The Crown: Edward the VIII Season 2, Episode 6

Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at the Waldorf

Edward the VIII’s abdication is something that I have been vaguely aware of for as long as I can remember.  It was a romantic, but, in my moral set, a tainted romantic decision – he chose to marry a divorced woman (when I was eight years old and first heard of this, divorce had a tone of scandal) and he gave up the throne for love.  It sets in motion the action in The Crown – but also in the King’s Speech – a movie that must have come out before I started blogging because I can’t believe that, to this point, I haven’t posted about it.  My personal connection with Edward is that his portrait – dancing with his wife, Wallis Simpson, used to adorn the walls of the Waldorf Astoria where, until last year when the Waldorf was sold to be turned into condos, the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association was held.  Edward and Simpson looked perfectly matched, and seemed to signify all that was royal and regal about the Waldorf Astoria back “in the day”.

And that fairy tale – tainted slightly further when it was hinted that Wallis Simpson was, in addition to being a divorcee, having affairs during the time that she and Edward were consorting - was largely sustained in both the King’s speech and in the first season and a half of The Crown.  So I was unprepared for the sixth episode of season 2 of The Crown.  If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want spoilers, stop reading.  In his appearances before episode 6, Edward is a slightly sleazy, slightly creepy character who is full of himself in a way that is more than a little off putting.  Handsome and aware of that, he believes he would have been a better king than “Bertie”, his brother and Elizabeth’s father, but if we have seen the King’s speech, we admire the pluck of the King George VI that Bertie became – and we know that his father prayed that Bertie and not Edward would become King.  Edward seems to be a self-indulgent fop and Wallis seems to have him wrapped around her little finger in the Crown.  He has nasty nicknames for everyone in the royal family, but then Elizabeth reaches out to him as an advisor, and there is a sense that he can be useful as she tries to navigate touchy family relationships.  Meanwhile, the dour old secretary, Alan Lascelles, who was intimately acquainted with Edward’s entire adult life as he had been his secretary when he was king and had watched him afterwards was incredibly opposed to him as a person – and by extension to Elizabeth’s sister Margaret who was displaying the same self-idolatry that he feared would cause her to rot from the inside out as Edward had rotted.  The language of rot was quite strong and it stood out.  When Lascelles used it, I experienced it as coming out of left field and being more of an old fuddy-duddy’s critical looking down his nose at the royals – but I should have listened to Mister Down-at-the-Mouth to be better prepared for episode six.

So the episode begins with the trading of secret Nazi documents at the end of the Second World War – documents that implicate Edward in a plot devised by Hitler to reinstate him as King of England should Germany have occupied England.  These documents are being reviewed by historians in the 1950s just as Edward is trying to figure out how to worm his way back into having some kind of role in public life in England – something that his brother George VI had worked very hard to prevent, but something Edward feels hopeful of achieving now that his relationship with Elizabeth is moving forward.   Meanwhile, to complicate things a bit, Billy Graham, of all people, played by the same actor who played the sleazy writer in House of Cards, is visiting Britain and Elizabeth has a chat with him.  She is taken by him, but, as the titular head of the Church of England, she can’t publicly support him and it is not clear that she would want to.

I think it is important – and the show does not emphasize this but we all know it in our bones – that England, under the leadership of Churchill and with the help of “Bertie” as King George VI survived the most harrowing of sea and air attacks during the Second World War.  During this time, in order to limit the mayhem that he might cause, Edward was installed as the protector of the Bahamas – a position that he used to look with disdain at the people of the Bahamas – especially the people of color (he was a class A racist who was not in the least discrete about it through the course of his life).  Now the British Empire as a whole was racist and was responsible for racially based atrocities including the slave trade with the United States (and slaving that brought Africans to England and the rest of Europe as well).  Being the titular head of the whitest nation on earth – whether you are Edward or George or Elizabeth – requires a fair amount of comfort with exploiting people whose skin is of a different color (and many of the same skin tone).  Elizabeth’s engagement with subjects of color is interesting – and certainly far more advanced than that of Edward’s, but it seems to fall into the “noblesse oblige” category, not the let’s hang out and chat category.

The first bombshell about Edward that is dropped is Hitler’s plan to instate Edward as the King of England after Hitler defeats Britain.  It is not clear that Edward is in on this, but he and Wallis tour Germany before the war and they are very taken with the treatment of them as royals – and especially the acknowledgement of Wallis as a royal – something the Brits never do – and something that has long infuriated both Edward and Wallis.  Edward’s plan was to marry Wallis as soon as she became divorced for the second time in a civil ceremony and remain King, but he was forced, by the intention of the entire government to resign if he did that, into abdication.  He did not weigh the investment of the government and the people in the propriety of the office.  His relationship with Wallis outweighed his obligation to The Crown.  Indeed, he appeared to be disdainful of the people and the office – there were fears that he was not protecting the documents that he was seeing as head of state from people – like Wallis – who were not cleared to see them.  Meanwhile, she was apparently, in addition to working on her second divorce, sleeping with a high Nazi official – von Ribbentrop – while also having her affair with Edward. 

But the bigger bombshell was the allegation, made by Lascelles when Elizabeth asked for it, that Edward sent information to the Nazi’s about the French defenses (he was originally a major-general in France responsible for British operations there) allowing Hitler to skirt the defenses as he drove to Paris and occupied it.  Should this have been the case, and I think there is enough evidence to suggest that his character would have supported it, Edward was every bit as nasty as Shakespeare’s Richard III who kept plotting and plotting to become king, regardless of who would have to die for him to accomplish it.  Edward’s character then is a particular kind of narcissist – one who is so full of himself and what he needs that he has no regard for what the impact of getting what he needs will have on others.  His subjects are not people with whom he identifies, but people whom he disdains because they don’t adequately love him.  The send up in the musical Hamilton of George III who reigned when we rebelled against Britain begins to get at the level of self-importance that Edward experienced.

Elizabeth’s dilemma at the end of the episode is that she cannot forgive Edward for what he has done, and this creates a moral crisis for her.  She consults with Billy Graham, who is encouraging her quite strongly to forgive as a Christian thing to do.  She desperately wants to do this but simply cannot – and we get why – but we also fear that Graham’s strident encouragement to forgive as that is the Christian thing to do will create a rift between he and Elizabeth, but then he saves her by suggesting that she can pray for forgiveness for the inability to forgive.  A nice trick – and one that allows her – as we see throughout the first two seasons – to retain the integrity of The Crown – to act in ways that are consistent with the needs of the country despite her own wishes and desires – demonstrating her capacity to do exactly what it is that Edward could not – to put her people and her country first, and, in so doing, to more fully inhabit herself.

To read a post on the Crown focused on Elizabeth, click here.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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The Crown: Governance as a lesson for our time.

My connection to Queen Elizabeth stems from my identification as a member of the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Church of England), where the minister once characterized us as the “frozen chosen”.  She has always appeared to me to exemplify what it means to have a stiff upper lip.  And a stiff lower lip.  She has seemed almost inhuman.  I was first introduced to her on screen when she was portrayed as a child in the movie The King’s Speech.  I think I next ran into her onscreen – or the royal family as a whole – in Love Actually, where the loser sandwich delivery guy imagines himself in America as Prince Harry without the weird family.  Oh, sure, I have seen her on TV and in People magazine.  Elizabeth is the mother of Charles who married Lady Di – and she has never turned over the throne to him – but I am not an anglophile, so am just now learning about the history of the monarchy from the new Netflix series, The Crown, which really seems to flow almost seamlessly out of The King’s Speech (by way of Dunkirk).

Claire Foy plays the queen – and she does this with all the humanity that my brief views of Elizabeth in People and News Clips lack.  What Foy is particularly good at – and what the show seems to centrally focus on – is portraying the experience of what it takes – the internal mettle – to cross a boundary.  It is as if you can see Elizabeth, over and over, making a decision – and each one involves leaving behind a little piece of her humanity to more fully assume the role of Queen – to become The Crown – and this transition, far from being a cold or mechanical one – paradoxically makes her become more and more delightfully and painfully human. Foy as Elizabeth invites us to empathically connect with what it takes to be the adult when all those around her are being children – to determine how to confront her prime minister or her husband – not because she wants to, but because it must be done – and, across the course of time and much against her will, we see her becoming the Queen and more fully and weirdly, herself.

Elizabeth is portrayed as believing herself to be poorly suited to being Queen.  The abdication of Edward the VIII is a truly awful moment for her – it is the moment when her father, George VI, becomes King and she becomes the heir.  She had wanted to lead a quiet life of leisure – to be a royal housewife at some kind of English Manor House in which she could raise children and horses and go hunting out of the limelight and off the party circuit, entertaining, and being entertained by a few close friends.  This is the life that she and Phillip fantasized about leading until she, rather late in life, would be called on to become Queen.  Unfortunately her father’s health precluded that – his death from lung cancer thrust her into a role that she had been trained for but felt quite ill-suited to.    Her sister Margaret (played stunningly by Vanessa Kirby) seems more suited to the role of Royal – outgoing, vivacious and beautiful, she would have wowed not just the Brits, but the world.  Instead it is the dowdy and inwardly drawn Elizabeth who, based on birth order, assumes the throne.

Now, wouldn’t we all, in some measure, want this thrust upon us?  Wouldn’t we all want to be Queen?  Well, it turns out that it’s not just a title but a role.  The Crown is an integral part of the functioning of a constitutional monarchy.  And governmental oversight (or more precisely in the role of the Crown – oversight of the government) it turns out – despite our current president’s position that abdicating oversight is a reasonable way to govern – is an essential function for a country by its titular governor.  We first get a flavor of this when Elizabeth’s father, who knows he is terminally ill but has not yet told Elizabeth or the family, introduces Elizabeth to The Red Box.  This is the leather bound box in which the notifications about the functioning of the government arrive.  What does he state that he does with it?  He turns it over before opening it.  The things they want him to see are on top.  The details – the boring, but also the essential stuff, is hidden in the bottom.  He says to her, in effect, turn it (and metaphorically everything else that is handed to you on a platter or in a box) over and work your way up from the details to the formalities.

Across the course of the first two seasons (the third has not been released at this writing), this is what she does – she turns things over, looks at them from underneath, and works her way towards functioning as The Crown.  She is doing this during a period in time when the British Empire, which quite recently had counted one fifth of the world’s population as its subjects, has fallen on hard times and is struggling to keep its head above water as a world power and even, at times, to feed its own people.  She works to define herself (choosing, for instance, to marry Phillip, someone whom no one from the royal family was in favor of) but also to define her role and her country during this time of huge transition.  And she does this living in palaces and castles that, for all their monstrous size, when they don’t look like the lobby of some kind of convention hotel, look more like tawdry middle class homes filled with old knick-knacks and souvenirs from a bygone era, as well as huge television sets with tiny screens that look chintzy, regularly fritz out, and are, appallingly, rented. 

The series is quite conscious of the tension between the Royal Family as perceived/ presented and the grimmer grittier reality of running a family business.  Margaret notes in one of the annual family portraits that the job of the royals is to support the fairy tale experience for the public.  All that glitters is not gold, though (Trump and family beware) and this series demonstrates that in engaging detail.  I think that its appeal to me is both on the level of curiosity about what has happened behind closed gates – we have since Shakespeare’s days been fascinated by the lives of the Royals – but also the story of the development of a person who has power thrust upon her – and I think that is both an historically interesting development – she is, for instance, a woman in power during a time that women are gaining power – but also a personally relevant one – she grows into herself on screen in ways that mirror how I have grown in my own life (at my best moments), and as I have watched my children, my students and my patients grow.  Becoming who it is that we are in the process of becoming is, I believe, a fascinating process.

In my Freud class for honors’ students that I am teaching this spring, we have just finished reading two of Freud’s papers that describe something about the governing of one’s own mind – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Uncanny.  Both of these papers wrestle with something that Freud calls the repetition compulsion – the ways in which we seem to repeat what has happened before in our lives in novel situations and with new actors.  This is not, he notes, just a replaying of pleasurable interactions – that would be understandable – but we replay things that are truly awful – he was treating what we now call PTSD and was wondering about why soldiers would keep revisiting terribly traumatic events they had survived, but he also noted that we seem to set up – and dream about – and re-enact - the most embarrassing and shameful moments in our lives – moments that are simply awful to live through.  Freud is perplexed by this and ends up proposing a drive to explain this – a drive deeper than the drive for pleasure – the death drive.  Now, I think this is a crazy idea and it has never held up.  To his credit, Freud did not seem entirely convinced of it either, but the question remains – why do we keep doing things the same way despite the fact that we know what the outcome of that will be – and how can we help people figure out how to do things differently?

I think that one of the compelling things about this series is that Elizabeth, in those moments when she steels herself, is engaging – over and over – in novel ways of being with others.  She takes as a given the role that has been thrust upon her – her role is to govern and she does that – but she does not do it by rote – but seemingly invents herself and the ways that she will express The Crown in new and completely different ways in episode after episode.  She is coming up against the repetition compulsion – and figuring out how to master it – how to ignore the signals that channel us into familiar ways of functioning – sometimes aided and abetted by pride or anger or a sense of entitlement or injustice.  Elizabeth – not always, but more often than not - is able to elude the grasp of the obvious.  She is able to achieve novel solutions to situations that seem intractable.  Because she, almost at times in spite of herself, cares deeply about the life that has been thrust upon her, she engages deeply and creatively in living that life – circumscribed though it is by tradition and rules which she must and chooses to follow – but she figures out how to do that in novel and exciting ways.  And this, I think, is what people who are awake and engaged do – they live lives that are complicated and fascinating.

As an example, in season 2, episode 8, after having been shown up terribly by the Kennedys – particularly by Jackie when she was a guest – Elizabeth decides to act as an ambassador in a time of great turmoil in Africa.  The communists are successfully wooing former colonies away from Western Influence.  She flies to The Congo and meets with the President there and successfully woos him back, something her advisors and her husband have warned her is a high risk venture with little chance of success.  This account feels prosaic in my telling – you really should watch the episode – and more importantly the series to observe the development of this intriguing – if frozen on the outside – person. 

By the way, I don’t mean to be suggesting that Elizabeth walks on water nor that becoming The Crown is always a good thing.  There are numerous deals with the devil that have terrible consequences in the immediate and long run.  Would that it were possible as a leader or a ruler to be prescient; she is not portrayed in this manner nor can anyone in the real world function in this manner.  But she does struggle with becoming the Crown and the impingement that makes on her being Elizabeth – something that we all struggle with in our own way.

This post has gone on too long, so I will post a separate description of her alter ego, Edward the VIII, and particularly of the Season 2, episode 6 description of his being not what he appears, but instead a worthy subject for Shakespeare…. And someone who does not appreciate what it means to be or become The Crown.

To read a post on The Crown focused on Edward the VIII as Elizabeth's alter ego, click here.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...