When it comes to their media image, things could be worse for the House of Windsor. Last week, the fifth Netflix season of The Crown began after an overture of outrage deploring the drama’s distortion or fabrication of various episodes in royal history during the Nineties. While former premiers (John Major and Tony Blair) rail against the “malicious nonsense” and “complete rubbish” in the scripts, few champions of the “Firm” have paused to reflect that, even now, the royals enjoy a smoother ride than many of their ancestors.

James Gillray’s 1791 print “Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14”, described above, added one more acid drop to the flood of satirical engravings that lampooned the Hanoverian monarchy — along with other pillars of the ruling class — between 1780 and 1820. In this “golden age of caricature”, with Gillray, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson as its lords of misrule, palace misconduct and political intrigue unleashed a level of obscene ridicule that makes the snide smears of The Crown’s lead writer Peter Morgan feel like the softest of touches.

Yet a glib contrast between Georgian ferocity and 21st-century gentility will only take us so far. The stance of the shape-shifting Gillray, in particular, is famously hard to pin down. Tim Clayton’s definitive new study of the artist, James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire, notes that his “ambiguous, enigmatic” pen means that “it is rare in mature Gillray for either side to be entirely right or wrong”. Is “Hopes of the Party” an awful warning against the sanguinary horrors of French Revolutionary radicalism (Gillray engraved it two years after the Bastille fell, but before the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette)? Or could it be interpreted as a parody of reactionary scare-mongering, a jibe at whipped-up alarms about the rotund Whig leader Charles James Fox — who features as George’s III’s executioner, while his gaunt Tory foe William Pitt dangles from that rope — and his reformist comrades? Proper satire slices both ways: different strokes for different folks.

Yes, Gillray and his colleagues could be brutal. In “A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion”, the bloated, gluttonous Prince of Wales recovers from his vices with an overflowing chamber-pot and bottles of pox-pills behind him. Chamber pots, in fact, became something of a running gag with Gillray. In “Lubber’s Hole — Or — the Crack’d Jordan” (“jordan” was slang for a chamber-pot), the future William IV, then Duke of Clarence, dives through a suggestive gash into a giant receptacle that represents his long-term mistress, the actress Dorothea Jordan. Even when he opted for an epic style, Gillray might be gross. In “Sin, Death and the Devil”, which alludes in his richly inter-textual way to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the wrinkled-breasted, Gorgon-haired Queen Charlotte intercedes in a fight between the naked Pitt and Thurlow (a rival minister), with her hand clasped over Pitt’s genitals. Although that particular scene did apparently give offence to King and Queen, the rudeness — and crudeness — of the “Prince of Caricatura” and his epoch can never be mapped neatly onto anti-Hanoverian attitudes.

Indeed, Gillray’s portrayals of George III and his consort as cheese-paring peasant bumpkins — as in “Frying Sprats, Toasting Muffins” — edged into outright affection. Gillray’s heyday coincided not with a fall but a rise in the royal household’s popularity after the débâcle of the American Revolution. When the widely-welcomed revolt against elite injustices in France turned regicidal and expansionist after 1792, the cross-Channel threat rallied sceptics to the House of Hanover. In “Anti-Saccharrites”, the frugal King is urging sugar-less tea on his daughters not simply to cut costs but as a blow against the West Indian slave trade. What “a Noble Example of Oeconomy”! And in Gillray’s master-stroke of loyalist toilet humour, “The French Invasion — Or — John Bull Bombarding the Bum-boats”, sturdy patriotism and poo gags reach a joint apotheosis. George III has morphed into the map of Britain itself (although he still wears a dunce’s cap in the shape of Northumberland) as he craps majestically — from somewhere around Lyme Regis — all over the hapless French fleet. As Tim Clayton puts it: “The daubs of the caricaturist produced no contempt for ‘Farmer George and his wife.’”

Suggested reading

Was Prince Philip a womaniser?

By Tessa Dunlop

Never mistake vulgarity for venom. Partisans both of the Windsors and the digital dukes of Netflix (a new elite if ever there was one) should reflect that mere rudeness about royals, however scurrilous or scatological, might not weaken monarchy itself. Critique, mockery and caricature — dim, cheapskate kings, randy, farting princes, blowsy mistresses and all — could leave the institution intact if the idea behind it remained robust. The flawed royal person (in Gillray’s time, that meant above all George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent and, at long last, George IV) might guzzle, booze, schmooze, fornicate and plunder at will. But if the core faith in monarchy held, an artist’s vitriol-tipped burin would not in itself corrode the crown.

For much of the audience could still separate frail individual from sacred office. The medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies — one fallible and mortal, the other an impersonal “body politic” — just about survived in many minds. In his terrific book on London in the great age of satire, City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell argues that star caricaturists “didn’t aim to influence the common people, still less to subvert the monarchical principle”. Besides, mockery usually shadows flattery. Dr Johnson dreaded the time when his name would cease to provoke “calumny or ridicule… for then I would be neglected and forgotten”.

Once the firm hold of an ideal starts to slip, however, and the public no longer accepts a necessary gap between person and principle, then even mild and oblique sniping, Netflix-style, may take a toll. In a disenchanted time, private life and public role have to align. Of course, the player in the royal show who best grasped — and acted on — that insight was the late Elizabeth II. Whereas the politician who has most shamelessly tried to revive in his favour an ancient distinction between the errant human being and the august office-holder who “got all the big calls right” was none other than Boris Johnson. Now there’s a target for some Gillray Redux.

More from this author

Annie Ernaux: queen of the suburbs

By Boyd Tonkin

Gillray, Cruikshank and co. assaulted the royal family but not the royal function. In the age of Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, real revolutionaries certainly did the latter. The circles of the graphic satirists seldom overlapped with theirs, although in the 1810s the Cruikshank brothers would forge stronger radical links. However, even the implacable George Cruikshank fell prudently silent on royal matters after a paltry-sounding royal bribe in 1820.

In 1797, Gillray himself had taken a £200 pension from the Tories while remaining a “deniable” loose cannon. For many years he lived and worked in St James’s Street, in the belly of the Establishment beast. He would have spotted his victims en route to club, town-house or palace. Some called in to buy the sort of prints that depicted them as grotesque bags of piss, pus and wind. Fox himself — the engraver’s beloved bugbear over many years — dropped by to purchase a portrayal of himself as a swarthy, sinister Jacobin insurrectionist (“A Meeting of Unfortunate Citoyens”). He left Hannah Humphrey (Gillray’s landlady, publisher and chaste life-partner) with a cheery “Good morning to you”. The Prince of Wales himself made sure that lackeys came in to buy successive caricatures of his flabby royal personage. There were many of those. Between 1803 and 1810, the Prince’s establishment at Carlton House spent £57 (a lot) on Gillray prints of their master as a preposterous balloon of lust and greed. Sometimes, he just wanted them taken off the market. But vanity loves even a distorting mirror.

You might say that the surface cruelty of Gillray’s time masked an underlying kindness, or at least solidarity. The royal satirists wanted to rock the boat but not to sink the ship. Whereas The Crown lavishes an unctuous, pseudo-respectful concern on its characters (Morgan has called the series a “love-letter” to the late Queen) while not caring too much if it does its bit to send the yacht of monarchy beneath the waves. You may think that a desirable outcome. If so, then the comic hyperbole of Gillray and Cruikshank would offer a more honest mode for hostile royal soap-opera than Netflix’s gear-crashing blend of fancily-written tittle-tattle with boring slabs of po-faced court reportage for “balance”.

More from this author

Kingsley Amis vs God

By Boyd Tonkin

At the high noon of caricature, ribaldry and reverence could rub along together. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s slide from liberator to despot (brilliantly chronicled by Gillray himself) handily blocked the path in many British minds that might have led from burlesque to the barricades. In any case, chortles tend to limit theoretical critique. As Clayton says of prints such as Gillray’s “Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials”, with the Turkish ambassador pointing a long phallic scroll at the royal couple as Pitt the pet monkey cowers at their feet, “they induce laughter, not hatred”. Even (especially?) at their rudest, Georgian and Regency graphic satires have a strong flavour of Carry on up the Throne-room.

Their artists’ slaps and digs bruised Hanoverian flesh but broke no vital bones. Once the tide turned in the direction of reform and respectability in the 1820s and 1830s, memories of the debauched Prince Regent and his idle clan did nothing to stop the emergence of Victoria and Albert as discreet, bourgeois monarchs for an increasingly discreet, bourgeois nation. Today, in contrast, the simpering faux compassion of The Crown has neither the candour of a principled aversion to royalty nor the coherence of a principled defence. Gillray and the satire squad’s tough love did not kill the monarchy; arguably, they made it stronger. In contrast, the unaccountable plutocracy at Netflix want to stifle it in a long, slow, sickly kiss of death.

Christopher Hitchens, that unthinking man’s iconoclast, once called her “an averagely-volatile woman from a disadvantaged family”. He was almost being nice, but like so many others, he only really used her as an excuse to tell hideous anecdotes. Craig Brown published a whole book that pasted together the worst stories that people recorded about her in their diaries. It was a sure and sorry way to ensure your letters were published after you were gone: put in an anecdote about Princess Margaret being difficult or looking, as Nancy Mitford had it, “excessively common”.

Remember, these are not tabloid reports. This isn’t the rough and tumble of a free press. We are quoting public intellectuals. Despite Margaret being awful, as they saw it — trashy and appalling, rude and condescending, and, frankly, low brow — the elites found her irresistible. Few of us are too classy for gossip, too clever to mock an appearance instead of imagining what lies beneath it. Margaret’s punishment for projecting upper-class indifference, privileged selfishness, is to be seen as more of a soap-opera character than a woman. Perhaps that says more about us than her.

Her husband, horrible bully that he was, once set her dress on fire. “Good thing too, I hate that material,” he said. To which Margaret replied: “Material is a word we do not use. We call it stuff.” This sort of thing gets held up as inexhaustible snobbishness. Really, it’s a stiff upper lip, splendid resilience in the face of abuse. And anyway, can’t we live with a little high handedness in our princesses? Consider her nephew’s current reputation and Margaret’s blue-blooded insistence on calling scrambled eggs buttered eggs starts to look rather appealing. It’s a small price to pay for a stable and enduring monarchy: that a king’s daughter’s might occasionally be too royal.

Suggested reading

The moral confusion of MeToo

By Helen Thompson

But living off the public purse makes you fair game for voyeuristic bitching: there is an assumed public ownership of Royal lives. The story of Margaret and the Queen, along with the Queen Mother, getting the giggles when T. S. Eliot read The Waste Land at Buckingham Palace is often reference to show what a bunch of philistines the Royal Family is — as if Modernist poetry has anything to do with constitutional monarchy. (And as if most of the rest of us wouldn’t have done the same. Eliot was a terrible reader.) When people enjoy that story, I am reminded of the painter Francis Bacon, who once booed Margaret off stage at a party because her singing wasn’t very good; the poor woman ran out in tears. Somehow when you are born into the Royal cage, many intelligent people think it is acceptable, maybe even clever, to treat you like you’re an animal.

People like Christopher Hitchens did this because they had a bigger target: the institution of monarchy. He could happily paint the Windsors as emotionless bastards without caring very much about their so-called victims. But the old saw about Margaret being the lamb sacrificed for the good of The Firm needs investigating. It fits the narrative of heartless Hanovarians to say that the Princess wasn’t allowed to marry Peter Townsend out of cruelty or myopic traditionalism or whatever. It’s a simplification, though, to see it as a case of the establishment crushing young love for the sake of expediency.

Sarah Bradford reports a friend saying “Princess Margaret was very religious, much more than you would think”. Yes, her desire to marry a divorcé was a moral and constitutional dilemma: the Queen was the head of a church that didn’t allow such things. But in the story about the institutional thwarting the individual, Margaret and her feelings have been ignored. As Bradford says: “Asked whether, as the general public perceived it, she had been sacrificed on the altar of the monarchy, the queen’s private secretary replied simply, ‘She sacrificed herself’.”

More from this author

The snake who saved the monarchy

By Henry Oliver

Margaret defies the stereotype, then, of a selfish, useless celebrity. Jonathan Freedland once said of her: “Five decades before Paris Hilton, there was the current Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret — an object of glamour and gossip, permanently on vacation, internationally famous yet achieving nothing at all.” (If only she had written book reviews for the New York Review of Books!) If you are more interested in bourgeois tattle-rags than humdrum duties, it’s easy to share his view that she did nothing at all. But in reality, Margaret was a great charity worker. She was a patron of the London Lighthouse, an AIDs charity more famous for its association with Princess Diana, and she used to visit patients there and make them laugh. (She did her work without any media attention and before Princess Diana was involved.)

Margaret’s friend Lady Glenconner had a son with AIDs at the height of the epidemic; Margaret turned up and gave the boy a big hug as if nothing had changed. But while Diana was hugely — rightly — praised for shaking AIDs patients’ hands, Margaret remained in the shadows. Of course, Margaret didn’t want attention for her good works, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them.

In the stories told about Margaret, style so often comes before substance. It’s easy to use anecdotes to make someone look bad, but there are plenty of stories that make Margaret seem not just nice but remarkably normal — the opposite of the character drawn by gossipy republicans. Gore Vidal reported how he and she once saved a number of bees from drawing in a swimming pool at Windsor. “Go forth and make honey,” the charming and humorous Princess said, in what Vidal called “a powerful Hanoverian voice”. When she visited Lady Glenconner, she would do her friend’s hair and lay fires in the grates. On these visits, she showered out of a bucket, ate tinned food, and went scrambling up mountains. Away from people who were desperate to say something shocking and scathing about her, Margaret appears to have been quite ordinary. Likeable, even.

Suggested reading

It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

One of the few people who seems to really understand Margaret is the biographer Selina Hastings, who said that the Princess,

“looked at the world outside between the bars of her extremely comfortable cage. She was inquisitive and she was courageous, and sometimes she ventured halfway out. But the moment it looked as though there may be difficulties, back she flew into her cage, slamming the door behind her.”

Margaret was forced into public life, and when she was expected to accept people’s offensive intrusions into her life, she sometimes refused. She wasn’t perfect; but she was goaded and cornered. As Ferdinand Mount said, “being ghastly is so much expected of her that it becomes her party piece”.

Craig Brown called her life “Cinderella in reverse”, in a classic example of our inability to see Margaret as anything but a character out of a story. “Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting,” he wrote. He could have been talking about all the journalists, biographers, diarists, and so on, who used her to fill their pages.

Margaret, unlike Cinderella, was never destined to be a queen; she was first and foremost a sister. There was a constant, silent presence in her public life — a gold standard of decorum — against which she was judged. Elizabeth and Margaret are, like Kate and Meghan, presented as stereotyped female opposites: the good wife and the wayward celebrity, the modest Queen and the flagrant Princess. Such reductions make for a lonely life.

For Margaret, this perpetual isolation began at her sister’s coronation. According to Sarah Bradford, Margaret had “very mixed feelings because I adored my father and he was dead and yet I felt I had to be pleased for Lillibet being crowned Queen though I knew that in a way I’d lost her.” She was only 23 when that happened.

Typified by its remarkable tendency to sound both sincere and insincere simultaneously, this Sussex-ese appeared again in a separate news story this week. “[We are] saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma,” the author wrote. “She is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good.”

No doubt you will have guessed by now how Sussex-ese was given its name. Both of the above statements come from the House of Sussex, specifically from the spokesperson for the Duchess of Sussex and/or the Duchess herself. And I suspect that they won’t be the last — by all accounts, Sussex-ese is here to stay.

As tempting as it may be, it is not enough to dismiss the House of Sussex’s latest statements as bland, sub-Obama pabulum. They almost always have a certain twist of their own; a style which suggests that Harry and, more importantly, Meghan are not only surprised, but almost amazed that anybody might think ill of them. Excerpts from the couple’s upcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey only confirm this.

More from this author

Pity poor oppressed Prince Harry

By Douglas Murray

History is, of course, rife with examples of princes and their spouses expressing their distaste with the lèse-majesté of their critics. But what’s different about Sussex-ese is that it is a creation born not from the Duke’s blue blood, so much as the couple’s unquestionably golden intentions. And as a result, a very modern form of deference is demanded: do not criticise me, for I am doing much good in the world.

Take the first quote above. It relates to the Duchess’s recent successful privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, which published excerpts of a private letter sent by Meghan to her estranged father. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that, even if she weren’t a former actress, the relationship between the wife of the person sixth in line to the British throne and her father is a matter of public interest. You would, however, be wrong — at least that’s the implication of the judge’s decision to halt the trial before witnesses could be called.

But even if you agree with Lord Justice Warby, it is hard to see how “we all won” because of it.  For example, you may not approve of the type of prurient Royal-watcher who wishes to know every detail of the Duchess’s life, but clearly those people don’t view the verdict as a “win”. More importantly, though, there is something deeply unsavoury about the attempt to extrapolate Meghan’s personal victory into a universal one, particularly since most people will never be in a position remotely analogous to the one in which the Sussexes find themselves.

The same can also be said of their response this week to accusations that Meghan bullied two royal aides out of Kensington Palace. Perhaps anticipating that the Sussex’s Oprah interview will show everyone but Harry and Meghan in a bad light, the bullying story may well have been a pre-emptive defence of sorts from London.

Suggested article

Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

Either way, the nature of the Sussexes’ response — talking about how “saddened” they are — was entirely in fitting with the sanctimonious language used by so many public figures today. What is uncommon, however, is for a person of such power as Meghan to deflect the harm caused to her alleged victims by stressing her own victim-credentials.

This is exactly what the Duchess does by saying that she has been “the target of bullying herself”. And, of course, this Sussex-ese makes almost no sense. There is no reason why someone who has been bullied cannot themselves be a bully; in fact, we’re constantly told the opposite. Yet it isn’t until the claim at the end of the statement that the Sussex-ese becomes completely overpowering. We must assume that the Sussexes have some idea, at least, of statements put out in their name. So how could they possibly allow a statement that claims Meghan “is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world” to be published? Try it for yourself. If a person asked if they could describe you as a person who is busy building “compassion around the world”, would you not turn around and suggest that it could be toned down a bit?

That isn’t to say that the Duchess has had an inconsequential career. But appearing in Suits, marrying a Prince and starting a podcast are eccentric ways to make the world a better place — let alone “set an example”. Indeed, what kind of person honestly believes that everyone should look to them as a beacon “for doing what is right and doing what is good”? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury wouldn’t claim such moral authority.

Unfortunately, the rise of Sussex-ese suggests that the Sussexes have drifted away not just from the world that created them but, particularly in the case of Harry, from the world that grounded them. The type of service embodied in both the army and the Royal family is such that you should not have to say that you are saving the world.

Suggested article

Prince Harry is royal Kryptonite

By Mary Harrington

And as we can now see, when you do bestow that authority on yourself, your inevitable failure is made all the more bitter. For if the latest bullying allegations are true, they will serve as very public proof that the Duchess of Sussex has failed at her own self-appointed mission. You cannot spread love, compassion and understanding around the world if you are cruel and bullying to the people around you — especially those who are, in hierarchy terms, unquestionably below you.

And that is why the creation of Sussex-ese was never going to be convincing. People do not like being told what to do, think or feel by people they do not admire. As working royals, the Sussexes accumulated a certain amount of respect — but that all vanished when they gave up a life of duty for one that enables them to preach from a number of well-remunerated platforms.

If anything, all Sussex-ese does is allow Harry and Meghan to remain blissfully unaware of their fall from grace. It means that the Sussexes can continue to tell us how to “all win”, how to be good and how to save the world, oblivious to the fact that the further away from royal life they drift, the less moral authority they have. And therein lies the irony of it all: that in trying to escape the Firm, the Sussexes have ended up demanding more deference and behaving with more grandiosity than any British royal for generations.

For all our chippiness and our tendency towards Scottish exceptionalism (I dare you to buy a 73-year-old Scotsman a pint and ask him to list the achievements of our scientists and inventors) we’re not, I daresay, so very different from our neighbours south of the border. Just as is the case in England, Scottish society is built on a bedrock of small-c conservatism. The majority of us are not the radicals of contemporary myth but traditionalists, suspicious of sudden change.

And so it is not entirely surprising that a majority of Scots remain, for now, in favour of the Monarchy.

The Queen, if not every member of her family, retains the respect of most Scots. Crowds may be depended upon to appear whenever she is north of the border. When she is in residence at Balmoral, the route to Crathie Kirk in nearby Ballater will be lined with locals who see her as one of their own. A publicised visit to Holyrood Palace at the foot of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile provokes similar interest, with tourists and locals alike gathering in the hope that they might catch a glimpse of the monarch.

It helps that the Queen has never been backward about describing her love of Scotland. Visiting the Scottish Parliament to mark its 20th anniversary in June of this year, she described her “great affection” for Scotland and spoke of “the many happy and personal connections I enjoy with this wonderful country.”

It is safe to say that among those listening to Her Majesty from the cheap seats that day were MSPs — particularly those from the SNP, the Labour Party, and the Greens — who do not reciprocate these feelings. There is a strong vein of republicanism running through Scottish political life. It is only the caution of mainstream political leaders which prevents much discussion about the matter. The findings of UnHerd’s survey, showing that Scots are not as enthusiastic about the continuation of the monarchy as our neighbours south of the border, will come as encouraging news to many elected members.

Suggested reading

Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Back in 2004, when Alex Salmond returned to the leadership of the SNP for a second stint, he and his team created a new story of Scottish nationalism. Out went the Braveheart rhetoric and in came a more widely palatable narrative. Basically, everything would change with independence but it would also, somehow, stay the same. The radical break up of the United Kingdom would not seem like the nationalists overturning centuries of tradition.

Crucial to this story was Salmond’s effusive support for the monarchy. He spoke enthusiastically about the Queen’s role in an independent Scotland; she would, he said, be proud to be its monarch.

Scotland is changing, and quickly. Politicians have long since abandoned the pretence that theirs is a battle between Right and Left. Rather, the fight now is between two visions (or fantasies, depending on your taste for populism) of how the country might be. For the (slender) majority of Scots, the country’s future is more secure as part of the Union. For nationalists, nipping at the heels of Unionists, a radical shake-up is required.

Suggested reading

Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

Cautious senior figures in the SNP will continue to publicly support the monarchy. The future of the monarchy, one tells me, is not a discussion worth risking right now. But the results of the survey — which show approval and disapproval of the monarchy equally split in some areas of the country — might reveal the existence of a ticking time bomb.

Not so very long ago, you could say with certainty that the vast majority of Scots would continue to vote Labour until the day they died. Now, the party languishes behind the SNP and the Conservatives in the polls. Nothing is set in stone.

Scotland may not yet be ready to discuss the abolition of the monarchy but with radical voices urging the SNP to be bolder in its approach to breaking up the union, it would be unsurprising to hear more republican voices emerge in our national debate. Should Scotland become independent, a debate on the future of the monarchy would be unavoidable.

One veteran SNP politician tells me that the outcome of that discussion may hinge on who is at the head of “the firm” at such a time:

“Nobody at the top of the party is going to agitate to get rid of the Queen. But if someone else is in charge, there may be a debate to be had in an independent Scotland.”

There might not yet be an insatiable appetite among Scots to ditch the monarchy but, as the findings of the UnHerd survey show, the Royals are endured rather than admired by a great many of us.

The first season opened, nine years ago, with the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the loss of the Abbey’s heir. If this was a metaphor for the withering of the British aristocracy, Downton Abbey did not follow through. Neither did reality: the aristocracy are still more important than they should be, although they try to hide it, usually by appearing to be very stupid. Self-interested self-deprecation has replaced a sword. So they cower politely, because it suits them.

More from this author

Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

It is decadent to watch television that details a nation’s oblivious self-hatred, but Americans do it often. In the superhero film genre they cannot stop imagining their own mass deaths. It is as if they long for it to happen and cannot stop imagining how exactly they will die, and how they will feel.

In Britain we are more subtle but only slightly; instead of alien raids and broken cities we imagine a class system we should be happy to see wither return in full pomp: a happy nation under a benevolent aristocrat, who may assume a faint anxiety disorder, should he be seen to be enjoying it too much. We wear social democracy much too lightly here, and that is a problem, for there is no functional hagiography for that. Marvel at the viewing figures for Downton Abbey – 13m at their height – and you would barely believe it exists at all.

I wonder, rather, if the programme and its impersonators did not contribute to the miasma of snobbery, nostalgia and brutality that encouraged Brexit, and made parliament a mockery, while the Queen sits inside a 72% approval rating. I think it is dangerous. Dream of a toy feudal state and it might eventually appear to greet you.

The trailer rolled out like a dream sequence from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s brain. There will be a royal visit to Downton Abbey, in case there is not, already, enough nobility inside Charles Barry’s mouldering Highclere Castle, which is Downton Abbey. (Barry also made the Palace of Westminster, but the Abbey is in rather better shape these days.) There is gay bunting, merry villagers, and servants in silly costumes looking grateful for the opportunity to serve.

“Welcome your Majesties,” says Lady Crawley (Elizabeth McGovern), curtseying low enough to meet the servants on the way back up. The butler Mr Carson (Jim Carter) returns from semi-retirement in an idealised tied cottage to save – I am presuming, but I would bet money on it – the royal dinner party. He will hold the class system up, by himself if needs be.

Suggested reading

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

The creator of Downton Abbey is Julian Kitchener-Fellowes, who once played Lord Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen, which was an affable Scottish precursor to Downton Abbey. He was made a real lord for services to costume drama — again I presume — in 2011, with the motto post proelia praemia: After Battle Comes Reward. Battles, as master propagandists have noted, are not fought where they used to be.

When Kitchener-Fellowes is not writing, he is scheming for his wife Emma to inherit an earldom; so much so, that when Lynn Barber in an interview suggested that Emma become a man to inherit, he appeared to seriously consider it.

His worship of nobility is real. And so his Lord Crawley — Hugh Bonneville taking avuncular to some sort of awful nadir — is a kindly landlord who, among other nonsensical acts of altruism that would shame his fictional ancestors, saves his cook Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) from blindness. He married his (American) wife for money — that much of Downton Abbey is true — but he had the good manners to fall in love with her afterwards. Or was it embarrasment?

His angst aside, the lesson of Downton Abbey is that the class system exists for our benefit, even if aristocrats let Labradors emote for them, and that is a tragedy, but only for them, and without it we would become meaningless and tiny in the world. Its lesson is — we are children, and we should look to others to take care of us.

Kitchener-Fellowes is not alone in polishing the class system; others who should know better do it too, and much too well for comfort.

Suggested reading

Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

The Crown, for instance, now entering series 3 — the boring years of the Queen’s reign, between creamy ingenue and ancient sorceress — is funded by Netflix and written by Peter Morgan. It is clever propaganda — you pity Elizabeth Mountbatten as she becomes Elizabeth Regina — but the best propaganda is clever: state your allegiance too baldly, and you will not carry your befugged audience with you.

The Crown repeats the myth that Elizabeth II is a selfless, unusually kind woman who would rather not wear the burden of the crown. (Shakespeare wrote in this vein too. It is the familiar line of the propagandist, whether William Shakespeare or Julian Kitchener-Fellowes. You can get away with anything if people think you are doing it for their sakes). The object of devotion is sacred, and reluctant; of the impact of monarchy on others — on us, still lurking underneath all this gilded misery — you learn nothing. There is a parallel narrative but you rarely hear it publicly; it is as if we are asleep. Prince Andrew is the principal argument for this parallel narrative, but we are too unconscious to listen.

Morgan actually meets members of the royal household to describe each new piece of hagiography, which is a gruesome fate for such a fine writer. I can only imagine that, like so many biographers before him, he has fallen in love with his subject, and longs for her approval; but the British Establishment, which watched almost every other crown in Europe fall, has always worked like that. It gathers talent to itself – for what damage might it do outside?

“Respectfully,” Morgan says, “I tell them what I have in mind and they brace themselves slightly.” I doubt that. I wonder, rather, if when Morgan leaves, they perform high fives.

Morgan’s art is monarchist; he also said that Tobias Menzies’ performance as Elizabeth’s consort, “will do a lot of good for Prince Philip. Because Prince Philip is not considered a complex person.” There is a reason for that.

Elizabeth II, meanwhile, will be played by Olivia Coleman with her Academy Award for Queen Anne in The Favourite – she moved from Queen to Queen. It was the fifth Academy Award for an English monarch in the guise of an actor. There was Colin Firth for George VI, the founder of the reluctant monarch myth; Helen Mirren for Elizabeth II; Judi Dench for Elizabeth I; and Katharine Hepburn for Queen Eleanor.

This happens so often I wonder if it is hereditary monarchy they are rewarding.

Suggested reading

How 'The Favourite' failed Queen Anne

By Polly Mackenzie

That creators of art — but not Kitchener-Fellowes, the Conservative peer, of course — usually consider themselves progressive makes it all the more ludicrous that the shared national culture they create is, in spirit, centuries old. I await an homage to the Plantagenets, with emphasis on their cracked inter-personal relationships.

I do not suggest that social democracy is not valued because people watch Downton Abbey. I suspect is more likely that they watch Downton Abbey because they do not value social democracy as they should, and instead, dream backwards to a time when things were simpler – and worse.