” The queen promptly says “Burma,” while Charles makes a face and chuckles, illustrating the divide between Charles and Diana which will only become more apparent as the episode and season goes on.

    • Burmese rubies are very popular and known for having a deep red color. They tend to be very rare and expensive. There really are several legends about the rubies in Burma, which the jeweller began to explain before he was interrupted by Diana choosing a different ring.

    • This ruby ring could be a reference to a few different things actually! The most famous burmese ruby in the English royal collection is the controversial Burmese Ruby tiara (much credit to the Court Jeweller for this post and everything I have ever learned about royal tiaras and jewels). Apparently this was made from the Nizam of Hyderabad Tiara, a diamond floral tiara that the queen received as wedding gift, from the Nizam, an Indian monarch who literally told Cartier to let the then-princess choose whatever she wanted from their collections as a wedding gift, much like in this scene with Diana. The tiara was dismantled in the 1970s and combined with another wedding gift, 96 rubies from the people of Burma, to make this tiara. People really liked the previous tiara and were upset at its being taken apart.

    • The ring itself in the show much more resembles a jewel from a different royal family, specifically, Queen Marie-Jose of Italy’s Ruby Ring, which is, in fact, made with a large Burmese ruby. It was offered for sale at auction recently with an estimated value of $5.8-$8.7 million.
      The ruby ring also slightly resembles the ring that Prince Andres later gave his future wife, Sarah Ferguson (Fergie).

    • Diana’s actual ring features an 18-carot oval-cut Sri Lankan sapphire. There is evidence that in real life, Diana did choose the sapphire ring because it reminded her of her mother’s ring and matched her eyes (her reasons given in The Crown) as well. It wasn’t custom made nor was it an heirloom ring, which made it unusual for royal ring (the queen’s ring was designed by Philip, Prince Andrew designed Fergie’s ruby ring, Charles proposed to Camilla with his grandmother’s diamond ring, and Prince Harry designed Meghan Markle’s diamond ring using diamonds that belonged to his mother). Prince William later used his mother’s ring to propose to Kate Middleton.

    • In this scene, Diana is wearing an outfit so similar to her engagement outfit that I initially thought it was the same one! The blue is almost exactly the same color. She’s sporting a pie crust collared shirt that’s very similar to those she wore in real life. She ended up really popularizing that collar style actually.

Upper left: Diana in The Crown looking at her new engagement ring. Other photos: Princess Diana in real life.

Upper left: Diana in The Crown looking at her new engagement ring. Upper Left: Princess Diana in a green dress.
Bottom: Princess Diana in various outfits
Left:Credit: Kypros / Getty; Right: Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty.

Left: Diana in The Crown, meeting the Royal Family after her engagement. Other photos: Diana in real life.

Left: Diana in The Crown, meeting the Royal Family after her engagement. Other photos: Diana in real life.

  • Next, the queen’s private secretary Martin Charteris passes on two suggestions from the Queen Mother: 1, that Diana be moved into Buckingham Palace before the engagement announcement to protect her from the media, and 2, that Diana be given some tutorials as to how to behave like a royal. Charteris suggests that the Queen teach Diana how to be a royal, but the Queen says she doesn’t have the time and that Lady Fermoy, Diana’s grandmother and the Queen Mother’s lady in waiting, can do so.

    • She was actually moved to Clarence House the day before the engagement was announced. She was later moved into Buckingham palace before the wedding.

    • I’ll talk about this more later on when we get to the actual “princess lessons,” but Diana said in interviews during her life that she was not given any training or education when she married Charles, although she really could have used it.

    • Note: Martin Charteris retired in 1977, so i’m slightly confused as to why they kept him as the queen’s secretary throughout all of season 3, which goes through 1990 - they must really like the actor!

  • We have a quick scene where Diana is hanging out with her flatmates for the last time before moving out and living with the royal family. As she walks down the stairs away from her flatmates, the camera actually spirals down with her. This is the first time this style of shot appears in this episode, but we’ll see it several more times, likely to illustrate her spiral down into her eating disorder. Diana going up and down stairs is also heavily featured throughout the stair, possibly referring to her change in status.

    • Note: Diana actually lived that flat in Earl’s Court, which her parents gave her when she was 18, after she had begged to be allowed to live in London for years.

    • In this scene, Diana says she’ll be on the phone with her friends day and night, which they laugh off, saying she’ll be too busy trying on tiaras and having tea brought to her. This illustrates that even her closest friends had a very “fairy tale” view of what Diana’s life would be like.

  • The scene where Diana meets all the family again in a more formal setting than Balmoral, forgets to curtsey to anyone, and then gets overwhelmed by all the rules and starts curtseying to the wrong people, is likely an exaggeration. The Spencer children grew up in a house on the Sandringham estate and regularly spent Christmases with the royal family while they were growing up. Both of Diana’s grandmothers served the Queen Mother (Lady Fermoy served the Queen Mother, as shown in the show, from 1956-1993, and her maternal Grandmother, Countess Spencer, served her from 1937-1972). They probably had royal protocol drilled into them by the time they were very young. Nerves could possibly excuse this though.
    We know that Diana’s brother Charles DID make a similar error to this out of pure nerves at a post-wedding rehearsal party at the palace; he said he just bowed to everyone in sight and ended up accidentally bowing to a waiter (I read this in Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words).

  • I couldn’t find a pastel plaid ball gown exactly like that shown in the awkward curtsey scene, but Diana certainly wore several similar outfits.

Left: The Crown. Right: real life.

Left: The Crown. Right: real life (Credit: Reginal Davis / Shutterstock).

Left: The Crown. Right: real life.

Left: The Crown. Right: real life (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

  • The Crown recreates Charles and Diana’s engagement announcement outfits almost perfectly. They also recreate the most famous segment of their engagement interview, in which a reporter asks if they’re in love, Diana says “of course,” and Charles says “whatever love is.” We have a video of the whole fiasco here, at about 7:40 in the video.

    • Diana’s family is never even shown in The Crown at all, except for Sarah in episode 1, but the engagement announcement does introduce her as “The Lady Diana Spencer, daughter of the Earl Spencer and the Honorable Mrs. Shand Kydd.” This is the only discussion we’ll ever see of the fact that Diana’s parents are divorced and had a very acrimonious separation, which involved Diana’s mother leaving her children and losing custody of them entirely. This tense childhood likely fueled her anxiety and mental health issues throughout her marriage and also contributed to her refusal to even consider divorcing Charles for a very long time.

  • I can’t find a screenshot from the Crown’s scene showing Diana saying good bye to Charles at the airport in the rain, but she wears a red velvet jacket with another piecrust collar shirt that’s tremendously similar to outfits she wore in real life. I did find a screenshot from another scene showing Diana in a outfit, with a green coat however, and have included that above side by side with photos of the real life Diana. Their conversation at the airport echoes their conversation after the opera in Episode 2, when Charles shrugs off the length of his trip away and Diana points out that their separation will be very long to her. This further illustrates that she’s much more attached to him than he was to her.

    • The Crown makes it look like the engagement was very short and that Charles was away on his trip almost the entire time, coming back only shortly before the wedding. In real life, Diana actually went on a trip to Australia immediately after Charles proposed in early February (he said later that he wanted to give her time to think about it if she didn’t want to say yes or no immediately), their engagement was announced in late February, and the two went to several public events together before their wedding happened in July 1981.

    • Charles tells Diana as they part that he’s asked Camilla to get in touch with her; Diana is already aware that Camilla is his ex, but doesn’t seem to realize how close they are yet. Charles seems to be trying here, but doesn’t seem to understand why Diana might not want to meet her or spend time with her, because after all “she's great fun...she's the best company.”

Left: Diana in The Crown, starting her princess lessons which absolutely did not happen in real life. Right: Diana in real life.

Left: Diana in The Crown, starting her princess lessons which absolutely did not happen in real life. Right: Diana in real life.
Bottom Right: Credit Julian Parker / Getty

Upper left: Diana in The Crown, watching news coverage about children making her congratulatory cards. Other photos: Diana in real life.

Upper left: Diana in The Crown, watching news coverage about children making her congratulatory cards. Other photos: Diana in real life. Bottom Left: Credit Tim Graham / Getty

  • Honestly, the thing I despise most about this episode are these princess lesson scenes. These in no way happened. Diana spoke several times in real life about how she was thrown into the deep end of royal protocol and public appearances without any education or preparation. She also specifically noted that she was never given any training in public speaking. People have said that The Crown was deeply unfair to the royal family in this season, but honestly, I think they’re actually being a bit too nice in this sequence. The royals may not have realized how unfair this was to Diana at the time, as they were just a bit oblivious and likely thought her background as a noblewoman had already readied her for this sort of thing. Thankfully, the royals have really really worked to learn from their mistakes with Diana and gave considerable training AND additional security to both Kate Middleton (Prince William’s wife) and Meghan Markle (Prince Harry’s wife) before their weddings.
    But yeah. These sequences where Diana’s grandmother trained her in royal protocol, public speaking, and the way that the royal household is run, are pure invention. They more resemble the plot of The Princess Diaries than real life. They’re most useful in showing how much Diana had to learn when she married Charles and how hard it all was on her, but the very fact that she DIDN’T get any of these lessons in real life only underlines how tough those early days were on her. I’m not going to get into royal protocol or expectations here, as there are a ton of them, but this article from Harper’s Bazaar talks about a lot of them (I should also note that things have definitely loosened up since the Queen Mother’s death and a lot of these rules aren’t really enforced anymore).

    • This sequence also does seem to indicate Diana’s rough relationship with Lady Fermoy. As I’ve noted previously, in real life, Lady Fermoy actually mildly advised against Diana marrying Charles, as she didn’t think the royal life would suit her. We don’t know the full details of what happened between them, but apparently Diana was not on speaking terms with her grandmother when Lady Fermoy died in 1993.

    • The plaid outfit Diana’s wearing in some of these scenes is very similar to ones she wore in real life.

    • This episode features a lot of quick shots of Diana looking at portraits around the Palace in awe, probably imagining her new life. In this scene, she’s looking at Queen Victoria’s coronation portrait. Victoria became queen when she was only 18 and married when she was 20/21, about Diana’s age at the time of her marriage (although I should note that Victoria’s husband was about her same age and they seemed to overall have a very happy marriage).

  • We have a lot of Diana Montage scenes coming up next, which I’ll run through quickly:

    • A lot of these scenes and in between moments really emphasize how alone Diana feels in her apartments at the palace, a stark contrast to the happy jollity shown in the scenes at her flat in Earl’s Court.

    • The next morning, Diana wakes up to Vienna by Ultravox playing as her alarm clock, which is a song written about a holiday romance with a dark tone. It’s only a very brief snippet, but the lyrics we hear are: “The music is weaving. …The image has gone, only you and I. It means nothing to me.”

    • Diana (once again shown with a portrait of young Queen Victoria, this time, wearing her wedding dress) appears in a white pie crust collar shirt with black ribbon tie to receive and start reading through all her post. She’s shown writing a letter to at least one person. In real life, Diana apparently did write lots of letters.

    • The dance lesson sequence kind of makes it look like Diana isn’t enjoying herself and is forced into it, as she has sort of a forced smile on her face, but in fact, she specially requested that the dance teacher and piano player come to the palace for lessons, as ballet helped her deal with stress. I couldn’t find any real life photos of Diana in dance costume that seemed legitimate (there are a few photos floating around claiming to be Diana as a teenager in a leotard doing ballet, but I couldn’t find a reliable source and her hair was dark brown rather than light brown, so I elected not to share those here, as I somewhat suspect they’re actually of one of her sisters). However, she did do ballet in school and really loved it, sneaking out of her dorm at night to go dance as stress relief. She also taught ballet for a while until a ski accident put her out of commission for several months. I did find some photos of her working out in a leotard and with several dance groups though.

    • Diana watching television alone as the news reports about elementary school children sending her wedding cards. She’s wearing her notorious “black sheep sweater,” which real life Diana wore several times in public over the years.

    • Diana listens to Girls on Film by DuranDuran on a tape deck as she skates around the palace. Diana definitely roller bladed in her life, but I’m unsure whether she would have roller skated inside a palace. Apparently there is evidence that she rode her bicycle around the palace though, so - maybe! She skates past the throne room and ends up stopping and looking at yet another painting of Queen Victoria (I figured it out it was this one) as grand soundtrack chords overpower Duran Duran, indicating her thoughts.
      This Duran Duran song really speaks to the situation, as it was inspired by the dark side of glitz and glamor. The song’s music video was actually quite controversial as the time, as they made it with lots of nudity with the idea that it would just be played in nightclubs, but then it showed up on MTV (with the nudes removed) and pissed everyone off.

      • This continues the trend of often using vaguely foreboding songs when Diana is around.

      • The actual lyrics in the show are:
        And I sense a rhythm humming in a frenzy
        All the way down her spine

        Girls on film [repeat several times]

    • Another scene of Diana sitting alone in her apartments looking anxious, looking out the window.

    • Diana meeting and learning all the staff titles with her grandmother, wearing a light blue floral vest and matching skirt with a white shirt.

    • Diana watching more footage of her wedding and trying to contact Prince Charles’s private secretary, then the Queen, and unable to reach anyone. The congratulatory flowers in her apartment are starting to multiply and become really apparent in this scene.

    • Content Warning: Eating Disorders [italicized]

      Another spiral staircase scene, as Diana runs down the stairs in her pajamas and a pale yellow robe to the kitchen, where she stress eats several desserts and then throws them up later. This is the first sign we’ve seen of her bulimia in the show. Diana claimed that her bulimia was sparked by Charles putting his hands on her waist during their engagement and saying something along the lines of “oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?”

      Content Warning End.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Middle: Diana with Prince Harry as a child. Right: Diana roller roller blading.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Middle: Diana with Prince Harry as a child. Right: Diana roller roller blading.
Middle credit Time Graham / Getty.

Upper left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Upper right: Diana working out in real life. Bottom pictures: Diana meeting various dancers.

Upper left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Upper right: Diana working out in real life. Bottom pictures: Diana meeting various dancers. Bottom right credit Princess Diana Archive / Getty.

  • Diana, bored in her apartments, starts to watch a children’s cartoon, Bagpuss, barely looking up as multiple carts of post (mail) are brought into her apartment, along with more flowers. The bouquets continue to multiply in her apartment rather ominously.

  • Diana calls a friend and walks around her apartment, where flowers now appear all around, on every surface and in every frame. She tells her friend that she hasn’t heard from Charles in three weeks. “I get letters from people all over the world but nothing, not a squeak, from the man I'm supposed to marry.” In real life, Diana said that she received a bouquet of flowers from Charles, but the lack of a note on it indicated to her pretty clearly that it was sent by Charles’s staff, not him personally. She finds a note from Camilla Parker Bowles and hangs up on her friends abruptly, without a goodbye. We get magnificent screechy horror strings music in the background as well.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Other Photos: Diana in real life.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Other Photos: Diana in real life.

Top: The Crown; Bottom: Real Life.

Top: The Crown; Bottom: Real Life.

  • She goes to lunch with Camilla at a place literally called Ménage à trois, which is a bit on the nose, huh? (a Ménage à trois is an arrangement in which three people have a sexual relationship). My husband pointed out that the restaurant has a French name but that the waiter speaks to them in Italian, which is weird. This was ACTUALLY a real restaurant that opened in London which only served starters and puddings, just like the one in the show.

    • Diana is dressed in a skirt suit in a pale yellow color, which contrasts a very feminine, young color with a more grown up silhouette. Camilla is in a very grown up looking black suit. These clothes resemble outfits their real life counterparts wore, but their juxtaposition highlights their age difference. Diana is barely 20 at this point in the story, while Camilla is 33 (actually a year older than Charles).

    • Apparently to heighten the tension and awkwardness of this scene, the director brought in the actor who plays Charles and had him sit between the women as they rehearsed their scene. He told the women, “only one of you can put your hand on his,” and Emerald Fennell (who plays Camilla) immediately put her hand on Josh O’Connor’s and kept it there the whole time. This ended up really making the actors feel Charles’s presence, even though he’s not there in the final scene.

    • I have a small theory that this season, with Diana and Charles, blue and yellow are important colors (these are both represented in the Prince of Wales’ seal, which is on a ring that Charles gives to Diana later in this episode). Once they’re a couple, they both wear blue when they are in harmony and their marriage is going well; Diana’s dissatisfaction with her relationship is represented by her wearing yellow. This trend won’t really become apparent until later in the season, but I think it’s noticeable that she’s wearing yellow in this particular scene, when she begins to realize how little she knows Charles and how very very close he and Camilla are. She also was wearing a yellow robe in the scene where she begins to binge and purge.

    • I think I’ve mentioned this before, but both Camilla and her husband were at Balmoral on the first weekend Diana spent there, so she had already met them in real life.

    • Conversation highlights indicating how very odd and specific Charles is:

      • "He's so fussy and set in his ways. He'll love it if you adapt to him."

      • Camilla reveals that Charles doesn’t eat lunch, as it’s supposed to be good for his health to only have two meals a day. This is true, and also finally explains Anne’s thrown off comment that “he doesn’t eat lunch anymore” in S4E1. It’s also rumored that Charles really does eat a soft boiled egg with everything.

      • "You know how he surrounds himself with old men and daddy substitutes." As was revealed in Season 2 and S4E1, Charles does NOT have a good relationship with his father Philip, and latched on to Lord Mountbatten as an elder “daddy substitute” figure. This is pretty accurate to real life as well.

      • Charles and Camilla really did call each other Gladys and Fred, names drawn from The Goon Show. Camilla didn’t tell this to Diana though; Diana figured it out from Charles’ friends and various notes he left behind.

      • When they banter about who should take the check and Camilla finally agrees to go Dutch, she says “I’m all for sharing, “ which again, is a bit on the nose, y’all.

      • Immediately after the lunch with Camilla, Diana retches in her apartments at the palace.

  • The incident where Diana found drawings of a bracelet with “Fred and Gladys” and “GF” on them on Charles’s secretary’s desk is pretty close to what happened in real life (Note: Diana is wearing yellow again in this scene!). In real life, Diana found the actual bracelet, with the initials “GF” on it. Just as the secretary in the show won’t answer who the bracelet is for, one of Charles’s servants wouldn’t answer Diana’s questions about it in real life.

    • Right after this scene, we get another spiral scene, of Diana running up the stairs to her apartment, where she is completely SURROUNDED BY FLOWERS, and after being told the Queen is unavailable, has a bit of a breakdown, pushing things off a table and putting her face in her hands in frustration.

    • In real life, Diana also determined before the wedding that she really should call it off. She told her sisters this, but they joked that her face was already on the tea towels, so she was stuck.

  • In the next scene, Diana dances first sedately and then more energetically and improvisationally to Elton John’s “Song for Guy,” which is a mainly instrumental song released in 1978. Elton John said later that he wrote this song while thinking about death; he was told the next day that Guy Burchett, his 17-year-old messenger boy, had been tragically killed on his motorcycle the day before. It’s one of the only few songs written by Elton John alone and only includes a few words at the end, which are simply “Life isn’t everything” repeated over and over again. Again, lots of foreboding music used when Diana is around. By the end of the scene, the music is drowned out by more somber instrumental music and Diana collapses on the floor.

    • Diana said in “Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words” that she often danced in the large hall at her family’s home in Althorpe, surrounded by large paintings. This scene seems to echo that.

    • Actress Emma Corrin asked if she could make up her own dance in this scene to Cher’s “Believe” (rather than choreographing anything in particular) and the director agreed to allow her to do it. Of course, that song isn’t period appropriate, so they changed it out in post-production, but the song definitely seems to help the actress’s sense of fun and energy come out. Corrin has also said that she’s a terrible dancer, so she was pretty nervous when she found out how large a role dancing played in Diana’s life.

    • Diana was close friends with Elton John in real life. He re-wrote and recorded “Candle in the Wind” in her honor after her death in 1997, which became a hit and raised lots of money for her charities.

  • Charles gets back into the country and we see him going to see Camilla first thing. We only see the aftermath of their meeting the next morning, as she's smoking a cigarette.

  • “I vow to thee my coutnry,” a patriotic hymn set to “Thaxted” by Gustav Holst (also known as the hymn melody from Holst’s “The Planets”), which plays in the background as Charles arrives at his wedding rehearsal, was actually sung at their wedding. Diana requested the song especially, saying that it had always been a favorite of hers. It was also sung at her funeral.

Top: Various views of Princess Margaret in The Crown in episode 3. Bottom: Various views of Princess Margaret in real life wearing similar silhouettes and colors.

Top: Various views of Princess Margaret in The Crown in episode 3.
Bottom: Various views of Princess Margaret in real life wearing similar silhouettes and colors. Credit L to R: Central Press / Getty, PA / Getty, Tim Graham / Getty

Top: Anne, Margaret, and the Queen Mother in The Crown. Bottom: The royal family at Charles and Diana’s wedding, with Anne, Margaret, and the Queen Mother all visible in a row at the left.

Top: Anne, Margaret, and the Queen Mother in The Crown.
Bottom: The royal family at Charles and Diana’s wedding, with Anne, Margaret, and the Queen Mother all visible in a row at the left (Credit: Bettmann / Getty).

  • As Charles arrives at their wedding rehearsal at St. Paul’s Cathedral (with lots of crowds cheering outside), Diana sits in the corner quietly freaking out. When he arrives, she stands and quietly but angrily confronts him - asking why he went straight to Gloucestershire and saying that she found the bracelet and knows about “Gladys.” Princess Margaret looks at them with a worried face.

    • They’re wearing basically exactly what they wore in real life.

    • Charles claims that the bracelet was made as a farewell gift, a souvenir, and also states that he went to Gloucestershire to tell Camilla face to face that it’s over, and also to pick up a signet ring for Diana.

    • All the scenes with Charles and Diana in St. Paul’s are shot with the cathedral just towering all around them, illustrating how small they really are in the grand scheme of things in the royal family.

    • In the rehearsal itself, the traditional wedding service is read out, pointing out that marriage should not be entered into unadvisedly. or lightly. Princess Margaret in the background grows increasingly concerned looking, clearly thinking about her own marriage and divorce.

  • That night, Prince Philip arrive at the palace and asks how the rehearsal went. The Queen notes that she and the Queen Mother that that it was lovely, but Margaret disagrees. Margaret than logically points out that Charles is in love with somebody else and asks, “How many times can this family make the same mistake. Forbidding marriages that should be allowed. forcing others that shouldn't. Paying the consequences each time.” Philip responds: “He's marrying Diana." Margaret: “But he's still in love with the other one.”

    • Margaret’s words, of course, refer to several situations: Edward VIII abdicating the throne so that he can marry divorcee Wallis Simpson, Margaret herself being forced to choose between her lover Peter Townsend and her royal status, Charles being unable to marry Camilla, and the current situation of Charles being forced to marry Diana, who he barely knows.

    • The argument continues: Philip argues, "The older Diana gets, the more confident Diana becomes, the more beautiful Diana becomes, and she will - the more Charles will fall in love with her - and this will all be fine." Margaret, “in the meantime he juggles them both?" Queen Mother: "That's how it works. That's how it’s always worked." Margaret, the only one talking reason: "That's madness - we have to stop them now - not just for the sake of the monarchy but for them as human beings.”

    • We have no evidence that any of these conversations happened before the wedding. It does seem that both Diana and Charles wanted to call off the wedding beforehand, but it’s unclear whether they brought these concerns to anyone in the royal family itself.

  • As celebratory fireworks go off ominously in the background, sounding honestly more like gun shots, the Queen goes to talk to Charles, who is gazing out a window alone and looking extremely miserable. His face looks terribly gaunt and his eyes are all sunken.

    • To encourage Charles, the Queen tells him the story of Mary, who was meant to marry her prince charming, but alas, after he died, ended up having to marry his younger brother, “prince charmless,” noting that there was no attraction between the two of them and certainly no love. But the two focused on their duty to their country, and “worked and worked and worked, and out of that work a tiny seed grew, a seed of respect and admiration, a seed that grew into a flower they could eventually call love.” She ends the story by noting that they were married for 42 years, stabilized a country “that was at war with itself”, while all around them great monarchies fell (here, she likely is referring to World War I, which featured many British royals and descendants of British royals on both sides of the war).

      • Reminder: we saw Mary in the first season of The Crown, as she was the mother of Elizabeth’s father.

      • I don’t know how accurate this story is, honestly. Vanity Fair did a recent roundup of awkward royal engagements that portrayed the relationship between Mary and her two princes very differently, indicating that her original fiance Eddy was actually much more awkward and odd and that Mary preferred his younger brother George from the start. By all accounts though, they did have a long happy marriage, her husband never took a mistress (although his father had had MANY), and they constantly wrote to each other while apart.

    • “I cannot claim to be the most intuitive mother, but i do know when one of my children is unhappy. Whatever wretchedness you feel now, whatever doubts you feel now, if you could follow the example of your great grandmother, love and happiness will surely follow." - The Queen to Charles.

      • I feel like this sort of advice was predicated on the idea that both Charles and Diana would be mature, responsible, and respectful to themselves, their duties, and each other, and honestly, neither of them really did a very good job with that.

  • On the morning of the wedding, Diana is no longer surrounded by flowers at least. She looks at her engagement and signet rings carefully and fingers them thoughtfully, like Charles did with his toy soldier at the beginning of the episode. A radio broadcast plays in the background discussing the weather for the day.

    • Note: The Emmanuels, who designed Diana’s wedding dress, actually made a little umbrella to go with it, but the dress’s material would have done Very Badly in the rain and had a gigantic skirt and train that wouldn’t have fit under the umbrella, so honestly, they’re really lucky it didn’t rain. We also see sevearl shots of the huge crowds outside the palace and along the wedding parade route.

  • As the episode draws to a close, we see all the royal women we saw at the beginning of the episode waiting for a phone call with engagement news now getting ready for the wedding. Anne and Margaret look miserable, although the Queen Margaret and the Queen look fairly happy. They’re all dressed in outfits extremely similar to what they wore in real life.

    • I wonder at the focus on the royal women. The montage does move on to show Philip, Charles, and Diana all getting ready for the wedding, but the fact that the episode starts and ends with a focus on four royal women is…very interesting. Is it meant to show something about all the relationship sacrifices they made for the monarchy? From all reports the Queen Mother’s marriage was happy, and although Elizabeth and Philip had some issues, they’ve been pretty good, but Anne and Margaret’s marriages both ended in divorce (Anne has remarried since and seems much happier), so they two in particular seem to really realize the situation that Charles and Diana are getting into.

    • Philip looks at his wife after they’re both ready for the wedding, smiles, and then walks away away. They have a friendship and a sweetness to them that I appreciate, but I miss the passion they showed in earlier seasons. The show doesn’t even bother to portray them as romantic beings for the vast majority of this season, which I dislike. There’s like one moment in the fourth episode where the Queen leaves her door open and Philip asks if it was a signal for him to come in, and the Queen instantly shoots him down and says she just wants to talk, which…./sigh/

Upper left, the design of Diana’s dress by the Emmanuels. Lower left, the dress in The Crown. Right: Charles and Diana on their actual wedding day.

Upper left, the design of Diana’s dress by the Emmanuels (Credit: Central Press / Getty). Lower left, the dress in The Crown. Right: Charles and Diana on their actual wedding day (Credit: Mirrorpix / Getty).

Left: Charles in The Crown. Right: Charles in real life.

Left: Charles in The Crown. Right: Charles in real life (Credit: Express Newspapers / Getty).

  • The episode ends with the words of the archbishop on their wedding day, over shots of Diana and Charles getting ready. The words of the service would be so very on point if the couple was actually right for each other and loved each other and were willing to wok together, but as it is, it just underlines the sadness of the actual story.

    • “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made. A prince and princess on their wedding day. But fairytales usually end at this point with the simple phrase, ‘They lived happily ever after.' As husband and wife live out their vows, loving and cherishing one another, sharing life’s splendors and miseries, achievements and setbacks, they will be transformed in the process. Our faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival, but the place where the adventure really begins.”

    • The IMDB page for this episode doesn’t list any credits for the archbishop, so I believe this last bit was actually taken from the actual audio of their wedding.

    • The creators of the show have said a few times that they didn’t feel the need to show the wedding itself, as it was an extremely documented event at the time. You can actually watch the whole ceremony online and look through their wedding program as well.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E2 The Balmoral Test

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e2 royal family stag hunting.jpg

Screenshot from The Crown, Netflix

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! I’ll be /trying/ to write these posts up one episode at a time (although I may watch ahead a bit of my writing), so there won’t be spoilers for any main plot points of any episode except that which I’m covering in the post, although I may point out a little foreshadowing to later strife and such. So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 2 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

This may be my favorite episode of The Crown literally ever, I laughed so hard at all the Thatcher/Royal Family shenanigans and loved the more extended introduction to Diana.

  • I kind of love episodes that start off with tiny characters we’ve never seen before and will never seen again. Here, it’s a short hunting scene with one of their Balmoral neighbors and his client. I love the way the neighbor says “That’s the line where our estate ends and the other begins. And we never cross that line.”)

    • Queen talks about how she has so many commitments for the day, but Philip just responds, "I've cancelled them.” The entire scene at the breakfast table where Philip and Anne argue over who ‘s going to get the stag is super funny. This family is so hilariously hunting crazy. Philip and Anne specifically joke about how the great stag head currently in their dining room NEEDS to have a rival to it. glowering at it across the room. Sure enough, at the end of the episode, the stag head is placed exactly where they said it should go.

    • Royal family members who notably do NOT hunt the stag in this episode: Princess Margaret, who goes out to meet the family for lunch but doesn’t go out with them earlier (In real life, Margaret apparently was NOT a fan of outdoor sports. However - note that later in the episode, she calls Thatcher’s suggestion that the stag was seen on the west shore of the loch “ridiculous,” as the land is low ground and too open, showing that she may not hunt herself, but she absolutely knows what it’s all about), and Prince Charles. Charles actually was and is still quite an enthusiastic hunter, but he is known these days as being quite interested in environmental issues and has spoken out several times about the need to reduce meat consumption. It’s an interesting contradiction. In the episode, I think it’s just to help Diana stand out and further set Charles apart from his family, in a way that hearkens back to the way he felt like an outsider in Season 3’s Imbroglio, at the funeral of his uncle.

    • Costume notes: Anne is in a navy shirt with a tan plaid vest and skirt that are similar, but not exactly like things she’s worn in real life. The Queen sports a plaid skirt and a matching shirt and sweater set, which conforms very much to her usual, plaid-eriffic, slightly more casual look at Balmoral. The entire family actually tends to wear a lot of plaid when they’re at balmoral. The queen mother is in a light shirt and sweater set, which matches with her generally pastel colored dress wardrobe at this time.

Erin Doherty as Princess Anne in the Crown; Princess Anne in real life.

Erin Doherty as Princess Anne in the Crown; Princess Anne in real life (Credit: Mark Cuthbert / Getty).

The Queen

The Queen (Credit: Ben Curtis / PA)

The Queen, Queen Mother, and Margaret Thatcher

The Queen, Queen Mother, and Margaret Thatcher

  • I maintain again that it looks like they put Olivia Colman in a bit of padding to play this queen this season, which is an odd choice, because the queen did not look like that in 1980. I checked, Colman wasn’t pregnant during the shooting for The Crown, and she doesn’t look like this in real life (see, pictures from her instagram), and the queen herself stayed pretty damn trim throughout the 1980s. I’m not going to post pics of the queen in the 1980s next to the Queen in the Crown in the 1980s next to each other because that just feels like i’m buying into the fact that we should give a shit about anyone’s waist size, but it’s just…such a weird choice?

  • According to Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words, Diana’s grandmother Lady Fermoy really did chaperone an opera date with Prince Charles to a Verdi opera - Requiem in real life, although here, the music played is from La Traviata. In real life, they also had supper at the palace afterward with Lady Fermoy. Interestingly enough, she’s shown later in the episode pressuring Diana into being a suitable mate for Charles and emphasizing how important the weekend in Balmoral is, but in real life, her grandmother warned Diana that the royal family had an unusual sense of humor and they might not get along very well. Diana ignored her at the time.

    • They only play a short snippet of the opera they play, but according to the internet, the specific song snippet is from E strano! E strano! The translation of the lyrics is uh, extremely on point for the themes in this episode, as by the end, Charles decides to marry a woman he doesn’t love and give up the woman he does (although of course, that woman is already married to someone else, so like, maybe should have made that decision years before, yeah, Charlie boy?).

      • How strange it is … how strange!
        Those words are carved upon my heart!
        Would a true love bring me misfortune?
        What do you think, o my troubled spirit?
        No man before kindled a flame like this.
        Oh, joy …I never knew …
        To love and to be loved!
        Can I disdain this for a life of sterile pleasure?

    • I do love that they put Diana in a green/blue dress on a date at an opera by Verdi. I couldn’t find any exact matches to this dress, but she did wear a lot of green and turquoise dresses in the 80s. Apparently while she was dating Charles, she actually borrowed a lot of clothes from her friends, as she had a pretty small wardrobe herself and needed more to wear.

    • Her conversation with Charles indicates their differences in viewpoint and age so intently: Diana says she loves Verdi because he’s so romantic. Charles said “to focus simply on romance diminishes Verdi’s legacy and musical influence. His music played such a key role in the Italian unification, too.” They see things very differently, and he lectures her like her teacher, not like her boyfriend.

    • Charles tells her he’ll be out of the country and in scotland for a while and won’t see her until the autumn, quite matter of factly; she says the time will drag by, indicating how much more interested she is in him than he is in her.

    • Emma Corrin just embodies Diana so well. I think it's the way she holds her head and neck and shoulders?

    • Was that curtsey to him like a sexy curtsey? It was sexy! But he didn’t kiss her and only shook her hand and CLEARLY DOES NOT DESERVE HER SEXY CURTSEY. Poor Diana.

    • ”Was that very frigid?”
      “Yes. but perfectly gentlemanly.”
      “Princely.”
      “Sorry. princely.”
      This exchange indicates their gap in status. Diana actually did not refer to Charles by first name until after they were married; she called him “Sir” up until then.

    • Apparently Charles wasn’t QUITE as standoffish and prudish with Diana in real life as he is shown to be in The Crown. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, Diana stated that when they met for the first time since he’d broken up with her sister at a friend’s house party, he began kissing her after she sympathized with him over Lord Mountbatten’s death.

The top photo was actually from the final cabinet picture in this episode, not the first. In the first posed pic, she’s wearing a feminine floral, but by the end, she’s moved into her power color of blue. The bottom photo is the real Margaret Thatch…

The top photo was actually from the final cabinet picture in this episode of The Crown, not the first. In the first posed pic, she’s wearing a feminine floral, but by the end, she’s moved into her power color of blue.
The bottom photo is the real Margaret Thatcher with her cabinet. Notice how the portrait behind them in the TV series is a woman, not a man, and is less ornate than the real life picture.

The real life Margaret Thatcher and the Queen at Balmoral, vs. Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.

The real life Margaret Thatcher and the Queen at Balmoral, vs. Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.

  • I will admit that I know almost nothing about Margaret Thatcher and her policies, so I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of any of her scenes with her cabinet. I’ll do some research and come back to this. : )

    • The first cabinet photo scene is so striking - Margaret Thatcher stands out in her floral dress so intensely from all the men in suits around her, in like an authoritative but also feminine way.
      As shown in the cabinet photos at the beginning and end of this episode, Margaret Thatcher really was the only woman in her cabinet for most of her time as prime minister though; she only appointed one female minister, Janet Young, who served as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (which is a weird role, as it doesn’t actually have much to do with the running of the duchy and more allows the PM to appoint an additional minister to the cabinet), Leader of the House of Lords, and the Lord Privy Seal from 1981-1983.

    • Thatcher bemoans how unimaginative and fearful some of her cabinet ministers are as she flies with her husband to Balmoral, referring to their “faint hearts.”

  • "Balmoral tests" refers to the royal family’s habit of subjecting their guests to secret tests. This apparently IS a thing that happens. I don’t know if the royal family INTENDS to put their guests through the wringer, but they do seem to have very specific traditions that they expect people to adhere to without necessarily bothering to tell them about it.

  • The Thatchers are bemused by having separate rooms at Balmoral and confused about how to tip the maids as well.

    • Margaret Thatcher’s strange contradictions of being the most powerful person in the country but also wanting to be super feminine and keep to traditional gender roles continues in this episode. When a maid starts to unpack her husband’s suitcase, she stops her, saying, "I like to do that myself, especially for my husband."

      • Maid: “I can't help but notice, ma'am, but you didn't bring any outdoor shoes."
        Margaret: “No.”
        Denis: "What a strange thing to say."

        • HAH. This apparently was a thing that actually consistently happened every time Margaret Thatcher visited Balmoral - she never once had the correct shoes for outdoor events.

        • Fun fact, immediately after this scene, we transition to a close up shot on Queen’s shoes in the next scene, which are very outdoor and appropriate and brown.

      • Margaret Thatcher: "Are we allowed to sleep in one bed?"
        Denis Thatcher: "I will check the protocol sheet."
        I don’t know about the Thatchers, but the Queen and Prince Philip definitely have separate bedrooms. This is pretty common in the British upper class actually, even now.

  • THE ROYAL FAMILY IS ALL SO brown so rustic and dirty and talking about stags in heat and omg. AND THEN MARGARET THATCHER AND THER HUSBAND WALK IN IN TUXEDO AND LONG EVENING DRESS. Thatcher’s dress in the series is pretty similar to some of her real life outfits.

    • They really are so rude to her, it’s hilarious but honestly, i feel terrible for her. If there was a protocol sheet laid out in the room, it SHOULD have included details about the schedule and dress code for every event, not just leaving them to assume that because dinner was black tie, the drinks before dinner must be black tie.

    • Philip: “But it’s TEA TIME.” Is it? It’s 6 pm. What? Everything I’ve read online says that tea time generally is 3:30-5 pm, but I’m not the British royal family so uhh, what do I know?

    • Corgi appearance: on the queen’s lap and also trying to get food off the plates.

    • Philip-ism: “Christ, do you think they’ll come to lunch tomorrow in their pajamas?”

Top: the cast of the Crown. Bottom: The queen stalking about at Balmoral.

Top: the cast of the Crown. Bottom: The queen stalking about at Balmoral (Credit: Central Press / Getty).

Top, Gillian Anderson and Stephen Boxer playing Margaret and Denis Thatcher in The Crown. Bottom, the real life Margaret Thatcher.

Top, Gillian Anderson and Stephen Boxer playing Margaret and Denis Thatcher in The Crown.
Bottom Left, the real life Margaret Thatcher (Credit: Peter Brooker / Shutterstock).
Bottom Right: Margaret Thatcher and Japan’s Crown Prince Akihito (Credit: The Asahi Shimbun / Getty).

A screenshot from the hilarious Ibble Dibble scene.

A screenshot from the hilarious Ibble Dibble scene from The Crown.

  • Princess Anne and then her husband doing stag bellows at the dinner table while everyone's wearing super formal evening wear, I’m dying.

    • Queen Mother talking about conservation of stags while Mr. Thatcher tries to tout it as a business proposition. The Royal Family really does have a strange relationship with animals, where hunting is a regular activity and tradition, but several members of the family tout conservation and environmentalism. In real life, the queen mother and Denis Thatcher apparently got on quite well and apparently had similar tastes in drinks.

    • Ibble Dibble looks like just the most fun game ever. The Independent has the rules online now if you want to play! They clearly are trying to pull Margaret Thatcher into their circle, and she just refuses to let down her guard and risk getting a cork mark on her face, as she says the silly rhyme in the slowest manner possible, somewhat ruining the whole vibe.

      • The queen once again demonstrates how much more empathetic she is and how much more understanding of the weirdness of being around the royal family than Philip is, who has no patience for that.
        Philip: “What was she doing”
        Queen: “Yes, she was rather hopeless. but i’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. It was probably just nerves.”
        P “Of what?”
        Q “Of the situation in which she finds herself. “
        P “We were playing parlor games, having fun.”
        Q “Perhaps her idea of fun is something else entirely.”
        P “or she’s incapable of it and wouldn’t know fun of it bit her on the backside.”

    • Husband John and I have decided that we will now say “tippity toppity down with the nazis" every time we drink, just like the Queen Mother right before she drank her whiskey during the drinking game.

  • Margaret Thatcher refers to the parlor games as a waste of a whole evening, and pulls out documents to work on in bed. Her husband complains and suggests he sleep in the other room assigned to them. Margaret says, “Don’t you dare! We don’t want to catch any upper-class habits. Those that sleep apart grow apart.” She points out a book on the bedside table for him to read. He notes that it’s “Hunting Memoirs of Balmoral Castle” and starts reading a letter from Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband) from September 5, 1848 in a German accent, which is hilarious.

  • OH MY GOD MARGARET THATCHER'S DELAYED ENTRANCE OUT STALKING - so you finally see what she's wearing and it's like a full bright blue business suit with heels.

    • The Queen strikes up a conversation with the prime minister but noting that her father taught her how to stalk. Margaret reminisced about how she connected with her father by working with him and listening to him practice his alderman speeches. You can tell the queen is really trying to connect with her (“how lovely for you both”) and just like….not…getting there.

    • Queen: “When stalking, the trick really, is to disappear into nature, to preserve the element of surprise. So next time, you might not wear bright blue. It means the stag can see you. Or wear scent. It means he can smell you.” /Thatcher almost falls/ “And now he can hear you too.” Thatcher then offers to go back and change. I just adore the Queen’s passive aggressive away of getting her point across, lol.

    • Margaret Thatcher really did use the term “wet” and associated upper class folks with being "wet, weak, and chinless.” She thought they weren’t brave enough to really do what needed to be done to fix the country.

  • In her usual straightforward way, Princess Margaret calls out thatcher, for 1., calling Elizabeth her sister instead of the queen, 2., sitting in Queen Victoria’s chair, which no one sits in, and 3. working on a bank holiday.

    • The “don’t sit in queen Victoria’s chair” thing is real, according to “Diana: Her true story in her own words.”

    • Battle of the Margarets:
      Prime Minister Margaret: ”It is hard to have a holiday when the country is in its current state.”
      Princess Margaret: "The country has been a state before, it will doubtless be in a state again. One learns, when one has the benefit of experience, that sometimes time off is the most sensible course of action.”
      Prime Minister Margaret: “Time off gives me no pleasure.”
      Princess Margaret: “It might give you something more important than that. Perspective."

  • Charles arrives at Balmoral and promptly calls Camilla to whine about her having a husband and children of her own and not being able to drop everything and come with him to Balmoral. Camilla tells Charles that he needs a young women who's free to follow him around and is willing to give up her life for him, straight up encouraging him to continue seeing Diana.

    • In real life, both Camilla and her husband Andrew were at Balmoral when Diana visited for the first time and met the family.

    • The hopelessness of their relationship is illustrated when Camilla suggests Diana as a possible wife for Charles. Charles: “Don’t say that. i’d much rather hear how jealous you are.”
      Camilla: “I would be, but it’s hopeless, isn’t it?”

The royal family at a Scottish festival in The Crown.

The royal family at a Scottish festival in The Crown.

Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, having anti-royalist, anti-haggis, and anti-Ibble Dibble thoughts.

Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, having anti-royalist, anti-haggis, and anti-Ibble Dibble thoughts.

  • The royals attend a super fun looking Scottish festival that Margaret Thatcher does not even slightly appreciate, as she’s in a terrible mood after seeing several of her cabinet members criticize her publicly on the news. While there, watching a haggis throwing contest, she wonders why she’s in “a half-Germanic half-Scottish cuckoo-land,” as her husband calls it, and calls the royals boring, snobbish and rude, comparing them to her upper-class critics in her cabinet. She then says the country needs a change from top to bottom and makes an excuse to leave Balmoral early.

    • In real life, although Margaret Thatcher didn’t like the upper class very much, she seemed to get along rather well with the Queen and never even once suggested the abolition of the monarchy, despite the ominous undertones of this scene.

    • I really enjoy the royals’ conversation reaction to this.
      Princess Margaret: "Life in post war-Britain is one uninterrupted crisis. and yet none of the other prime ministers left early." …..
      Queen: "Perhaps we weren't very friendly."
      Princess Margaret: "What are you talking about? I was incredibly friendly. I positively gushed." (Margaret has the best passive aggressive lines.)

  • The juxtaposition of the Thatcher’s failure of a Balmoral visit vs. Diana’s success there is emphasized by the fact that Diana literally drives up as Thatcher leaves. I enjoy that the queen doesn’t even know who she is at first.

    • The maid, still fresh from dealing with Margaret Thatcher, asks Diana if she brought outdoor shoes. Diana responds that she ONLY brought outdoor shoes.

    • Queen, about Charles and Diana: "i can't keep up, is this one a friend friend or a girl friend"

    • In real life, on her weekend trip at Balmoral, Diana stayed at a grace and favour cottage on the estate with her sister Jane, who was married to Robert Fellowes, an assistant private secretary to the queen. It seems that she IS staying in a separate cottage on the estate, but her sister and husband aren’t mentioned and it’s not really commented upon; i missed that she wasn’t staying in the castle proper on the first watch actually. As I mentioned earlier, Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles were also at Balmoral that weekend in real life.

Top left: Emma Corrin in the Crown, bottom left: Princess Diana and Prince Charles in real life. Top Right: The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with tiny Prince Charles and Princess Anne at Balmoral. Bottom Right: The whole royal fam in plaid.

Top left: Emma Corrin in the Crown, bottom left: Princess Diana and Prince Charles in real life (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty). Top Right: The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with tiny Prince Charles and Princess Anne at Balmoral (Credit: PA / Getty). Bottom Right: The whole royal fam in plaid (Credit: Lichfield / Getty).

Top: Emma Corrin and Tobias Menzies in The Crown. Bottom: Princess Diana and Prince Charles at Balmoral.

Top: Emma Corrin and Tobias Menzies in The Crown. Bottom Right: Princess Diana and Prince Charles at Balmoral (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

  • She debuts well at the dinner in a lovely plaid dress that looks very much like a few outfits she wore in real life. She also blends in very well with the family, who wears a LOT of plaid when they’re at Balmoral. She also looks like part of the family when she goes off hunting the next morning with Prince Philip, as she’s dressed almost exactly like him.

    • Diana to Philip: "The muckier the better, I'm a country girl at heart." Philip smiles very broadly at this, seemingly delighted.

    • In real life, Diana really didn’t like hunting, but she had been around it and knew how to talk about it and deal with it. She knew how to impress people. And she did grow up in the country, so she’s comfortable with that sort of thing.

  • The whole stag story line feels incredibly familiar, and reminds me very much of another famous stag scene, namely, a significant scene in the 2006 film The Queen. That film, about the aftermath of Diana’s death, shows the queen connecting with a prize stag her husband is hunting and shoos it away. Later, the stag dies, and the queen is terribly affected by it, even shedding a hidden tear over it. People have argued about these scenes a lot, as the Queen has hunted her entire life and would likely not have felt that much emotion over a stag, but it’s very symbolic and meant to show someone beautiful and lovely being captured and destroyed, just like Diana. It has to be a purposeful tribute to that film, as Peter Morgan, the creator and writer of The Crown, ALSO wrote The Queen (and the Audience, a brilliant play about the queen’s meetings with her prime ministers. He’s made a LOT of money off writing about the royal family).

    • Throughout the episode, there’ve been little moments where we see the stag in various bits of scenery. After they catch him and bring it to the castle, there’s a moment where all those pieces of scenery are revisited, only now they’re empty, no stag to be seen.

  • Diana leaves Balmoral wearing a distinctive striped sweater that’s almost identical to one Diana wore in real life. The photos we have of Diana in that sweater actually look SO much like Emma Corrin, who plays her in The Crown, that I had to look at them several times to check.

    • She’s now spent the weekend with his family but Charles still doesn’t touch her as they say goodbye, not even for a hug or a kiss on the cheek. He says, very romantically, “You’ve been a great sport.”

  • Charles talking to Camilla. They continue to talk in a very negative way about a lot of people, as was shown in Season 3, imitating the way that Wallis Simpson and Edward spoke about the royal family. Charles notes that Diana got "rave reviews from the whole ghastly politburo." “In the history of Balmoral, no one has ever passed the test with such flying colors.” Camilla looks beautifully sad as Charles tells her that his family wants him to marry Diana.

    • Charles complains to Camilla that Diana’s a child. She was 20 when she married Charles, who was nearly 13 years older than her. There have been reports that Charles actually did refer to Diana as a child in real life, noting that she was “exquisitely pretty, a perfect poppy,” but that “she does not look old enough to be out of school, much less married.”

    • This entire conversation also foreshadows how often Charles and Camilla are really talking and in how much detail about his life with Diana. The show leaves it a little bit ambiguous as to whether Charles is actually having a physical relationship with Camilla at this point in his life, but there’s definitely a huge emotional attachment.

  • Philip tells Charles that the family wants him to marry Diana. This scene takes place in the hanging room with the stag all strung up, dead and trapped. The symbolism is a bit on the nose here, yes? But fortunately, Charles points it out in the dialogue, saying that her father was “oblivious to the grotesque symbolism. It might as well have been me strung up and skinned.”

Emma Corrin on the left, real life Diana on the right. (She looks INCREDIBLY like Emma Corrin here, doesn’t she? It’s bizarre).

Emma Corrin on the left, real life Diana on the right (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty). (She looks INCREDIBLY like Emma Corrin here, doesn’t she? It’s bizarre).

Real Life Diana on the left, Emma Corrin in the Crown on the right.

Real Life Diana on the left (Credit: Jacob Sutton / Getty), Emma Corrin in the Crown on the right.

  • Margaret Thatcher puts on a formidable purple suit, pulls out a symbolically shaped sword letter opener, makes a list of the ministers who are making problems for her, and then fires them one after another in a marvelous sequence. I disagree with Thatcherism on probably every single point, but it’s hard not to love some of her scenes in this season; she’s just so determined.

    • The queen passive aggressively notes at the beginning of her meeting with Thatcher: “I’m always mystified by those who don’t feel at home at Balmoral. Some just don’t. They come and are bewildered by it, by the weather and traditions. They see only cruelty in the blood sports, instead of kindness or necessity. But there have been blood sports here too, I see, you have a brand new cabinet.”

    • Thatcher specifically says that she fired her ministers because they were from a background that made them privileged, entitled, and lacking grit. The queen mildly questions this choice, noting that Thatcher is playing "A dangerous game, making enemies left right and center.” Thatcher says, "Not if someone is unafraid of having enemies." “Are you?” “Oh yes” - and then Thatcher recites a long quotation, suggesting that perhaps she was prepared for this criticism.

      • The poem she recites to the queen is by Scottish author Charles McKay: ““You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight.”"

    • In 1981, Thatcher really did fire three government ministers who were critical of her economic policies and transferred a fourth to Northern Ireland. The dismissed ministers were the deputy foreign minister, the education minister, and majority leader of the House of Lords. Employment Secretary James Prior was transferred to the position of secretary of state for Northern Ireland against his wishes.

    • She looks so incredibly triumphant

  • Anne tells Charles to get on with it and marry Diana even though they barely know each other, calling him Eeyore in the process (which is basically a perfect description of his constant hangdog looks this season, although I can’t find any indication that he actually was called that in real life). She spouts out a couple wonderful Anne-isms, saying “After a selection process that involved half of Britain, you’ve somehow stumbled on the perfect one in age, looks, and breeding. Or have you managed to find fault even in perfection?” “Don't fight it. She's perfect. She even got the stag, damn her." and “Those legs. Cow.” These admiringly positive but petty statements would transform in a few episodes to outright jealousy.

    • Anne is two years younger than Charles and at the time of this episode, has already been married almost 7 years (marrying at age 23) and had two children. Their parents married when Elizabeth was 21 and Philip was 26. So yeah, they all seem to be pretty desperate for the 31 year old Charles to get on with it already.

    • Charles expresses the concern that he and Diana barely know each other. This is a inner voice he really should have listened to. Diana said in her life that they had only met in person 13 times before he asked her to marry him.

    • Anne KNOWS that Charles still speaks to Camilla all the time. She says, "Time to close this chapter. Time to put the whole Parker Bowles saga behind us all for good." HAHAHAHAHA.

  • The show ends with trading visuals of the stag head being brought to Balmoral and mounted, Thatcher posing happily with her new cabinet for a photo, and Diana walking down the street with her head down, surrounded by photographers, which is both a happy and foreboding scene. In real life, before they even got engaged, Diana sometimes had as many as 30 journalists following her around. A news media organization rented the flat opposite hers so they could look in at her bedroom. I’ll get into this more in the next episode, but it’s clear that this season is going to focus a lot on the media sensation around Diana, which was wholly unexpected and unprecedented.

    • Music note: These scenes take place with the Overture from La Traviata playing in the background, bringing back the opera’s sad themes. La Traviata tells the story of a courtesan dying of tuberculosis who leaves her lifestyle to be with the man she loves, but ultimately leaves him behind at his father’s request in order to avoid ruining his and his family’s reputation. There’s lots of strife, but her lover ultimately comes back to her and forgives her right before she dies. (and uh, yeah, it’s very similar to the plot line of Moulin Rouge). The story doesn’t align with Charles and Diana’s, but the elements of love, duty, and family pressure all strike a chord here.