‘The Crown’ Will End With Queen Camilla’s Triumph

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‘The Crown’ is good news for Camilla

After years of seething about the show, the royals may appreciate one of the positive upshots of the sixth and final season of The Crown ending in 2005. It’s the year of then-Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles’ wedding.

“People are always asking Peter (Morgan, the show’s creator and writer) if he’s going to write a sequel,” a source linked to the show told the Telegraph. “He doesn’t need to because those last five or six episodes bring you right up to the present day. You’re actually watching this rehabilitated Queen Camilla figure.”

The upcoming final season will be split into two parts—Princess Diana’s death, and the tumultuous events around it, and then what happened in its aftermath, including the mission to oversee Camilla’s public image rehabilitation (including the moment she and Charles were first photographed as a couple together outside the Ritz in 1999), and Queen Elizabeth’s longtime refusal to meet her.

Prince William ‘Totally Sickened’ by Princess Diana’s Ghost in ‘The Crown’

However, The Crown shows the queen ultimately toasting the couple at their wedding in 2005 in terms of top British horse race the Grand National, saying, “They have come through and I’m very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.”

Prince William, Prince Harry, and Kate Middleton are central to the final season’s drama too, Morgan has said. “In season 6, just the arrival of William and Kate and Harry is, so... It just blows the doors off, as it were, and you just wanna see them,” he said. “In the read-through when we were reading, you could just see everyone was just looking up and looking at each other across the room. And every time William spoke it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is just riveting.’”

Kate’s parents face ‘cruel’ poster campaign

Kate Middleton’s Carole and Michael are facing a “cruel” poster campaign after their party business Party Pieces went bust, the Sun reports. When it went belly up, the company had £2.6m ($3.1m) in debts.

“Malicious messages have been put up on lampposts and trees around the couple’s home village” of Bucklebury, the paper says, with their son James, who lives nearby with wife Alizee, seen tearing some of the posters down. Some Party Pieces suppliers if are still owed money, and want the Middletons to pay up out of their own pockets.

A source told the paper: “Carole and Michael are incredibly popular. Everyone is horrified by these posters. It’s unfair to do this in their home village, just yards from where they live. “Their son James lives nearby and so does Pippa who has moved around there recently with her family so they all have to be confronted by this. They are doing their best to make things right and don’t deserve this kind of abuse.”

Happy holidays

Meghan Markle said at a recent event that the only thing she puts above being a parent is being a wife, and she and Prince Harry are prioritizing some us-time this weekend having jetted off to Canouan, a tiny island in the Caribbean, without their children, Archie and Lilibet.

The couple were photographed by the Daily Mail on the island which it said is jokingly referred to as the spot where “billionaires go to escape millionaires.” Holiday packing seemed spot-on with Meghan seen wearing an ivory Chloe maxi dress and panama hat, while Harry slouched it up in a t-shirt and cargo shorts.

Canouan Island is part of St. Vincent & The Grenadines. It boasts a branch of Soho House, the members club of which Harry and Meghan are patrons, where the Mail speculates they might be staying. An onlooker told the Mail: “They looked happy. As Harry walked out of the shop, he slightly bumped into one of the barrels [outside] and they both giggled and Meghan reached for his hand. They just looked very happy to be having a holiday together.”

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Take five

Princess Eugenie married her beau Jack Brooksbank five years ago and this week posted an adorable Instagram video celebrating the anniversary, including some flashback footage from October 2018 wedding.

Eugenie also posted an image of her and Jack and their two children, August (2) and Ernest (4) on a beach. The family now live in Portugal. The clip had a musical accompaniment to the tune of “You’ve Got the Love” by Florence and the Machine.

Sweet and sour

A rather heartbreaking reminder of the beloved terms in which Harry and William once held each other has emerged in the form of a Christmas Day menu from Sandringham House, featuring a message sent by a young Harry to his brother. Harry’s message reads “William, what are you talking about? Sign back.” The unruly scrawl, written in pencil, is in stark contrast to the formality of the menu for the 1993 Christmas buffet, which featured dishes such as filet of beef, foie gras, beef tongue, York ham and smoked turkey.

It is printed in French and adorned with the queen’s cipher. Harry would have been nine and William 11, and their parents were still married. The menu is understood to be the only known example of Harry’s hand­writing to come up for sale. A memorabilia expert was quoted by the Sun as saying: “This is absolutely genuine and a very interesting historical item that illustrates how close William and Harry were growing up.”

Royal biographer Ingrid Seward said: “This is very sweet and shows that the princes were having fun at a rather stuffy evening meal. But I look at it with a tinge of sadness as it shows that they were close and were allies, in a real contrast to their current relationship.”

Secrets of Edward VIII

Exciting news for followers of the saga of Edward VIII, the king who abdicated the throne for Wallis Simpson, and has been widely portrayed as a Nazi sympathizer.

American actor and archival specialist Jane Marguerite Tippett is to publish a new book based on what the Telegraph calls an “extraordinary treasure trove of forgotten documents” including an early draft of his memoir, which, Tippet suggests, has a lot of the juicy stuff in it that was ultimately left out of the published version, his 1951 memoir, A King’s Story.

Tippett cleverly checked the archive of Charles J.V. Murphy, a US journalist at Time magazine, who worked as ghostwriter for the Duke of Windsor, as he became known after abdicating. “As soon as I sat down in front of the material, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. She found the first draft of the memoir, and “hundreds of pages of transcriptions of conversations between Murphy and the Duke.”

Tippett says: “It was all new material. How, I kept asking myself, could it not have been found before. My heart was racing.”

She will publish a book based on the new material later this year, titled Once A King. Among the documents she found were papers written between 1936 and 1947, which include Edward VIII’s visits to Nazi Germany. Tippett says: “They contain raw thoughts, comments and emotions, that were never meant to get out anywhere near the public space. We will never hear as directly from the Duke and Duchess as we do in this material. That is why for me it is unprecedented.”

This week in royal history

Happy birthday Fergie! Sarah, Duchess of York, ex-wife of (and still best buddies with) Prince Andrew, was born on October 15, 1959 in Marylebone, London.

Unanswered questions

Why does the royal family get so steamed up about The Crown when the show consistently shows them in a nuanced, open-minded, relatively sympathetic light? It certainly takes them far more seriously than the institution’s fiercest detractors.

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