The Real Crown: Inside the House of Windsor: "Heirs and Spares" (ITV, All3 Media International, American Public Television, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 3) I watched the fifth and final episode of a rather quirky British TV show called The Real Crown: Inside the House of Windsor. I’d skipped the previous shows in the series but caught this one, “Heirs and Spares,” because it dealt with recent history, particularly the fraught relations between Queen Elizabeth, her sons Charles and Andrew, and her grandsons William and Harry. It mentioned in passing Prince Andrew’s service with the British military in the Falklands War of 1982 and compared it to Prince Harry’s service as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. Apparently the royals decided that as next in line for the throne after Charles, Prince William was too close to the succession to be allowed to risk his life in a war, but as the second son, the royal household decided that Harry – “The Spare,” as Harry derisively called himself in a phrase that became the title of his autobiography (supposedly someone told Harry, “Your brother is the heir, and you’re the spare” – though when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 the then-“spare,” Harry’s great-grandfather George VI, became King) – was dispensable. It seems that, in the old cliché, serving in Afghanistan “made a man” of Harry; he’s seen in interviews saying that for the first time in his life he was just another guy, judged not by his heritage but by how well he did his job. Harry also talks about how he benefited from psychotherapy and at last was able to exorcise his grief over the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and like a lot of other people he blamed the media for her death.

The episode, directed by Kate Quine and Ella Isobel Wright (and I’m guessing written by them as well, though no writers are credited), goes through a lot of both the high and low points of British history in the last two decades, including the trauma of the “Brexit” vote in 2016 and the nationwide lockdown in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “Brexit” came as a shock to a lot of British people, and it’s revealing that the referendum to leave the European Union ran most strongly in England (apart from London) and Wales, while the Remain side carried Scotland and Northern Ireland. (At least part of that was due to the Northern Irish peace process, which was dependent on there no longer being a “hard” border between the Republic of Ireland and the still-British section of the North. As long as both Britain and Ireland were EU members, that wasn’t a problem, but a lot of people fretted over the possibility that a post-Brexit Britain would reimpose strict border security over the British-Irish land border.) “Brexit” would kick off a period of major political instability in Britain, as various governments came and went when they were unable to manage the delicate negotiations and as certain factions in the British government wanted to preserve the trade advantages of associating with the EU while severing the political ties.

Another complication facing the royal family was Prince Andrew’s embroilment in the child sex abuse scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein and his right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell. Though the show doesn’t mention Epstein’s so-called “suicide” (I remain convinced that one or more of the many powerful people who stood to be ruined if Epstein had testified against them had him killed in prison) and Maxwell’s ultimate conviction for human trafficking in a U.S. court, Andrew’s involvement with at least one of Epstein’s women and her determination to expose him to the world, no matter what, forced Queen Elizabeth to cut ties with her younger son. She did this very reluctantly because Andrew had always been her favorite of her two sons; whereas Charles had been properly correct as befitted The Man Who Would Be King, Andrew was the light-hearted one who could make her laugh. This show depicts Queen Elizabeth as someone who cut Andrew a lot of slack over the years until she finally had effectively to eject him from the family, taking away his titles and his “duties” to the Crown (though a lot of fun of a show like this is trying to figure out just what the “duties” of a royal family member are; an early scene shows that Queen Elizabeth regularly receives high-level intelligence briefings but it remained ambiguous exactly what she does with all that information).

Queen Elizabeth died quietly at her castle in Balmoral, Scotland on September 8, 2022, just 17 months after her long-time spouse Prince Philip, and it’s indicative of the sheer longevity of her reign (in 2005 she broke Victoria’s record as the longest-ruling monarch in British history) and the way her country devolved over the years that the first prime minister she formally appointed was Winston Churchill and the last was Liz Truss. Though the prime minister is actually elected by British voters, and under their parliamentary system the head of the leading party in the House of Commons is automatically the chief executive, the monarch still has to make the formal appointment. When Liz Truss got the official appointment as prime minister from the Queen just two days before Elizabeth’s death, in what was no doubt the last official act of the Queen’s life, her political standing collapsed so quickly a British TV show put a head of lettuce on screen and asked viewers to take bets as to which would last longer: the head of lettuce or Liz Truss’s tenure as Prime Minister. I remember joking that officially appointing a prime minister was one part of the king gig Charles hadn’t anticipated having to do so soon – but he did with the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (a well-to-do man descended from Indian people – I’ve called him “Gandhi’s ultimate revenge” – whose family fortune has been estimated as larger than the Windsors’), who’s just called a snap election for July to give the politically restive British population the chance to vote on whether or not to keep him in office.

Of course the show also covered the scandal surrounding Prince Harry’s eventual marriage to American actress Meghan Markle and the birth of their child. Not only is Markle mixed-race – her mother is African-American – but she’s been an outspoken feminist and advocate for environmentalism and nature conservation. Eventually Prince Harry and Meghan gave an internationally televised media interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021 after they effectively resigned from the royal family to make a new life in the U.S. In 2023 Harry published a memoir, Spare, which according to this program became the best-selling non-fiction book of all time. I remember watching the coronation of King Charles III and publishing a moviemagg blog post about it on May 6, 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-coronation-of-king-charles-iii-bbc.html), and the two things that most struck me about it were Charles’s own apparent disinterest – I wrote, “Charles himself looked oddly befuddled, especially for a man who has literally been waiting his entire life for this to happen to him” – and his attempts to make the whole business more racially and socially inclusive to try to adapt the monarchy to the politically correct standards of our age. As I wrote about the coronation as a whole, “The whole ceremony seemed uncertain, as part of it stemmed from traditions literally centuries old while other parts were added by Charles himself or his staff to symbolize the reinvention of Great Britain as a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural community.” Just what this old, clunky, tradition-bound institution has to do with building a vibrant modern-day country is anyone’s guess, especially since the program dramatizes how the British don’t have a tradition of the monarch abdicating in old age and effectively going into retirement as other constitutional monarchies (notably The Netherlands) do. So Queen Elizabeth had to continue in the job literally until the moment she died.