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It’s time for our final recap of The Crown for the season! Today, we’ve got a deep dive on the jewels and history shown in the final episode of season three, “Cri de Coeur.” (Missed any of my previous recaps? You can find them all here!)

We begin at Kensington Palace. The Queen has arrived in pearls and zero brooches to visit her sister, Princess Margaret.

Margaret’s not looking good. She and Tony have been fighting again — not bickering, but knock-down-drag-out stuff. Tony’s been cheating on her.

We see Tony with his latest lover, Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, on their way to his home in Sussex. (Tony’s relationship with Lucy, who became his second wife, reportedly began in 1972.) We’re not the only ones who spot him — Margaret’s friend and lady-in-waiting, Lady Anne Tennant, sees them, too.

Anne tells Margaret what she’s seen. Margaret’s a little blasé about the whole thing. She’s certain they’ll never get divorced. (We get a quick time locator in this scene, as the television in the background is showing general election results, which means that it’s February 28, 1974.)

Over breakfast the next morning, the Queen wears something that looks suspiciously like a brooch but I think is probably just a button. (Sigh.) Philip goes on and on about the election results. Ted Heath’s party has lost seats, they’re heading for a hung parliament, and it looks like Harold Wilson will be back as PM. The Queen, however, is distracted and worried about Margaret, who is celebrating a birthday soon. (The show’s version of Margaret must need a lot of advanced planning for her birthday celebrations, as the election was held in February, and Margaret’s birthday was in August!)

At Kensington Palace, the royal family gathers for a dinner to celebrate Margaret’s birthday. We’ve got an interesting depiction of the family here. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester are both present, which would have been a tough get, as the Duke died in June 1974! Also present are the Duke and Duchess of Kent (played by actors who appeared earlier this season) and a whole bunch of other unknown faces — presumably Prince Richard of Gloucester, Princess Alexandra, Angus Ogilvy, etc. It’s not totally clear who’s supposed to be who.

The Queen’s talking about how happy she is that Wilson is back as PM, wearing a rather inexpensive looking necklace and earrings.

Prince Philip and the Queen Mother (wearing pearls and an invented ribbon brooch) are amused.

You’ll note that there’s a piece of jewelry in Princess Anne’s hair as she talks with the reanimated corpse of the Duke of Gloucester.

Margaret’s not looking particularly lively herself, to be honest. She uses the opportunity to declare to everyone that it’s time to give the cut direct to her wandering husband.

The Queen is concerned. Everybody else takes the opportunity to talk about how much they like Tony, which ticks Margaret off royally.

She’s thoroughly disgusted, but she’s at least wearing some interesting jewels. The necklace looks cheap as chips, but the earrings are interesting, if a bit modern in design. We know for sure that Helena Bonham Carter wore her own jewelry in some of the scenes from this season, and I’m curious to know whether that’s the case with these earrings.

While everyone else is toasting his wife, Tony is all snuggled up with Lucy at his home in Sussex. She’s hopeful he’ll marry her, but he tells her that will never happen. Their only hope, they think, is for Margaret to fall in love with somebody else.

Margaret is in dire need of a change of scenery, and she jumps at Lady Anne’s offer to stay with the Tennants for a house party at the Glen.

She is not doing particularly well on arrival.

By the pool, Anne tries to convince her that it’s time she went ahead and had an affair of her own. (By all accounts, Margaret had already begun dabbling in extramarital liaisons far before this, with one affair reportedly happening as early as 1966.) Margaret is uninterested in the prospects before her — until she spots one man in particular.

It’s Roddy Llewelyn, a young (as in almost two decades younger than her!) landscape gardener from a Welsh aristocratic family. Margaret wants him to swim with her, but there’s a problem: he doesn’t have swimming trunks.

They solve the issue with a shopping trip. Margaret’s famous ruby engagement ring and gold wedding ring are both on prominent display in this scene, as well as several other moments during the episode. They’re being used as symbols of her uneasiness over breaking her marriage vows.

Uneasiness aside, and trunks procured, Margaret and Roddy splash about in the pool. Margaret keeps her gold earrings and necklace on.

Later, they entertain the house party with a song and dance routine. The production’s entire brooch budget for the season must have been blown on this floral bauble for Roddy. (A historical note: Roddy and Margaret were indeed introduced by the Tennants, but it reportedly happened in September 1973.)

Meanwhile, at Windsor Castle, Tony has come to see his sister-in-law. He arrives bearing gifts.

One is a photograph of Claire Foy and Matt Smith. Memories!

The other is a whole bunch of memorabilia prototypes for the Queen’s upcoming Silver Jubilee. He’s particularly enthused about the tea towel.

But the Queen doesn’t want to chat about merch — she wants to talk about marriage. She admonishes him for the way he’s been hurting Margaret, but then he breaks the news to her that Margaret is doing a little illicit canoodling of her own.

Margaret, gold jewelry in tow, flies with Roddy to her favorite getaway: the island of Mustique, which is owned by the Tennants. (Their first visit together took place in February 1974; they traveled to the island together several times over the next few years.)

They arrive at Les Jolies Eaux, her home on the island. The land was a wedding gift from Colin Tennant, and Margaret sniffs that it’s ironic that her husband hates the place.

We’re treated to a montage of Vacation Margaret in various pieces of fantastic jewelry, starting with a suite of gold and gemstone pieces…

…and then long gold filigree earrings…

…a suite of gold jewels set with dark orange gems…

…a pair of gold statement earrings that are clearly perfectly suited for water sports…

…and a vibrant pair of beaded statement earrings. Margaret briefly has a crisis of conscience over her absent husband while wearing them, but she moves past it.

But soon, the couple’s Caribbean bliss is interrupted by a photographer with a long lens. Margaret and Roddy really were photographed on the beach in Mustique, but it happened in March 1976, not 1974. They were also tamer than this — they just showed Roddy and Margaret sitting near each other on the beach, not a whole suntan lotion situation.

Back in Britain, the photos are splashed across the front page of the News of the World. The Queen and Philip read the news over breakfast…

…as does Prince Charles, who is still in the navy. In March 1974, he was serving aboard the HMS Jupiter, but when the news of Margaret’s affair really broke in March 1976, he was commander of a minesweeper, the HMS Humber, off the coast of Scotland.

Princess Anne also sees the news at breakfast. All of you here will undoubtedly have registered the fact that the episode conveniently ignores several important events in Anne’s life, including her wedding to Mark Phillips in November 1973, as well as the kidnapping attempt of March 1974. In 1974, she and Mark were living at Oak Grove House on the grounds of Sandhurst. In 1976, she was still living there, but she was also in the middle of training to compete in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. Honestly, I can’t believe this soap opera missed the chance to cover a royal wedding and a kidnapping. Seriously!

The person who is maddest about the whole affair, though, is the Queen Mother, who storms in to see the Queen, newspaper in hand.

The Queen Mother talks at length about how disgusted she is by Margaret’s behavior, while the Queen makes this face.

It’s a little hard to see, but we definitely got a brooch on the Queen Mother in this scene, and it looks quite a lot like one of the invented ribbon brooches we saw on the Queen in seasons one and two.

Lucy Lindsay-Hogg is over the moon about the affair when she reads the papers — now that Margaret’s in love, perhaps a divorce really is on the cards.

She’s disappointed, though, in Tony’s reaction. He’s not as thrilled as she hoped he’d be.

Back in Mustique, we get more engagement and wedding ring symbolism as Margaret and Roddy’s vacation ends.

They return to Britain under heavy press scrutiny and head straight for Kensington Palace.

There, they’re confronted by Snowdon, who is livid about the whole business.

He and Margaret have it out, Roddy leaves the room, and Tony threatens to divorce her if she follows. She heads straight after Roddy — but he’s gone.

(In reality, the couple separated almost immediately after the photographs were printed in March 1976. Tony was in Australia for the opening of an exhibit of his photographs when the news of the separation broke, and he told the papers there that he was “desperately sad” about the end of his marriage.)

At Buckingham Palace, the Queen wears pearls and no brooch for an audience with Harold Wilson. (I don’t know about all of you, but the jacket she’s wearing here strikes me as a little anachronistic — it looks like something she might have worn in 2006, not 1976.)

It’s not a happy meeting. Wilson reveals that he’s dealing with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, and he’s stepping down as prime minister. The Queen is shocked and sad, and she extends him a rare honor, letting him know that she’d be happy if the Wilsons would have her and Philip to dinner at Number 10.

(Wilson really did have Alzheimer’s, and he really did announce his resignation in March 1976. It’s not clear whether the two things were truly linked, or whether he told the Queen. It’s certainly possible that they were, and he did. The Wilsons hosted the Queen and the Duke for a farewell dinner on March 23, 1976. It really was the first such dinner since the retirement of Churchill. Interestingly, the show skips another major dinner held a month later: the Queen’s birthday dinner and ball at Windsor Castle, held on April 21, 1976. The event was attended by both Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, just weeks after their separation. Harold Wilson was there, too, as was his successor, James Callaghan.)

As Wilson leaves, Charteris comes in with even worse news. Princess Margaret has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. The Queen Mother refuses to believe that it was a suicide attempt, instead seeing it as a cry for help.

When the Queen gets to Kensington Palace, Margaret is awake but still a little woozy.

(According to Christopher Warwick, a version of this really did happen in 1974, long before the Roddy Llewelyn affair was public knowledge. Roddy, confused about their relationship, hurried off for an impulsive trip, traveling to Turkey by way of Guernsey. Warwick writes that Margaret’s subsequent decision to take “a handful of Mogadon tablets” is described variously as “a nervous breakdown” or “attempted suicide.” She and Tony were still living together, and Anne Tennant reportedly barred him from going in to Margaret’s room during her recovery. Margaret had recently asked Tony to move out, and their relationship was clearly at a highly unhealthy period.)

In The Crown‘s version of events, the Queen visits her sister, wearing the production’s invented pearly floral brooch and conveying to Margaret how very important she is. The two have a touching conversation. They also talk about Margaret’s impending divorce.

(The show is conflating the events of 1974/1976 here, but either way, divorce wasn’t yet being discussed after Margaret and Tony’s separation. Instead, Margaret’s lawyers negotiated a financial settlement for Tony, so that they would able to remain married but live totally apart. They didn’t divorce until May 1978. The show also seems to suggest here that her relationship with Roddy ended after the photographs and the separation announcement. It didn’t. They remained romantically involved until 1980, and friends for much longer than that.)

And then, we see the Queen wearing a familiar hat, heading for one of the palace reception rooms. It’s June 7, 1977, and the nation is celebrating her Silver Jubilee.

The royal family is assembled to greet her. The costume is a good facsimile of the real thing, including the double strand of pearls, but the brooch is wrong. The Queen didn’t wear the Flame Lily Brooch; she wore the Williamson Pink Diamond Brooch for the service of thanksgiving in her honor at St. Paul’s. I’m almost okay with the substitute here, though. At least the production chose a replica brooch that’s a) a real royal jewel, b) a floral brooch, and c) a brooch with significant sentimental weight. It’s the brooch she wore when she arrived back on English soil after acceding to the throne in February 1952. (Spoiler: we’ll have an extensive feature on the Flame Lily Brooch here tomorrow!)

Special focus is given to Princess Margaret here, as a carry-over from the last scene. She’s wearing a pearly brooch. Somehow, the corpse of the deceased Duke of Gloucester has been Frankensteined once more for the occasion. (He’d been dead for a whole three years by this point!)

The Queen glances over at Prince Philip and Prince Charles as she steps into the carriage for the procession to the cathedral. The show depicts her riding alone in the carriage, but in reality, Philip was beside her.

And that’s how we end the season: the Queen, looking rather morose, celebrating the first twenty-five years of her reign. The show really does want to view her as isolated, sad, and unfulfilled, doesn’t it?

Time for our penultimate recap of The Crown for the season, everyone! It’s time to check in with the jewels and history presented in “Imbroglio.” (Missed any of the earlier recaps? You can find them all here!)

We pick up the action almost exactly where we left off in the previous episode. It’s May 31, 1972, and a Royal Air Force plane is bringing the body of the late Duke of Windsor back to England.

Six days later, on Monday, June 5, 1972, the Duke is buried on the Frogmore estate in Windsor.

We get another glimpse of Geraldine Chaplin as Wallis, who is heavily veiled for the funeral. The costuming is quite accurate. Less accurate, though, is the brooch on the Queen Mother, who’s in the background over Wallis’s right shoulder. Production has put her in their replica of the Teck Emperor of Austria Brooch, which she never owned and never wore. (Go figure.) In reality, the Queen Mum wore one of her favorite jewels, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Brooch, for the funeral.

The Queen, who is watching Prince Charles warily throughout the scene, is shown wearing a diamond bow brooch. The design of the brooch is similar to that of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Bow Brooches. Close, but no cigar: the Queen really wore the Dorset Bow Brooch for the funeral. Honestly, though, when compared to most of the “jewels” shown this season, I’ll take it.

It wouldn’t be an episode of The Crown without a soapy reflection moment, and this episode goes the distance, showing Charles considering his own reflection in the glass over a photograph of the late Duke of Windsor. (Hey, did you know they were both Princes of Wales, and they both had troubled romantic lives? Did you???)

Wallis chats with Charles at Windsor Castle after the services are over. It’s doubtful that the real Wallis was nearly as composed as she’s presented here; the papers reported that she was in shock after the Duke’s death, and she was accompanied by her American doctor during the funeral. She also apparently went directly from the funeral service to a royal plane and headed straight back home to Paris.

The fictional Wallis, however, chats with Charles, even asking whether Camilla is around. (Gyles Brandreth argues that even Charles’s parents didn’t really know about Camilla, let alone Wallis.)

She gives him a memento from the Duke’s collection: a pocket watch and compass, which had been a gift from her to the Duke in the 1930s.

She also tells him to watch out for his family.

Camilla is waiting outside the castle to see Charles before he leaves for the naval academy at Dartmouth, and she sees Wallis leaving as she arrives. She’s spooked by the whole business. (Did you know that both Camilla and Wallis were divorcees who married Princes of Wales? Did you???)

We switch gears quickly, as the Queen’s attention is turned to a coal miners’ strike. The 1972 strike took place long before the Duke’s death, from early January until the end of February. This particular moment from the strike, the Battle of Saltley Gate, was a mass picket of a fuel depot in Birmingham. The picketing took place from February 3-10.

The Queen, as she always seems to do in this show, sits motionless and silent as she watches the events unfold on television. (Also unfortunately standard on the show this season: the brooch and no pearls accessory depiction.)

As the strike continues, we’re shown some background on Edward Heath. We see him learning to play the piano as a little boy in Kent, and then playing as an adult. Heath really was an accomplished classical musician, even installing a grand piano at 10 Downing Street during his tenure as PM.

The Queen wears her pearls/no brooch combo for an audience with Heath, who isn’t interested in negotiating with the National Union of Mineworkers.

Later, she talks about their conversation with Prince Philip. He’s gotten some dirt on Heath, including the sad story of a childhood romance gone wrong. (Heath never married.)

Speaking of young romances about to go wrong, Prince Charles is busy with his naval training at Dartmouth. (In real life, Charles completed his six weeks of training at Dartmouth in October 1971, months before the death of the Duke of Windsor. As I mentioned in the last recap, he was already serving on the Norfolk off the coast of France when the Queen made her last visit to her uncle.)

He pours his heart out to Camilla over the telephone while they’re apart.

When Lord Mountbatten comes to visit, he’s dismayed to see how lovesick and distracted Charles seems.

Dickie heads straight to Clarence House, where he and the Queen Mother discuss Charles and Camilla’s romance. Neither of them are happy about the situation, and they decide that it’s time to break them up. Dickie will engineer a naval posting for Charles, and the Queen Mother will handle Camilla. (It’s worth mentioning that all of this plotting is fictional.)

Meanwhile, the talks between the government and the miners’ union are going absolutely terribly.

Since no agreement has been reached, the nation is facing real problems with their power supply. Charteris briefs Elizabeth and Philip on the governments’ plan for intermittent power cuts.

The Queen, in — guess what? — pearls and no brooch, gives Martin this concerned face. It’s so fascinating to me that the show has almost totally stopped offering a perspective on her inner thoughts and feelings this season. Surely the whole premise of this show is to reveal (fictional) insights into how she feels? She’s often just as much of a cypher here as she is in real life.

Speaking of characters who have been left behind by this show, here’s the Queen Mother, holding court in candlelight in the middle of a power cut. It’s nearly impossible to see, but she’s actually wearing some sort of brooch pinned to her jacket here. Leave it to The Crown to find a way to make their poorly lit scenes even darker!

Hidden in the shadows here are Bruce and Rosalind Shand and Derek and Ann Parker Bowles, who have been summoned to Clarence House so that the Queen Mum can tell them that their children have to get married. It’s both completely fictional and the most interesting thing that her character has done all season.

At Dartmouth, Charles is informed that he’s passed his exams, and even though he’s not done with training, he’s being sent to the Caribbean. He is immediately suspicious that strings have been pulled.

(Historical reality check: Charles’s first official posting, a nine-month stint aboard the missile destroyer Norfolk, was publicly announced in August 1971, weeks before he even arrived at Dartmouth for training. It was always part of the plan, not a plot engineered by Mountbatten. I feel like that last sentence should be a disclaimer on every episode of the show, really.)

But in the world of The Crown, Charles knows that someone’s trying to send him off to keep him away from Camilla. He heads straight to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen what’s up.

The Queen (in pearls and — wait for it — no brooch) wasn’t aware of the string-pulling, but she immediately knows who to ask about it.

She calls in Dickie and the Queen Mum for a meeting, and they spill the beans about their (fictional) meddling. But, they explain, it’s all for a good reason.

And then we cut to perhaps my favorite scene of this entire season: Princess Anne, driving to Buckingham Palace, belting out David Bowie’s “Starman” at the top of her lungs in her very posh accent. It’s fantastic. (For what it’s worth historically, the song was released on April 28, 1972, and it climbed the charts in Britain that summer.)

Anne’s been summoned to the palace to tell everyone about Camilla, Charles, and Andrew Parker Bowles. She’s convinced that Camilla’s mostly still in love with Andrew.

She also tells them about her own fling with Andrew, leading the broochless Queen to make this face.

The Queen Mum gives her daughter this “see???” expression. She also explains that Camilla and Andrew’s wedding date has been set. Now someone just needs to tell Charles.

Mountbatten gets that job.

Meanwhile, the Queen watches even more television footage of Britons suffering because of the strike.

And Charles calls Camilla, who tells him that she really does love him, but she does love Andrew, too.

(Okay. Nobody really knows all the ins and outs of the end of Charles and Camilla’s early romance, but the facts seem to go like this: just before Christmas in 1972, they spent time together at Broadlands, Lord Mountbatten’s country estate. He didn’t propose, and he went back to his naval duties. Family members told Gyles Brandreth that that weekend in December, Charles had had his chance to win Camilla once and for all — but didn’t take it. There wasn’t a plot to separate them; Charles just didn’t ask her to marry him. Andrew Parker Bowles did, and their engagement was announced on March 15, 1973. Charles reportedly wrote to Mountbatten that he was upset by the news, but “the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.”)

Back at Buckingham Palace, Heath reports once again that the miners aren’t budging in their negotiations.

The Queen (no brooch!) is unhappy — she thinks that Heath’s clearly not giving enough consideration to the union, and she’s upset that the blackouts are still going on.

(The 1972 strike ended on February 28 of that year, when the union accepted an offer that raised miners’ pay. The deal happened shortly after the Battle of Saltley Gate.)

The episode ends with the Queen delivering a speech on the occasion of her 25th wedding anniversary. That celebration happened in November 1972. She really did make a short speech to mark the occasion, but it happened during a luncheon at the Guildhall in London, not during a glittering evening banquet.

The tiaras on display are, well, complete and utter inventions. Not a royal replica to be seen here!

We’ve got some sort of invented diamond scroll tiara on the Queen Mother…

…and a tiara set with rubies (!) on Princess Margaret. (She had diamonds, pearls, sapphires, and turquoises — no ruby tiaras.)

As the Queen waxes poetic about her marriage, we see glimpses into others’ romances. In Paris, Wallis grieves for David…

…and at the Guards Chapel in London, the Queen Mother looks very smug in pearls for a wedding.

Surprise! It’s the marriage of Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles, which happened on July 4, 1973. The ceremony really was attended by the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne. Charles was invited but had to decline because of a scheduling conflict.

In The Crown‘s fictional version of history, Charles is alone and distraught in the West Indies.

And although she’s saying lots of things about happy marriages, the Queen ends up with this expression, in all of these completely invented jewels. Sigh.

Time for yet another recap of The Crown, Netflix’s royal soap. Here’s the lowdown on the (disappointing) jewelry and the (mixed-up, as always) history of episode eight, “Dangling Man.” (Missed any of our earlier recaps? Catch up here!)

We open with text helpfully telling us that it’s 1970 and we’re in Paris. The Duke of Windsor, now being played by Sir Derek Jacobi, isn’t feeling well at all. Turns out it’s throat cancer, and there’s not much they can do about it. I’m not at all sure why The Crown decided to start with that date stamp, as the Duke was diagnosed with cancer in late 1971. It was the last and most serious in a series of major health crises for the former king, who had undergone several operations in the 1960s, including one at an ophthalmology clinic in London in 1965.

After his diagnosis, David discusses the matter with Wallis, who is now being played by Geraldine Chaplin. (Quite a casting coup, getting these two for the roles — Chaplin in particular is very good in the part.) She wants to throw a party so they can focus on happy times while they still can. David insists that he needs to focus now on rehabbing his reputation while he has the chance.

They go with his plan. First up: a visit from Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako of Japan. This meeting really did take place in October 1971, while the Japanese imperial couple were in Paris for a quick private visit during a foreign tour. The emperor and the foreign king had once played golf together in Tokyo when both were heirs to their respective thrones.

Production did a decent job of replicating the outfits worn by both the empress and the duchess for the half-hour meeting. Both couples leave feeling glad they’re not in the others’ shoes, though David does say, of course, that it wouldn’t be bad at all to be the ruler of an island nation. (Mm-hm.) The show doesn’t mention it, but the visit with the Windsors was just a British royal appetizer for the Emperor and Empress, who headed to London for a grand state visit immediately afterward.

In the world of this show, though, the Queen’s apparently too busy reading about the Windsors’ meeting with the imperial couple to put on a state visit herself. Wearing a microscopic invented gold brooch, she talks to the Queen Mother about the situation.

The Queen Mum, perhaps the character best suited to have an interesting storyline in this episode, mostly just makes this face. SIGH.

Meanwhile, Prince Charles is super curious about the other man who recently inhabited the title of Prince of Wales, and he heads over to Paris to meet with him. Charles, encouraged by Mountbatten, really was pushing at this point in history for more connections between the Windsors and the Windsors. The Duke and Duchess had come to London for brief visits in the 1960s, both medical and ceremonial. According to Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles wanted the Queen to invite David and Wallis for a weekend visit in 1970, but that didn’t happen. Dimbleby suggests that the Queen Mum wasn’t particularly receptive to the plan, though other palace sources have disputed that.

Charles really did meet with the Duke and Duchess in October 1970 — a full year before the cancer diagnosis and the Japanese meeting — stopping by for a brief, last-minute meeting while on a hunting holiday in France with Christopher Soames (who was British ambassador to France at the time — and, of course, a son-in-law of Churchill).

Meanwhile, back in England, we’re introduced to a couple who will become very important to the storyline going forward: Andrew Parker Bowles and his on-off girlfriend, Camilla Shand.

Camilla, played by Emerald Fennell, isn’t pleased with Andrew’s recent philandering, and she refuses to go with him to a military ball being held that evening.

At the ball, Andrew (played by Andrew Buchan) encounters another interesting woman…

…Princess Anne, who’s apparently had a crush on him for a while and is very receptive to his flirtations. She’s wearing a suite of invented diamond jewelry and a little bejeweled feather in her hair.

Their flirtation turns into a fling. (Anne and Andrew really did date in the early ’70s. In his biographer of Charles and Camilla, Gyles Brandreth says that their relationship began in 1970, when Anne was 19 and Andrew was 30, and that their flirtation turned into “a full-blown affair during the week of Royal Ascot.”)

Andrew soon meets with another member of the royal family, Prince Charles, on the field at Guards Polo Club in Windsor.

The Queen Mother and Lord Mountbatten cheer for Charles on the sidelines…

…as, unexpectedly, does Camilla Shand. The Brandreth biography notes that many have speculated that Camilla set her cap at Charles as a way to get revenge on Andrew for his affair with Anne. He notes that according “to Charles and Camilla, that simply is not true,” but concedes that it’s “most certainly how the story will be told when the movie comes to be made.” Turns out he was right about that! The Crown never comes out and says it directly in this episode, but it hints mightily at Camilla’s motives.

Charles has lunch with Mountbatten after the match. They talk about the Duke of Windsor, who thinks Charles should find a wife. He tells Mountbatten that he’s found a girl he likes — Camilla. Mountbatten advises him that he’s too young for serious relationships, and that he should be “sowing his wild oats.” (The real Mountbatten gave the real Charles that advice in a letter in 1974.)

But Charles is already smitten. In a nod to the way they’d eventually conduct their famous affair, Charles and Camilla chat flirtatiously on the telephone.

He invites her to the palace for dinner, and he also gets in a handy historical time stamp by asking if she’s voted in the general election. (She has.) That means that it’s (at least theoretically) Thursday, June 18, 1970.

The next morning, the Queen wears pearls without a brooch (sigh) for an audience with the winner of said general election.

The new prime minister is Edward Heath (played by Michael Maloney, who coincidentally played Sir Robert Peel in The Young Victoria). Heath’s Conservatives have pulled off a surprise and defeated Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.

Later, in pearls and an invented pearly brooch, the Queen is doing a puzzle when Martin Charteris (who has replaced the retired Michael Adeane) stops by to talk about Heath. They discuss Heath’s desire that she should go to France — he’s passionate about connections with Europe.

Charteris thinks that the Paris visit should include a stop to see the ailing Duke of Windsor.

Philip balks at the idea. (I think it’s odd that they assign Philip the role of the “absolutely not” when it comes to the Windsors in this episode. Shouldn’t that perhaps have gone to the Queen Mother?)

The Queen, in her fake pearly brooch, is torn.

Later that evening, Charles has Camilla over for dinner at the palace apartment he shares with Princess Anne.

Camilla wears her very best strand of royal pearls for the romantic meal, and she’s sympathetic when Charles talks to her about his place (or lack thereof) in the family.

He’s very serious and philosophical, comparing his endless waiting game to the plight of the central character in Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man (hence the title of the episode).

But then, Charles pranks her with an exploding envelope. The seriousness was all a gag — and Camilla thinks it’s hilarious. The series is being deliberately cagey about Camilla’s characterization here, but if this is a genuine reaction — and it seems it — it’s a sign that the show’s ready to embrace the (apparently true) idea that Charles and Camilla have compatibly weird senses of humor.

After their laughter dies down, an aide comes in to remind Charles that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s BBC interview will be starting soon. The Windsors really did do a famous televised interview with the BBC; it was filmed in Paris in October 1969 and aired in Britain on the night of January 13, 1970. Much of the dialogue in the Crown version of the interview is taken straight from the real thing.

The Crown loves showing the royals watching themselves on television, so naturally we see Charles and Camilla watching…

…and Mountbatten watching, one of his trusty dogs by his side…

…and the Queen Mum watching, with a bowl of ice cream, because the writers have to keep that one-note characterization consistent, blech…

…and finally the Queen and Philip watching, too. He can’t stand to watch the whole interview, so he leaves her to watch the end alone.

The costuming is pretty spot-on, especially where the Duchess is concerned, though in the real interview, they were sort of both dwarfed by the chairs they were sitting in. (You can see an abridged version of the hour-long interview on YouTube.)

Later, Princess Anne drops in to see Charles, who is busily writing Uncle David a letter. She asks about Camilla, and suggests that her affair with Andrew isn’t anything serious. She warns him that they need to be careful to make sure that Camilla and Andrew don’t use them as part of their romantic games.

In Paris, the Duke of Windsor’s health begins failing fast.

The Duchess, in typical oversized jewelry, is terrified when he’s overcome while playing cards with friends.

We get several silent appearances in the episode from one pivotal member of the Duke and Duchess’s household: his valet, Sidney Johnson, who began working for the couple during their stint in the Bahamas in the 1940s. After the deaths of the Windsors, Johnson helped Mohamed Al-Fayed with his restoration of the Windsors’ villa, which is now owned by the city of Paris. Johnson is played by Connie M’Gadzah.

Wearing yet another production-invented brooch, the Queen flies out for a state visit to Paris. That means that it’s May 15, 1972. In reality, the Queen was joined by Prince Philip for the five-day visit. Elizabeth and Philip stayed at the recently-renovated Grand Trianon at Versailles during their trip. In reality, she wore a very different outfit for her arrival in Paris, along with the Cambridge Pearl Pendant Brooch.

She wore a different outfit with some similarities (though it was turquoise) to lay a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe, which doesn’t look anything like this. She wore her modern gold, diamond, and ruby brooch for that part of the visit. (Here’s some newsreel footage of her arrival and the wreath-laying.)

The Queen makes a speech wearing this hat and a little invented gold brooch, and afterward, Charteris tells her that she needs to go see the Duke, who isn’t doing well.

Not doing well is an understatement. The Duke has to be hoisted out of his sick bed to get dressed and get in a wheelchair for the last-minute visit. He’s not well enough to greet her — that’s left to Wallis, who curtseys deeply.

This visit really did take place, on May 18, 1972, but the show is taking significant fictional liberties. Wallis was indeed photographed curtseying to the Queen during this visit, but the Queen wasn’t alone. She was accompanied by both Philip and Charles. In May 1972, Charles was serving on a destroyer off the South of France, and he was able to meet his parents for part of the official trip. The visit was planned from the start, not a last-minute decision; the date was set weeks in advance and reported in the press before the Queen even left for France. The royal party stopped at the Windsors’ villa on their way back from a visit to the races at Longchamps. As always, the show likes to make it seem that the Windsors are struggling deeply with decisions and then making them at the last second; that may be good for drama, but it’s not generally how things go in the royal world.

The clothing and jewelry also don’t match the clothes that the real women wore during the visit. The Queen wore the Dorset Bow Brooch for the meeting, while Wallis wore a dark dress with a big brooch, hoop earrings, and a coordinating bracelet. (Here’s an image from the real visit, though you’ll note that the date on the photograph is incorrect.)

In the world of The Crown, the Queen walks into the villa alone and immediately encounters a very strange sight: one of the famous red despatch boxes, which the monarch uses for state papers. This one is labeled with “The King,” but it’s also decorated with the familiar heraldic badge of the Prince of Wales, featuring a trio of feathers and a coronet, as well as the motto “Ich Dien” (I serve). The badge is rendered in heavy gold, like a paperweight, and is situated beside a golden letter opener also featuring the badge. King? Prince of Wales? Neither? Both? Eh.

Upstairs, Uncle David struggles to his feet as he greets his niece and monarch.

The two have a conversation in which she admits that he’s still her favorite uncle, reminds him of his “Shirley Temple” nickname for her, and he says that he underestimated her. He thinks the crown found the right person in the end, and he asks her to forgive him for everything he did.

One note on the framing of this shot: The Crown, being the soap opera that it is, has always used mirrors and reflection to symbolize, well, actual self-reflective moments, especially where the Duke of Windsor is concerned. I’m very interested in the way that Elizabeth and David are rendered here where the mirror is concerned.

David tells her all about his correspondence with Prince Charles and gives her Charles’s letters, telling her to read up. (Would have been tough to do this in reality with Charles literally in the building!) As the Duke falls asleep mid-conversation, the Queen’s mirrored reflection comes sharply into focus.

She was in the middle of admitting that she’s sometimes grateful that he abdicated, but he’s not able to hear it.

On the plane home, she reads Charles’s letters to the Duke, and we’re treated to some flashbacks of that earlier 1970 visit to Paris. Charles tells Uncle David that it’s a shame that he was forced to abdicate to be with the woman he loved. (Apparently Charles missed episode six of last season!)

In London, Charles writes away while the woman he loves lounges in the tub nearby.

And in Paris, Uncle David dies. The time that elapsed between the Queen’s final visit to her uncle and his death really was very short. The duke died on May 28, 1972, ten days after the Queen saw him for the last time. We’ll pick back up with his funeral in Windsor at the beginning of our next recap.