Fact checking ‘The Crown’: Is Queen Elizabeth really that religious?
Her faith and close relationship with Billy Graham
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
The second season of the Netflix series, “The Crown,” portrays the queen as someone who, feeling betrayed by a family member, wrestled deeply with questions of faith and forgiveness. The show also depicts her budding relationship with famous American evangelist Billy Graham, who drew millions of people to his “crusades” across the globe and was a friend to many U.S. presidents.
“Monarchy is God’s sacred mission to grace and dignify the Earth,” her elderly grandmother, Queen Mary, tells Elizabeth early in the show.
Several writers have pointed out how “The Crown” took more liberties with historical fact and chronology in its second season. So what really happened?
Here’s what we know from scholars and books.
[Spoilers ahead]
In the show
The royal family struggles with its relationship to former King Edward VIII, Elizabeth’s uncle who abdicated the throne to marry a divorcée and became the Duke of Windsor. That familial struggle becomes increasingly tense as the queen learns the family’s dark secret: Her uncle had become friendly with the Nazis during World War II, plotted to overthrow his brother and encouraged Germany to bomb England.
After learning the shocking details about her uncle, the queen asks Graham open-ended questions about forgiveness. Played by actor Paul Sparks, Graham tells the queen that she should pray for those she “cannot forgive.”
In real life
1. Evidence of the queen’s faith is easily traceable.
Scholars believe the queen possessed a “deep vibrancy of her faith” as someone who read scripture daily, attended church weekly and regularly prayed, said Stan Rosenberg, a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford.
The queen’s Christmas messages, a British tradition that goes back to 1932, have provided a window into her private faith.
“I know just how much I rely on my faith to guide me through the good times and the bad,” she said in 2002. “Each day is a new beginning. I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God. … I draw strength from the message of hope in the Christian gospel.”
2. Queen Elizabeth and Billy Graham met in 1955.
Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, said his father had a good relationship with the queen. He spoke several times in her private chapel and he was knighted in 2001. But Billy Graham initially met resistance, his son said, and some in Parliament tried to block him from coming.
The queen’s meeting with the evangelist came about after Graham launched one of his evangelistic “crusades.” Graham had spoken to “the greatest religious congregation, 120,000, ever seen until then in the British Isles,” according to a biography of the late John Stott, a chaplain to the queen. During one of his rallies, Graham preached for 12 weeks, drawing 2 million.
Graham delivered a sermon for the queen on Easter Sunday in 1995 in the royal family’s private chapel.
“Good manners do not permit one to discuss the details of a private visit with Her Majesty, but I can say that I judge her to be a woman of rare modesty and character,” he wrote in his autobiography “Just As I Am.”
“She is unquestionably one of the best-informed people on world affairs I have ever met,” wrote Graham, who is now 99 years old and living in his mountain home in Montreat, N.C. “… I have always found her highly intelligent and knowledgeable about a wide variety of issues, not just politics.”
3. It’s unlikely, although still possible, that the two met alone.
“The Crown” shows the queen meeting alone with the evangelist so they could discuss things privately. However, Graham long had a personal rule that he would not meet alone with another woman, something that became known as “the Billy Graham rule” and has come under the spotlight since Vice President Pence has said he uses the same rule.
Historian and Graham biographer William Martin says, however, that there’s not much chance that the queen would have been left truly alone even if no attendant was in the room. But if the queen asked for this, Martin and fellow Graham historian Grant Wacker both believe he probably would’ve made an exception.
“Graham always meant for the rule to be observed with common sense,” said Wacker, who is a historian at Duke Divinity School. “The point was to prevent candlelit dinners far from home.”
