Netflix’s The Crown has revolutionised the way we view the royal family, triangulating as it does between three competing sources: the truth, fiction and rumour. When we mourned the Queen last year, many of us, I think, will have intermixed memories of her from real life with the far more intimate and revealing portraits we got from The Crown. The royal family and their various hangers-on are burnished in the series by their place in a stream of narrative, the jagged edges of real life smoothed; they are summoned into life by a kind of communal act of magical thinking.
All of this, of course, presents a challenge for the royal biographer. We come to this family and their story with expectations of drama and revelation, entertainment and scandal. And yet it is a family that seeks – with a few notable exceptions – to maintain an air of haughty secretiveness, revealing as little as possible of its inner workings.
