[Warning: The next accommodates spoilers for the fifth episode of The Crown Season 4, “Fagan.”]
Within the fifth episode of The Crown‘s newly launched fourth season, Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) wakes up early one morning to discover a man sitting on her mattress. No, it isn’t Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) coming to say good morning or Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) on the lookout for some mommy time (actually, may you think about?). It is Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke), an unemployed painter and citizen of the U.Ok. who simply broke into Buckingham Palace for the second time that summer time and is trying to have a pleasant chat together with his sovereign. It is a story so wild that it have to be true — and that is as a result of it’s, a minimum of largely.
Like a lot of The Crown, the palace break-in as depicted on the present relies on info however given an inventive aptitude. Queen Elizabeth II, as you might need already assumed, has by no means spoken publicly about what actually occurred in the course of the couple of minutes she spent along with her intruder, however Fagan has given interviews since. Primarily based on these and stories from the time of the incident, it is clear it did not go down precisely because the present depicts.
In 1982, Michael Fagan was an unemployed painter and decorator who had simply gone by a divorce, and his spouse had taken their children. The present makes use of Fagan as a method to discover the impact then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s (Gillian Anderson) conservative insurance policies had on the working class of the U.Ok. Thatcher’s first few years in workplace had been met with a recession, and hundreds of thousands turned unemployed. Fagan was a type of hundreds of thousands. In The Crown, Fagan is proven going to his ex-wife, to the unemployment workplace, and even to his native MP to get assist, or a minimum of state his grievances, however each step of the way in which he is instructed to go take up his points with another person. Lastly, he has nobody to speak to besides the Queen herself.
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Throughout his first palace break-in in June, he merely wanders round and drinks some wine till he is caught by a maid and leaves. By the second time he breaks into Buckingham Palace, on July 9, Fagan’s private state of affairs has gotten worse, and he would not appear intimidated in any respect to get up the Queen and inform her how Thatcher is ruining the nation and he or she must do one thing about it. Colman’s Elizabeth is clearly scared, however she stays calm as they speak, and when a maid lastly comes within the room with tea, she very matter-of-factly tells her to go get the guards. Even moments earlier than Fagan is taken away, she provides him time to inform her anything he needs, however he is mentioned every thing he wanted to. He largely simply appears relieved that lastly somebody took the time to really hearken to him. He is taken away and since trespassing wasn’t a felony offense on the time, as an alternative of being tossed in jail, he spent a number of months in a psychological facility.
Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies, The Crown
Though evidently Fagan’s precise break-in — climbing over the palace fence, shimmying up a drain pipe, and climbing by a window — was as impossibly straightforward at The Crown depicts (his efforts had been aided by malfunctioning alarms), in keeping with the actual Michael Fagan, he did not even have any sort of significant dialog with the Queen. In 2012, he told The Independent that when he woke her “she went previous [him] and ran out of the room.” He additionally mentioned {that a} footman poured him a glass of whisky whereas they waited for the police.
In the identical interview, Fagan gave his account of the primary time he claims to have damaged into the palace. His model of the primary break-in is near what occurs on The Crown, proper right down to ingesting low-cost wine. However there may be one element in Fagan’s story that is noticeably absent from the Netflix collection: Based on Fagan, he peed within the corgis’ meals.
Fagan additionally talked about that his motivation for breaking in was possibly much less fastidiously thought out than the present would have you ever consider: “I hadn’t thought of moving into there till that final second when it got here into my head to do it,” he instructed The Unbiased. He even urged his actions had been as a result of lingering results of getting taken mushrooms months earlier. In a 2020 interview with The Telegraph, although, Fagan did point out being “pissed off by joblessness” on the time.
Stories of the incident instantly after the actual fact provide up totally different tales: In a New York Times article from July 14, 1982, Fagan’s lawyer on the time mentioned that the Queen and Fagan spoke for round ten minutes, largely concerning the royal household, earlier than a maid led him out of the room. The actual Scotland Yard report of the incident, as written within the New York Occasions in July 1982, tells yet one more model of the story, through which the Queen, whereas ready a number of minutes for the police to reach, “obtained the eye of the maid, and collectively they ushered Fagan into a close-by pantry on the pretext of supplying him with a cigarette.” The Scotland Yard report additionally says Fagan broke a glass ashtray within the palace (within the present he arrives within the bed room bleeding from breaking in a window). He reportedly carried a chunk of the damaged ashtray into the Queen’s room with him and “mentioned that he meant to slash his wrists within the presence of Her Majesty.”
At this level, we could by no means be really positive precisely what occurred that early morning within the Queen’s bed room, however The Crown‘s tackle the incident provides up an attention-grabbing tackle what may have been. Regardless, the one second from the entire episode that I am taking as reality comes on the finish, when Philip regrets that he wasn’t there to guard Elizabeth. Towards all odds, I am rooting for these loopy children and their love story!
The Crown Season Four is now streaming on Netflix.