In the struggle between human and crown, the Queen let the crown win – but Charles never would

“We are half people, ripped from the pages of some bizarre mythology, those two sides within us, human and crown, engaged in a fearful civil war which never ends, which blights our every human transaction as brother, husband, sister, wife, mother. I understand the agony you feel and I am here to tell you it will never leave you.” These are the imagined – but believable – words the Duke of Windsor says to the young Queen Elizabeth, in the finale of the Netflix series The Crown, as she agonises over whether she should allow her sister to marry the divorcee Peter Townsend.

What makes this series so watchable is it breathes vivid, colourful life into our deliberately dull monarch. In real life, the Queen has embodied this “half person”, a monarch as described by 19th-century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot: “intelligible” yet “dignified” – a neutral figurehead above the excitement of politics and the taking of sides.

This neutrality, this art of saying nothing, has been key to her reign: there has been a solidly reliable, unexciting ordinariness to those 64 years. Her Christmas Day speech is her annual study in bland platitudes, and this year the raciest thing she says is straight out of one of those “daily inspiration” quotes you see on Facebook: “It’s understandable that we sometimes think the world's problems are so big that we can do little to help. On our own, we cannot end wars or wipe out injustice, but the cumulative impact of thousands of small acts of goodness can be bigger than we imagine.”

There has been a comfort in the boredom of her monarchy. In her own internal war, the crown has conquered the human.

Contrast this to her heir, Prince Charles. The Queen’s “heavy cold”, which caused her to miss the Christmas Day service, is a reminder of her mortality; her stepping back from some public duties an acknowledgement that the 90-year-old monarch is actively preparing the way for a future King Charles III, even if she has another decade on the throne.

If Charles is on the verge of becoming king, he is not showing any signs of toning down his strident views into a more regal neutrality. If anything, his Thought for the Day message condemning the rise of populist, anti-minority groups was the heir to the throne at his most outspoken.

Is this a sign of how King Charles intends to strike out from his mother’s reign and define himself as a political monarch? Given he can never match her longevity, there must be an urgency in wanting to make his mark on history. Or is this Charles getting it all out while he has the chance before he has to close himself to the prison of monarchy, become that half-person, engage in that never-ending internal civil war between human and crown?

The Queen, as The Crown reminds us, had very little time to prepare for her reign – she is dismissed as a girlish ingenue by courtiers, the Duke of Windsor and Winston Churchill – yet has made a success out of saying nothing. Prince Charles has had his whole life to prepare for his, so should he really expect to continue his mother’s studied neutrality when he becomes king?

The constitutional weight of the crown would say he should. Yet, in his private life, we have seen the fallibility and fragility of his human half – his affair with Camilla while still married to Diana, his public divorce, the grief of his ex-wife’s death. In his own struggle between human and crown, Charles, as heir, has allowed the human side to win. How refreshing it would be if this continued when he is king.