‘The Crown’ Season 4 Episode 7 Recap: Secret Sisters

It’s about time The Crown Season 4 got a Princess Margaret episode! After all, it’s not a controversial opinion to say that Helena Bonham Carter is too good to remain a mere supporting character all season. Margaret is like the original Tahani al Jamil, always ready with a story about an encounter with a famous person, and she’s often at her best when she’s playing up her glamorous, celebrity side. “The Hereditary Principle” gives us the total opposite, the depressed, humbled side of Margaret.

When the episode opens, it’s early 1983. Margaret prepares to welcome her beau, Derek “Dazzle” Jennings to her apartment. She and Dazzle drink and dance, but when it comes down to it, Dazzle is there to not just break up with Margaret, but to tell her he’s planning to join the priesthood. A note to the Catholic Church: not a bad marketing campaign for you to consider letting more priests go by names like “Dazzle” and preach the gospel of David Bowie. When Margaret tells Elizabeth about the breakup and Dazzle’s dreams of priesthood, Elizabeth tells Margaret that religion was not the only thing standing in the way of their true love. Dazzle was also…

Further upending Margaret’s life is the fact that she’s been relegated to the royal B-team now that young Prince Edward has turned 21, which means he now holds a higher rank than she does. Margaret is no longer allowed to step in for the Queen as a senior royal allowed to deputize for Elizabeth on formal occasions and she must relinquish any duties she once had. With no man in her life and a recent health scare that has caused her to give up her other true love, cigarettes, Margaret had told her sister that she was hoping to take on more royal responsibility, and now with this news forcing her to do just the opposite, she is truly at a loss for anything that gives her life meaning.

“If it were up to me, I would have given it all to you,” Elizabeth tells her livid sister. But as with all things in the Windsor family, they must adhere to a set of rules, the subtext of those rules being that they might be important but boy do they make everyone in the family miserable. And the rules and image of the royal family are what lead Margaret to make the episode’s great discovery.

Despondent, Margaret heads to her villa in Mustique.

While there, she is visited by the other depressive in the family, Charles, who implores her to consider therapy. It’s 1983 and yet a stigma still exists around analysis, and Margaret is reluctant to go, but for her own good, she gives it a try. And lucky for her, her therapist doesn’t seem to care much about doctor-patient confidentiality, and reveals that Margaret’s not the only member of her family that struggles with mental health, her cousins (“the sisters”) Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon had been locked in a mental institution for decades.

“They’re long dead!” the Queen tells Margaret as they discuss the two cousins on their mother’s side of the family., the children of the Queen Mother’s brother. A family genealogy book even lists their dates of death. Not content with what the book says, she calls on her old beau Dazzle who, now in seminary and able to at least pass for a priest in wardrobe only, is able to gain entry into the institution that houses the two sisters. He confirms that the two are very much alive, as are three more cousins that Margaret didn’t know existed.

“They know who you are, and they know who your sister is,” Dazzle tells Margaret. These are not strangers to Margaret, these are blood relatives, and she’s devastated to learn they’ve been hidden away and neglected. Margaret confronts her mother, who scoffs, “What did you expect us to do?”

“Behave like human beings,” Margaret says.

The Queen Mother (played by Marion Bailey, who sounds so sweet while saying the most awful things) explains that the abdication of King Edward in 1936, which seated her husband, King George, on the throne, was the reason these cousins had to be hidden away. The integrity of King George’s bloodline would be called into question if people knew that there were genetic abnormalities within his family, and so it was these children who paid the price and were hidden, even declared dead, to protect him. It’s horrifying, and Margaret knows it. While it’s doubtful that Margaret was the one to make these discoveries in real life, it’s in keeping with her being the moral compass of this season, and Bonham Carter is our proxy every time someone mentions how much more important royal protocols are than someone’s actual feelings or well-being. She spoke up before Charles married Diana, and she’s the one willing to call BS on this situation too.

The cruelest irony of all is that the affliction her cousins suffered was all due to the genetics of their mother, who shared no genes with anyone on the Bowes-Lyon side of the family, and therefore, no genes with King George or his children. “If they didn’t threaten the integrity of the royal family, then the girls need never been hidden away and what my family did was unforgivable,” Margaret says.

And with all of these realizations under her crown, the Princess heads back to Mustique to wallow in self-pity, but at least they have karaoke and cocktails there to help her forget the atrocities committed by her family.

The sisters, who were indeed real, as were the three others Dazzle discovered, lived out the rest of their lives in institutions, until their deaths.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Brooklyn. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.

Watch The Crown Season 4 Episode 7 ("The Hereditary Principle") on Netflix