In episode seven of The Crown season four, Princess Margaret starts screaming at her mother on a beach in Scotland. She’s sick of it all: the family’s secrets, her dropping place in the line of succession, and transitively, her growing irrelevance as a public royal figure. “If you’re not first in line, if you’re an individual character with individual needs,” she says, “you’ll be spat out or hidden away.”
It’s an imagined conversation between two characters in a show that’s historical fiction. But when Helena Bonham Carter utters the lines, it’s hard not to think that perhaps Crown creator Peter Morgan wrote it with a real-life figure in mind: Prince Harry.
Nine months earlier, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle left the monarchy in an abrupt move that took the world, and even their own family, by surprise. Their official reasoning was, as they wrote on Instagram, for “space to focus on the next chapter.” The press reported more personal motivations: a desire for more privacy, exhaustion from the negative tabloid reports. But also another factor that was intrinsic and unfixable: their apparent sidelining. They felt senior family members’ initiatives—William and Kate’s, Charles and Camilla’s— were prioritized over theirs. They may have wielded megawatt star power, but it still wasn’t enough to overcome the inevitable: William and Charles one day would be kings ordained with divine power. Harry, as sixth in line to the throne, would not.
The royal family is, yes, a family. But it’s also a business—one that Forbes estimates makes £1.8 billion for the UK economy per year. Their money-making model is one of crowns, castles, pomp and circumstance, and most of all, the concept of the monarchy itself: that, among us mere mortals, there are those with a birthright to serve as custodians of a country’s history and morals. The Crown’s plotlines show that personal-professional dichotomy season after season: Princess Margaret can’t marry Peter Townsend not because the Queen doesn’t like him, but because she’s the head of the Church of England, which doesn’t approve of divorcés. Queen Elizabeth can’t share her opinions about the Commonwealth with Margaret Thatcher because as an unelected head of state, she’s not allowed to politically pressure Prime Ministers. And despite skills, experience, or even vested interest, there’s only one monarch born into the job.
The post It’s Hard to Watch “The Crown” Season 4 Without Thinking of Harry and Meghan appeared first on Honk Magazine.
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