This article contains spoilers for season 4 of “Crown”.
LONDON – Imagine being invited to a black tie dinner with the Queen of England and the extended royal family at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, and it’s very important that you make a good impression. Have you been asked to meet for a drink at dusk when you arrive in gorgeous evening wear like clockwork, or whenever you wander in ool’s sweater and mud shoes without a shut?
If you answered with the former, then you have already failed the test, and the royal family is upset. The queen will be smiling gracefully, and she is brightly insisting on dinner (Always 8.15am) can be advanced for more than an hour, but is damaged. At least you won’t be alone: this is Margaret Thatcher’s experience in a thrilling scene in the new season of ‘Crown’.
In the fourth season of Netflix’s grand show about the royal family, two notable new characters – Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and Diana Spencer (Emma Corinne) – form a very different relationship with Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Coleman) as a result of the limit. Which they understand to be the strange, agreeable modesty of British high-class etiquette and royal protocol.
Thatcher was first introduced into the “Crown” by the lens of the British class system. The Queen sees the news of her election, describing Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) Thatcher as “the shopkeeper’s daughter” in a snippet tone, to which Elizabeth replies, “One Alderman The daughter of a shopkeeper, who worked hard and received a scholarship to Oxford. “The difference – in Britain – is an important one.
Khacher’s father, Alfred Roberts, was a self-made and wealthy owner of two shops. He was the mayor of the town of Grantham, in the north of England, where the Thatcher family lived in an apartment above them. Shop.
Nevertheless, Thatcher later emphasizes how much she lacks as a child – including hot water and indoor toilets – her deprived household was the result of her father’s economic weakness, not poverty. As Hugo Young puts it in his book “One of Us”, the young Thatcher “belonged to the emerging petty bourgeoisie, not to the tolerant working class.” It was in the mid-1930s when 75% of British households were officially working class. Were defined as, but Thatcher’s family was 20 percent which could be considered middle class.
All of this is compounded by the fact that Thatcher had lessons in brawling to eradicate her regional accent, studied at Oxford University with Britain’s privileged elite and rose to social rank when she married rich, upper-middle class Dennis Thatcher. Were. In November 1970, when Thatcher was Secretary of Education, The Sun asked angrily, “How did Grantham’s grocery daughter become a Tory lady in a public school with big hats, a posh house, a rich husband and a love for children?”
“I think the Queen was very upset by Margaret Thatcher because she jumped into class,” said Dean Palmer, author of “The Queen and Mrs. Thatcher: An Inconvenient Relationship,” in a telephone interview. Jumping into the upper class brackets is notoriously difficult in Britain, because in general, the main way to get title, land and “good breeding” – the traditional foundation of the aristocracy – is innate. Less money rarely cuts. (Before Prince William married Kate Middleton, sources close to the royal family were quoted in mourning newspapers for his wealthy – but not aristocratic) mother, whose false pass included social chewing gum, public chewing gum and a previous career as a flight attendant. )
Until she became prime minister in 1979, Thatcher was seen and voiced, but she had little in common with her monarch. Nevertheless, a law-abiding and ardent monarch, Thatcher famously arrived early in her meetings with the Queen and gave the most sincere, respectful Curtis. He admitted in his autobiography, The Downing Street Years, published in 1993, “I was concerned about the details of the process and the protocol.”
But biographers have observed that Thatcher’s restless nature, tenacious pronunciation, and grandeur annoyed the queen. Before Thatcher became prime minister, he was invited to Buckingham Palace as the leader of the Conservative Party. Palmer said, “On at least two occasions, he was dizzy and fainted, and the queen had to say, ‘Someone caught that woman again!’
In the second episode, “The Balmoral Test”, the relationship between the Queen and Thatcher erupts during a visit to the Queen’s private residence in Scotland. Once referred to by The Newcastle Evening Chronicle as “The Girlfriend of Suburbia”, Thatcher had no interest in the country’s businesses of shooting and fishing and did not wear tweeds, sweaters and Wellington boots. A workaholic with little time for leisure, she shocked the royal family by working instead.
“If you’re not interested in shooting, horses or dogs, what do you do?” Palmer said. “That balm ral real world is a very strange, backward world that doesn’t exist outside of ‘Downton Abbey’ nowadays.” In the show, Thatcher leaves the visit early, outraged by a family lifestyle she sees as increasingly passive rich.
If Thatcher fails the “balmoral test”, the “Crown” shows Diana passing by with flying colors. We first hear about the Spencer family when the Queen is told that Charles is dating Diana’s older sister Sarah Spencer. “Johnny’s girl?” She replied. “Oh, I like that idea!”
“Johnny” is John Spencer, the eighth Earl Spencer: an Eaton-educated nobleman and a member of the House of Lords, who served as an Equinox for both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. The connection to royalty is an old one: Diana’s mother was a friend of Elizabeth’s mother, and was named after her ancestor, who was to become the second Princess of Wales. The two families could not be quite literally close: Diana was raised in the Queen’s private residence: in Norfolk, Sandringum. Essentially, the Queen was the landlord of the family, until they inherited their own palace property when Diana was 14 years old.
As author Bell Hooks notes, Diana was “obscure from a high-class background, and she became the story of a ragged rich man.” Author Hillary Mattel observed in a recent essay collection “Mattel Pets” that in some ways Spencer was more involved with the British aristocracy than the Royals: “Although she was not born a monarch, her ancestors were ancient power-brokers. Dig more on the islands, “he wrote.
By the time Charles started dating Diana, both the Royals and the press were delighted with the fit of the match. “Her genealogy is complete,” said one news reporter. “At the time, it seemed important that the Prince of Wales should marry a nobleman,” Penny Jr., who wrote the biographies of both Elizabeth and Diana, said in an email. “Diana looked perfect in every way.”
Having experienced a noble rural upbringing like Prince Charles, Diana came to understand life in Balmoral. “Diana had no trouble sitting close to the Royals,” Juner said. “She knew how to hold a knife and a fork, and used it for servants. She seemed to fit perfectly, and she was enjoying all the activities outside. The Queen’s private secretary praised Diana’s “wonderful instincts”.
But this was a demonstration to an extent. “In reality it wasn’t fun to jump into Heather in the pouring rain,” Junor said. Diana made this very clear when, after their marriage, Charles returned to “Bloody Balmoral” (as he later called it) for the last leg of their honeymoon. Tina Brown, in her princess biography, recounts the moment when the “happy, gosh-me-all-muddy” Diana disappeared.
Diana was fed up and overwhelmed by the numerous .formal dinners with strange guests, the family, observing Brown, said, “For a girl of her descent, she was somehow a social novice, a horrible realization.” Although her childhood was aristocratic, it was secluded, and Diana felt bored in the constant social pressures of royal life.
Later in the episode “Crown”, Diana struggled with the complexities of royal life, as she had to chair the family’s own private gatherings first. Bi Andrew Morten writes in his autobiography that Diana was deeply rooted in the “protocol of the family, Flum Mary and Artifice” and the “brittle formal formality” of royal life. As she lived with a more casual, less stuffier approach to her relationships and duties, she celebrated in public but, outraged by the Royals, became increasingly estranged from them.
Of course, the most important story of the 1980s class is not one of Britain’s upper class etiquette. Thatcher’s 11 years in power were a time of dramatic economic and racial inequality, and a growing quality of life for the average British. As its policies shrunk the welfare state, labor unions protested and sold social housing, doubling unemployment and child poverty.
The “Crown” only captures this broader context of Michael Fagan’s story, which depicts a man breaking into the Queen’s bedroom in 1982 as an act of class protest. Coleman’s queen lets him voice his concerns, says unemployment bothers him “greatly” and has real sympathy for the plight of the working class under Thatcher. In fact, the Empress found him and “ran out of the room,” Fagan told The Independent in 2012.
“A lot of people want to present the queen as a trumpet in the heart,” Palmer said. “I don’t buy it at all.”
