Fictional Charles’s shadowy meetings with British leaders, in which he attempts to win their support over The Queen, prompted emphatic public denials from Major, for one. But these scenes feel less smarmy than an attempt to depict the prince as ambitiously, tirelessly progressive. (Are West’s striking good looks a mitigating factor? Maybe!) In another clandestine meeting in the season finale, Prince Charles ventures to link himself to change-making prime minister Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel), the 43-year-old Labour leader who upended 17 years of Conservative rule under Major and Margaret Thatcher in 1997. Post-meeting, Blair sympathizes with Charles, who is only five years his senior, telling his wife, Cherie (Lydia Leonard): “It can’t be much fun being the Prince of Wales if you’re an impressive man.”
“Is he?” Cherie—and everyone watching—wonders aloud.
“Oh yes,” Blair replies, “with energy and a brain and a conscience and a beating heart and a genuine desire to engage and make a difference.” At this point, I almost began to wonder if the King’s communications department served as consultants on season five.
Intentionally or not, The Crown also undercuts its Prince Charles redemption arc by showing the character’s persistent whining—about everything from his mother’s insistence on living a long life and/or refusing to abdicate, thereby denying him the throne while in the prime of his life, to The Queen’s distaste of his romance with Camilla Parker-Bowles. On the latter point: fair. He’s a grown man who loved Parker-Bowles for a lifetime. Still, given their boundless privileges, the royals have hardly made for sympathetic characters: this is true in both real and fictional contexts. In an eye-rolling dinner party monologue, Prince Charles calls his title a “predicament,” lamenting that his contemporaries have “gone out into the world and made their mark,” while he’s but a “useless ornament, stuck in a waiting room, gathering dust.”
“You’re a criminally wasted resource, sir, ” one dining companion fawns. The point lands shakily at best, given that it’s juxtaposed with a butler brushing the shoulders of Charles’s tuxedo.
That The Crown’s Prince Charles was restless in the ’90s is poignant; viewers know it will take the real-life heir 25 more years for him to become king. In season five, Charles compares his limbo-state to that of his great-great-grandfather, Edward VII, who was heir to the British throne for 60 years under his long-reigning mother, Queen Victoria. “It was said that Queen Victoria had no confidence in him, thought him dangerous, free-thinking. He longed to be given responsibilities but his mother refused,” Charles laments. “And yet when his time came, he proved his doubters wrong and his dynamism, his intellect and his popular appeal made his reign a triumph… what a pity it was, what a waste, that his voice, his presence, his vision wasn’t incorporated earlier. It would have been so good for everybody.” Will the same apply to the newly-minted King Charles III? The Crown now has me wondering.
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