Royal Family Responds to the Queen Elizabeth Stamps in The Crown Season 3

Someone in the royal family has been watching The Crown. (Or, at least whoever runs their Twitter account has.) This morning, the official handle of the British monarch and her family seemed to respond directly to the popular Netflix series.

No, they didn’t take issue with Peter Morgan’s sometimes cold-hearted depiction of Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with her oldest child Prince Charles or set the record straight about that invented newspaper story about Princess Alice. They just wanted to share a little history of royal mail.

In the first episode of season three, the transition from Claire Foy’s depiction of the Queen to Olivia Colman’s is addressed head on in a scene about stamps. A new portrait of the Queen has been commissioned to appear on postage, one that better represents the middle-aged monarch, who is now approaching 40. Colman then stares at both images side by side before the theme song cuts in.

And today, the royal family offered a history of the real-life portraits that inspired that scene, though without directly mentioning the TV show.

“These photographs taken by Dorothy Wilding, of Her Majesty in 1952, were used as the basis of The Queen’s image on postage stamps from 1953 until 1971. In two sittings, photographer Wilding took 59 images of The Queen,” reads one post.

“Arnold Machin’s effigy of The Queen, which has featured on UK stamps since 1967, is widely considered to be one of the most reproduced and iconic images in the world.It has been reprinted an estimated 220 billion times, in more than 130 different colours,” reads another.

Of course, it should be noted that today the Queen visited the new headquarters of the Royal Philatelic society, which also runs a postal museum, so these postal tweets have an alibi. We’re going to think of them as doing double duty—a bit of royal history as well as Crown commentary.

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Some members of the Queen’s family have admitted to watching the show. For example, Princess Eugenie said she felt “very proud to watch it,” and Camilla’s nephew revealed that the Duchess of Cornwall, too, is a fan of the series. But it’s unlikely the Queen will ever make an official statement about the program that dramatizes her reign. For now, we’ll have to look for a double meaning in social media posts about the royal stamps.