The Crown is not fiction

 

     When Season 4 of The Crown came out six-and-a-half months ago, a hue and cry suddenly rose up, "The Crown is fiction!  The Crown is fiction!"

     No, it isn't.  Every notable plot point of The Crown is in The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown.  If the writers of The Crown are "making things up," then how come those same "things" were somehow "made up" for The Diana Chronicles, too, which was published clear back in 2007?!  Does Peter Morgan have ESP with Tina Brown??  Are they time-traveling together or something...?

     The same incidents, events, and conflicts that we see in The Crown are sprinkled throughout other royal-featuring media--books, articles, videos.

     The claim that The Crown is "fiction" is 'thin soup' if not an outright lie.

     P-R machines for Prince Charles and the Palace apparently believe that saying something over and over again will convince the public.

------------------------------ [excerpt from The Diana Chronicles] ---------------- "All eyes were on Her Majesty," said Plunket.  "She was so young and it was so long since we'd had a Queen on the throne.  Fifty years!  And the only things we had ever read about her were positive."

     That's the point.  No Royal since has had his or her mystique left so thoroughly intact....The Queen then could do no wrong, and with her, the Royal Family.

Intense was the rage visited on a Tory historian, Lord Altrincham, when in an obscure publication he suggested that Her Majesty was too attached to the upper classes....the BBC dropped Altrincham from Any Questions, its iconic forum for public debate.  

He was slapped in the street.  

Club members moved to the other side of the coffee room when he came in.

 Altrincham observed:  "There was this atmosphere of almost cringing acceptance on the part of everybody in positions of authority whether politicians, churchmen, people running the press, people at the top in business.  They all had this sort of attitude of uncritical acceptance of everything that was done by the Royal Family."

     The notorious Altrincham--who actually believed very much in the monarchy as an institution--badly shook the Establishment, but it was a member of the Royal Family itself who made the first dent in the mass culture of deference.  

The loose cannon was Princess Margaret, the Queen's younger, saucier sister.  Distraught at her father George VI's death, she sought solace not only in prayer at St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, but also in the company of someone who had been her father's Comptroller of the Household, a Battle of Britain war hero, a man seventeen years her senior she had met when she was twenty-one:  Group Captain Peter Townsend.  The perfect romance?  

Alas, no.  

Marriage was out of the question.  

Townsend was a divorcé (like Wallis Simpson) and, perhaps worse, a member of staff.  Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, no royal prince or princess could marry before the age of twenty-five without the permission of the Queen and Parliament....

     ...The Times had already assumed its lofty role of speaking for Britain, declaring that the Royal Family were a national symbol of family life and it would damage the monarchy for the Queen's sister to marry a divorced man.  

     But Hugh Cudlipp saw his paper as representing the brave new Briton who had been through two world wars and who no longer cared to "know his place in the social pecking order."  His Daily Mirror ran a poll on whether Margaret and Townsend should marry, addressing royalty in the vernacular of the street:  "COME ON MARGARET, MAKE UP YOUR MIND!"

     Such intrusion into the private life of a member of the Royal Family was considered deeply offensive, a rustle of mob rule in democratic rags. -------------------------------------- [end - excerpt]

________________________________

the Princess Margaret - Peter Townsend stuff

the Lord Altrincham stuff

...all in The Crown, Season 2.

          Just two examples among many.

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