The Crown – Fairytale

By: Kelly Kearney

After she accepts Charles’ proposal, Diana moves into the palace to begin her Princess training.  Noticeably absent is her fiancé, who promptly leaves for six weeks and won’t be back until the not-so-happy couple says their I do’s. To keep Diana company Charles sends Camilla to entertain his bride-to-be and, as you can imagine, his idea of having his cake and eating it too doesn’t go as planned.

Welcome to the Family, Princess

After successfully winning over his family in Balmoral, Charles (Josh O’Connor) pops the question to Diana. In every way this proposal has less to do with love and all to do with Charles’ duty to the crown. After his family receives the call that the eldest son of the Queen (Olivia Colman) has found his forever match, Diana (Emma Corrin) takes an apartment inside Buckingham palace and starts learning the royal ropes. Her grandmother, Baroness Fermoy (Georgie Glen), is her etiquette tutor and promises to turn Diana into the perfect and appropriate Princess. This starts the long road to the unraveling of Diana, who has no clue her life is about to take a dramatic turn. The whole world wants to catch a glimpse of Lady Di and their hunger for content wets the appetites of the press and paparazzi. It isn’t long before Diana, locked in Buckingham like Rapunzel, starts to crack under the pressure of her daily instructions on fitting in. She is young, not as uptight and seasoned as the others in the Windsor family and we all know where that can lead. As we learned from Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), the royal life can be a stifling, dark and painful experience that only the strong survive and Diana isn’t cut out for it. Her worries of fitting in only intensify when she makes her first of many blunders at the expense of The Queen’s sister. During cocktail hour Princess Margaret holds the room with her stories of the time she visited Imelda Marcus’ aquarium. When Diana walks in she is unsure of herself and the proper protocols, which causes everyone to turn their attentions to her and away from Margaret. It’s awkward but expected and it is later used as a lesson for Fermoy to correct. The Baroness walks Diana through an endless list of behaviors fitting for a Princess, like how she should never show emotion, never talk with expressive hand gestures and many others that feel unnatural and all around tedious. Her feelings of being out of control in this new experience only get worse when she and Charles are presented to the world in a press conference. When the press comments that the two appear to be very much in love, Charles (always the Debbie Downer) shrugs and says, “Whatever love is.” How these two became the representation of a fairytale romance I will never know, but Diana’s fiery spirit is starting to flicker the more she realizes this is a contractual marriage and not one based on fairytale romance.

After the press conference Charles informs Diana that he will be leaving for six weeks and he won’t see her again until they say their I do’s. Over the next month and a half he makes no effort to contact Diana and her only saving grace from the loneliness is the millions of fan letters she receives daily. If her fiancé can not show her love at least the people do and, for now, that has to be good enough.

The longer her isolation and training continues, the more Diana’s emotions spill over and manifest into late night binge eating and purging. It becomes her escape from the micromanaged world and the bulimia soon turns into depression. Thinking she could use a friend, Diana makes the horrible decision to accept an invitation to lunch from Charles’ “friend” Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell) and why wouldn’t she? Before Charles left he told her to make friends with Camilla who was “a good time” (ew) and could keep her company. Diana has no idea the true nature of their relationship and assumes the girl’s lunch is just what the doctor ordered.

The Girlfriend and The Bride

When they women meet for the first time two things immediately jump out: Camilla cannot read the room and Diana is in this way over her head. After endless Camilla and Charles stories of everything from his obsession with soft-boiled eggs to his limits on how many cups of coffee he drinks a day, Diana gets a clearer picture of the relationship between her fiancé and Mrs. Bowles. Camilla can’t help but remind Diana of how well she knows Charles. She also goes out of Der way to mock Diana’s naivety. The lunch is such a disaster that Diana chokes down her meal in record time after which Camilla asks, “darling, you really know nothing, do you?”  That’s not even the worst of it, as if only to make matters worse (as if they could get worse) Camilla lets it slip that she and Charles have pet nicknames for each other. Fred and Gladys, named after a television show they both loved. For Diana that is the last straw and she cordially attempts to extract herself from the conversation by offering to pay for half of the lunch. Sure, why not? What’s sharing a lunch bill when you two already share a man?

After lunch with her fiancé’s true love Diana goes on a tirade demanding the staff make contact with Philip. She wants to talk to Charles, but his secretary claims he is unavailable. While that might be true, he certainly found the time to sketch a bracelet he’s having made. One Diana assumes is for her until she sees the engraving of “GF” for Fred and Gladys! Furious, Diana tries to contact the Queen to call off the wedding, but just like her son her royal highness doesn’t have the time.

When Charles finally arrives in London for the wedding preparations Diana confronts him about the bracelet and he doesn’t deny it. In fact, he admits it was a goodbye gift he gave Camilla on their last night together! Talk about the worst wedding surprise!

Later that night at the wedding rehearsal Charles is sullen as if the whole ceremony is going to be like some depressing funeral. His aunt picks up on his less than happy vibes and alerts the family, mostly his mother and father, that she doesn’t think this marriage is going to be a loving union. Loveless marriages are something Margaret knows a lot about. “Charles loves someone else,” she says. “How many times can this family make the same mistake forbidding marriages that should be allowed, forcing marriages that shouldn’t and not paying the consequences each time?” Phillip, along with the Queen Mother, disagree and Elizabeth seems to agree – not that she expresses her opinion either way. The elder Windsors think Charles will learn to love his wife because he has no choice. Duty always comes first and the rest will follow. Apparently, they learned nothing from Princess Margaret’s suicide attempt after she was forced to give up the love of her life for an arranged marriage and her contempt for them because of it still shows.

Duty Calls

In a genius move from showrunner, Peter Morgan, we skip the wedding that oversaturated the airwaves for decades to concentrate on the disastrous build up. We do; however, get to see a young Diana transform into a Princess in her famous wedding gown. Like a picture perfect Princess she is nervously dressed in white while her guests, the millions of people watching around the world, not only fall in love with her but in the very idea of her achieving the happily ever after they dream about. It’s tragic and she isn’t the only one suffering. The night before the wedding Queen Elizabeth came to her brooding son to tell him he had no choice but to follow through with the wedding. It is his duty as the future King to marry and produce an heir (preferable two and most definitely male). His mother hopes that he will learn to love his wife, just like the many royals before him did. So, the fact the world is celebrating these nuptials while the bride and groom look like they’re about to be waterboarded, is a level of irony I don’t think we have reached since their commemorative plates were added to your Granny’s china cabinet.

With strained smiles and royal waves, Diana and Charles’ carriage makes it’s way through the crowded streets of London to the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. There is no turning back now. They are a worldwide symbol of love and everyone, including the Queen, is counting on them. As the crowds cheer outside the doors of the cathedral of what many would say was the wedding of the century, Charles and Diana take their vows in what, for them, must felt like the funeral for their hopes and dreams. It was a sprint to the alter that proved to be a long and winding road to their end.