A Man and His Monarch

Peter Morgan  has never met Queen Elizabeth but, over a long and distinguished career, he’s spent a lot of time imagining what her life is like and writing about her.

So, what does he really think?

“I think she’s all the things we know her to be,” he says, without missing a beat. “She’s a woman of selfless devotion to public service. She’s a religious woman, she’s a modest woman, she’s unnarcissistic, she’s a woman of her era. She grew up in the war, and people of that generation have a different outlook.”

As he sat down once again to write about her and her life as Britain’s reigning monarch — he wrote the feature The Queen (for which he won a Golden Globe) and the stage play The Audience — he was determined to offer a more intimate view of the royal family.

“I’m sure I’m getting a lot wrong,” he says, “but we did our very best to research things and try to tell the true story. Happily, the feedback I’ve gotten has been pretty positive.”

It took him a year to write the first season’s 10 episodes. For a good part of that time, he says, he had to put himself into the head of a 24-year-old girl, “someone who is not going to hit the ground running” as she learns to be queen. “She’s young, she’s going to allow herself to be taught and, I know from her character, she’d be a willing pupil.”

Some moments in the series were well documented, such as the incident of elephants nearly charging the royal couple as they walked to the Treetops Hotel in Kenya. For plenty of other scenes, Morgan had to turn to his own imagination: inventing conversations between the queen and Winston Churchill (when no one else was in the room) and, well, pillow talk between Elizabeth and Philip.

“She came from an extraordinarily loving home with loving parents in a happy marriage, and Philip came from an extraordinarily unstable home,” Morgan says. “His mother was taken away from him when he was young and put into institutions. His family had to leave Greece as fugitives and live in exile.

"And yet, I would say together Philip and Elizabeth have been an amazingly good team. What they’ve achieved, and what she has achieved as head of state, has been astonishing, particularly when you survey the catastrophic failure of the political classes.”

Despite past grievances with the royal family, Morgan fully believes that if the British people today had to vote on a referendum to keep the monarchy, it would pass overwhelmingly.

So, would he ever like to meet the queen?

“Absolutely not. I don’t want their approval or to be censored by their disapproval.”

He even takes it one step further.

“I have heard that the entire royal household is watching the show, but the less I hear from them the better.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 5, 2017