TV Review: “The Crown: The Hereditary Principle” (S4, Ep. 7)
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: Culture, Tv Reviews, Television, TV Series, The Crown

Now we come to what is quite a controversial episode of The Crown, in a season that has already garnered quite a lot of criticism for its willingness to distort the historical record in the service of the particular message that it wants to convey about the nature of the Crown and the effects that institution has on the lives and psyches of those who fall into its orbit.

This episode, for the first time this season, focuses on Princess Margaret. She’s begun to feel a bit weary, both because her body is increasingly frail (she has to have part of a lung removed, just as her father did), and because she doesn’t seem to have much purpose. What’s more, she has also begun to fear that she may be going mad, a suspicion brought into sharper focus when she discovers two of her maternal cousins have been institutionalized for severe mental disabilities. This leads to a rather unpleasant confrontation with her mother, who informs her that they were kept secret out of a fear that knowledge of them would shake the public’s trust in the royal bloodline, a fear that, it turns out, was misplaced, since the problematic trait was inherited from their mother, not their Bowes-Lyon father. Though she remains chilled by her family’s cold-bloodedness, Margaret at least takes comfort that her own mental affliction won’t ultimately become as debilitating as that of her cousins.

Normally, I’m more than willing to let a series get away with a lot of historical license. As Bridget Kies has observed, in some ways The Crown is basically fan fiction and should be treated as such, i.e., articulating a message about the monarchy and modernity without being taken as an accurate representation of the facts as we know them. At the same time, as Helen Lewis argues in The Atlantic, it is also true that this series, because of its enormous popularity, bears a particular burden when it comes to either making it clearer that it’s fiction or, alternatively, making more of an effort to be accurate in terms of the ways that it chooses to portray events.

Unfortunately, it seems to me, “The Hereditary Principle” does neither.

Normally, the victim of this sort of historical myth-making is Queen Elizabeth herself. In this episode, however, it’s the Queen Mother. Like many of the older generation (more on that in a moment), she’s been frequently sidelined in the third and fourth seasons, in favor of the younger generation and their various romantic escapades. In this episode, however, she’s cornered by Margaret, who demands to know why members of her family have been institutionalized and presented as dead when they are very much alive. The Queen Mother, as she usually does, digs in, suggesting that it was for the good of the Crown, that the sisters Nerissa and Katherine, like so many others, paid a terrible price so that the royal bloodline could continue to remain unquestioned. And that, of course, is the entire point that The Crown makes again and again and again, that innocent people, including the Queen herself, are often steamrolled and crushed by the ponderous weight of an ancient institution that struggles to deal with the pressures and challenges of modernity.

Now, it has to be said that none of this bears any relation to what actually happened. Margaret, so far as we know, had no role in discovering that her cousins were alive, and the Queen Mother didn’t find out about their rather existence until the story broke in the 1980s, after which she did, apparently, send money. All of this shouldn’t detract from the fact that, even after they discovered the truth, the Royal Family did very little to involve themselves in the lives of their cousins (they can be quite cold-blooded at times, in reality as in fiction), but it does seem to me to be a bit unfair to hold Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to account for something that, from all that we know from those who have documented her life, she actually didn’t realize until quite late in life.

If there’s one good thing to emerge from this episode, it’s that we finally get to see Helena Bonham Carter in all of her glory. While Margaret was a key player in the first two seasons of the series, we’ve increasingly seen her sidelined (a similar phenomenon occurs with her sister Elizabeth). This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does make one wonder why they went to the effort of casting someone with as much star power and attraction as Carter if they weren’t going to make more storylines that revolved around her. She’s a hell of an actress, and she really does allow us to understand the cost of the Crown on her personal life, since by this point her sacrifices must have seemed rather futile, given her increasing marginalization in her own family.

Throughout the episode, Carter does a brilliant job (of course) conveying the sense of weariness and ennui that Margaret feels as he begins to creep into middle age. Unlike her sister, who continues to be a mother to her country, Margaret continues to labor under the burden that she has no clearly-delineated role, especially now that her nephews are all beginning to come of age. In one of the episode’s finest scenes, she has one of her brutally honest talks with Elizabeth in which the latter, as she always does, sticks to her duty no matter the personal cost to her loved ones. In this case, it’s the demotion of Margaret from most official duties. It’s a brilliantly executed scene, in large part because Colman manages to convey Elizabeth’s stiff upper lip mentality and Carter Margaret’s vulnerability in equal measure. It’s clear that, by this point, Elizabeth has become the Crown. She might not have wanted it, she might even believe that Margaret would have made a better queen, but that will not keep her from doing her duty.

And, of course, the episode is full of wrenching pathos, as we see the unfortunate conditions of the sisters, as well as their continued loyalty to their royal cousins (including pictures of Margaret and Elizabeth on their bedside tables).

Next up, we’ll discuss a juicy episode in which Elizabeth and Thatcher find themselves increasingly at odds.