The Crown, season 6 episode 10, Sleep, Dearie Sleep, review: a bitter, mournful note to end on
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Sleep, Dearie, Sleep is the title of the piper’s lament played at Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022. The final episode of The Crown (Netflix) is set in 2005, but the Queen is preoccupied with her death. It makes for a gloomy end to a drama that once brought such pleasure. You sense that Peter Morgan, the writer, has become bogged down in the misery of it all.
It should be a joyful note on which to end: Charles and Camilla’s wedding day. Although the tone is set when he asks her to marry him: “Marry me. That’s not a proposal – I can’t do that without my mother’s permission.” Camilla looks terrified, and tries to change the subject to something less appalling: the war in Iraq.
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You can’t blame the Queen for contemplating her death in this episode, because her aides and military top brass announce that they need to start planning her funeral. They open a set of doors at the Palace to reveal a little room laid out with models of her funeral cortege. She bends down and looks at her tiny coffin on its tiny toy gun carriage. Later, she sighs: “My preference would be a quiet service in Scotland, out of sight and over in 20 minutes.”
Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) is having a terrible time of it, with crowds protesting about Iraq. The Queen tells him she’s not impressed. Charles (Dominic West) tells the Queen that Blair should step down but “that’s the thing – once people get a taste of life at the top they don’t want to leave.” Get the message, Mummy? Hmm?
Charles gives a speech about Camilla being marvellously loving and loyal, and points out that her ex-husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, was “serially unfaithful himself”. The Crown does go quite easy on Camilla, although in their wedding vows they have to repent their “manifold sins”.
Now we’re on to the Nazi business. Harry and William and their dreadful friends are shopping for fancy dress costumes. It’s a “colonials and natives” theme. William has gone all woke and says the theme is offensive. “You’re such an undergraduate now. You’d have never said that before you went to uni,” scoffs Harry, who picks out a Nazi uniform. Kate suggests he might like to cover up the swastika. When a picture duly turns up in the press, the Queen sighs: “Oh, Harry.” Charles throws his newspaper across the breakfast table. Harry says “f--k”. The Duke of Edinburgh says: “The uniform was inaccurate. The German Africa Corps never wore swastikas!”
As the Queen, Imelda Staunton spends most of the episode on the verge of self-pitying tears. What an awful character she has become in Morgan’s hands, just a miserable old woman with corn plasters on her feet and the uncertain future of the monarchy on her mind. In the stables, she has conversations with her younger selves – in the form of Olivia Colman and Claire Foy – about the way ahead. Colman tells her she always put duty before motherhood, and needs to retire. Foy says Charles isn’t up to it, so she needs to carry on. The Queen says the monarchy will be “decrepit”. But she soldiers on, trapped in a role she never wanted.
“What about the life I put aside? The woman I put aside when I became Queen?” she asks plaintively. “You buried her years ago,” says Foy.
The monarch gives a bright little speech at the wedding but then retreats into sadness and worry. At least Morgan gives her a touching moment with Philip, reminding us of the early days of their marriage.
Morgan doesn’t appear to have faith in the future of the monarchy. “The system makes no sense any more to those outside it nor to those of us inside it. We’re a dying breed, you and I,” says Philip. “I’m sure everyone will carry on pretending all is well, but the party’s over.” Did he really have such a dismal view of the future?
At the very end, the Queen walks alone through the hall towards a white light, her younger selves disappearing behind her. In fact, she lived for another 17 years during which, we should all hope, she found more contentment than she did in the later years of The Crown.
