King Charles Plans to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ Over ‘The Crown,’ Friends Say

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King Charles III barely has his feet under the metaphorical table of Buckingham Palace. On Monday, however, a miserable winter of challenging media portrayals of him and his family will begin, thanks to the new series of The Crown, before Harry and Meghan’s Netflix reality show tracking their new lives in California hits TV and laptop screens, which will itself be followed by Harry’s candid memoir, Spare—due to be published Jan. 10.

Most public figures, faced with such a potentially harmful media onslaught, would be wargaming counter-attacks and rehearsing lines of defense.

Charles, however, has little option according to friends and palace sources other than to “keep calm and carry on” over the coming days and weeks, as he seeks to weather the inevitable media storm by following the late queen’s example of “dignified silence” a friend of the prince told The Daily Beast.

However, as has been apparent in recent weeks, while Charles may not say anything, he has plenty of friends and sources willing to speak on his behalf. The attacks may come from them, sourced in his voice and thoughts.

‘The Crown’ Spotlights Princess Diana’s Face-Off Against the Palace

While the palace declined to comment to The Daily Beast for this article, hopes continue to circulate among Charles’ friends that Netflix will finally cede to calls to append a disclaimer to the show making clear it is fiction.

Their hopes have been raised by such a note being added to the trailer to the series, which suggests Netflix may at least be considering making the same concession when the real thing drops on Monday.

The streamer is said to have been taken aback by the pushback to many of its fictionalized scenes, including an attack by former British prime minister Sir John Major, who explicitly denied that any conversation between himself and Charles about encouraging the queen to abdicate had taken place.

A letter to the London Times from the revered British actress Dame Judi Dench also helped moved the conversation about dramatic license and the appropriateness of a disclaimer into the spotlight domestically.

Dench, a friend of Camilla’s, wrote: “Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series—that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence—this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent… this cannot go unchallenged. Despite this week stating publicly that The Crown has always been a ‘fictionalized drama’ the programme makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode.

“The time has come for Netflix to reconsider, for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers.”

The Crown is a drama, not a documentary, and is being pilloried by critics like Dench and Charles’ allies for not hewing closer to the diktats of the latter rather than former.

Whether Netflix is ready to make a move to explicitly define the show as fiction remains to be seen—and of course there is no denying that much of the show is an accurate reflection of what actually happened, including the toe-curlingly embarrassing conversation between Charles and Camilla in which he fantasized about being her tampon.

It was reputedly recorded by an amateur radio fanatic and then uploaded to a premium phone line that Brits called in their droves to listen to Charles declaring, “I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier…[to come back as] a Tampax.”

While Charles and Camilla are likely to have been buoyed by the public support for them as expressed by Dench and others, don’t expect them to come out fighting on their own behalf. Lawsuits against Netflix over either The Crown or Harry and Meghan’s reality show (due to drop in the next few weeks, if industry rumors are to be believed) are considered vanishingly unlikely. Legal action against his son over his memoir also seems an impossible-to-imagine escalation—right now at least.

As one friend told The Daily Beast: “Charles and Camilla wouldn’t say or do anything, even if they wanted to, because it would just be great publicity for Netflix. Everyone knows it’s all rubbish anyway. They will follow the queen’s example of dignified silence, and keep calm and carry on.”

The friend pointed out that Charles and Camilla have long been accustomed to an almost endless stream of often baseless stories being run about them and their family in the global media, and that the queen’s answer always was “to ignore it all and carry on regardless.”

Sources in the palace quietly concur, and have emphasized a sense that next week it will just be “business as usual” for Charles; indeed he has a particularly busy week of engagements and will be highly visible in the British media, carrying out duties in Britain’s largest county, Yorkshire.

One of the jobs will be visiting the head office of a supermarket (a supremely relevant and visibly in-touch engagement given that Britain is experiencing an unprecedented surge in the cost of living), another will be unveiling a statue of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth, at York Minster Cathedral, reminding everyone of his recent personal grief.

It is seen as inevitable in Charles’s camp that The Crown might be accepted as accurate by many overseas viewers. And, of course, there is little sense denying that Charles engaged in plenty of very well-documented shameful behavior, most notably by flagrantly conducting an affair with Camilla under his wife’s nose. There was also the campaign of briefing against her in the so-called War of the Waleses, the period from roughly 1990 to Diana’s death in 1997, when Charles’s camp sought, in essence, to portray Diana as insane.

Diana engaged in plenty of efforts to blacken Charles’ name herself, of course, culminating, in her collaboration with journalist Andrew Morton for his book Diana Her True Story, and the Panorama interview.

However, most observers have pretty firmly concluded that Charles was the worse guy in all this, and that his and the royal family’s treatment of Diana ultimately contributed to her death.

All that aside, there is a sense in palace corridors that in the all-important domestic U.K. market, The Crown has become a less and less realistic portrayal of royal life as it has approached more contemporary times.

Perhaps the increasing drift of The Crown into fantasy and very clear make-believe in specific set-piece scenes—like Diana making Charles a post-separation omelet in the upcoming season—will do Charles’ camp’s work for him. Maybe rather than mocking such moments, Charles’ supporters should be fervently hoping for more.

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