The real reason why The Crown is so disrespectful

The Netflix drama suffers from a lack of historical distance, unlike portrayals of previous eras’ monarchs

We have been telling stories about kings and queens for as long as we have existed as a nation. Monarchy has always lent a human scale to our grand defining narratives; even if those tales are sometimes disappointingly apocryphal, such as King Alfred burning the cakes or King Cnut’s experiment with the tide. It seems odd to imagine it like this, but The Crown, Netflix’s mega-budget series about the Royal family, is merely the latest in a tradition stretching back to Gerald of Wales and Bede. Yet as its narrative trundles along towards the present day, the value of a little historical distance is becoming evermore apparent.

The Crown has always hovered uneasily between fiction and documentary. Enjoyable as earlier seasons were, it was striking how often its creators would alter recorded events to suit their own dramatic interests. Some of its errors were harmless; like scenes of pheasant-shooting in July.

Others, like the insinuation that the late Duke of Edinburgh contributed to his sister’s horrifying death in a plane crash, seemed cruel. A certain amount of artistic embellishment to fill gaps in the historic record is one thing, but shows like The Crown should at least start with what is known for certain.

Later seasons remained entertaining, though I couldn’t quite fathom the praise for Gillian Anderson’s Spitting Image-puppet take on Margaret Thatcher. Season five goes further still, featuring storylines that are blatantly untrue; including scenes where the Queen petitions ministers to restore the Royal Yacht and Prince Charles (unthinkably) tries to draw John Major into a campaign to oust his mother.

Yet observable factual inaccuracies go hand in hand with an extraordinary attention to detail on hairstyles, outfits, accents and mannerisms. Many of the performances, like Emma Corrin’s turn as the young Diana, are astonishing. That is half the problem; recreating so much with detailed precision will lead some viewers to assume the show has been equally fastidious with real events. Only after interventions from Judi Dench and Major himself, aghast by the inaccuracies in his portrayal, has Netflix agreed to tack a disclaimer onto it.

But I wonder if that will be enough. Plenty of viewers, especially younger people and those living beyond the UK, have already accepted the Netflix narrative as unambiguous fact. If the past tells us anything, it’s that history isn’t just written by the victors, but by the best storyteller. Just ask “Mad” King George. As Andrew Roberts notes in his persuasive recent biography of George III, almost all of the accusations of tyranny levelled at the King in the Declaration of Independence are provably false – yet what is that to the stirring ideals and transcendent language of the Founding Fathers?

Richard III was arguably the original victim of twisted historical artistic treatment. Shakespeare is often considered the architect of this interpretation, yet with only a few exceptions, he devised his plots from existing sources – Plutarch, Boccaccio, Holinshed. His Richard is essentially a dramatisation of Thomas More’s account of Richard III, written while More was in good odour with Henry VIII. With More’s account, Shakespeare fashioned one of the greatest villains in the English language. Tudor artists doctored likenesses along propagandistic lines – exaggerating Richard’s lopsided shoulders from scoliosis into the all-out “crookback” described by More. The precise truth about Richard III may be unknowable but it was surely more nuanced than this.

The Lost King, a recent dramatisation of the unearthing of Richard III in a Leicester car park, has not been without its controversy – one of the university officials depicted is considering suing over his portrayal. But it does suggest that such dramatisations can be done well today. Rather like the excellent The Dig (made, ironically, by Netflix) about the unearthing of Sutton Hoo, The Lost King portrays the discovery as a triumph of amateur history. A group of enthusiasts who identified something that the official channels weren’t so interested in, and pushed doggedly for its completion. It was a vindication of a noble British tradition; that of the self-taught “amateur”, encompassing Sutton Hoo archaeologist Basil Brown and the 19th-century fossil-hunter Mary Anning – both experts in their field yet marginalised by ivory-towered academics.

History is always a battle of competing narratives, and one of its joys is the democracy of it; how much is up for grabs. The discovery of Richard III’S body in that car park revived many long-standing debates; arguments even raged over his final resting place. Instead of Leicester, some argued that it should have been Westminster Abbey or York, where Richard III endowed chantries to his memory. Perhaps this is how things ought to be. In a world of intractable problems – war, ageing populations, a global refugee crisis – to expend a little harmless energy quibbling about long-ago events is one of life’s simple pleasures. And truth, after all, is the daughter of time.

With Richard III, however, there is at least some distance between then and now, and it comes after a long debate about the man (400 years and counting) none of which is true of The Crown. It is all too close; close enough to feel prurient and disrespectful of living people – and especially to an institution which, almost by definition, lacks a right of reply.