A Very British Scandal (2022)

Firstly, it is very disconcerting to see the actress who portrayed Elizabeth II in the first season of “The Crown” play this member of the British aristocracy who created a scandal in the divorce courts. I said to Susan within the first half hour of episode one: “I don’t like this woman.”

The time period covers 1950 to 1963. It was a very revealing time: the British people, having survived WWII, discovered sex. (It says a lot that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was finally published in 1960 and became the subject of an obscenity trial. The echo in real life was surprising, but was it really?)

What strikes me about the way this show was constructed was that no actual impropriety (meaning, sexual infidelity) was ever demonstrated, once the marriage between them happened. Sure, there was a lot going on prior to their wedding, but other than Margaret trying to relieve the boredom of being married to Ian, who was obviously financing his life with her money, she invented fantasies to make her husband jealous and pay more attention to her emotionally (and sexually). She was on a self-destructive journey that wouldn’t end well. She was also a compulsive liar. But is Claire Foy’s portrayal of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll accurate, or was there something more behind the scenes?

They chose the actors well.

Compare this video with her interview in those same years:

There seems to be a vacancy behind those eyes. But that’s just my opinion. Which reminds me, there was a recurring image in the show of Margaret finding herself on the ground and bloodied. Had she fallen from a great height? Had she been brutalized? (It always seemed to be hinting at something in the future, as if a premonition, but may have been a memory of something from the past.) Was this a hint?

After a series of miscarriages, Margaret had two children with Charles. In 1943, she fell nearly 40ft down a lift shaft, surviving but with a significant trauma to her head: many say the fall altered her personality, and that she was a different woman afterwards. Four years later, the Sweenys divorced.

Historyhit.com

You’ll have to see for yourself.