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What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother?
Throughout her long reign, the late Elizabeth II juggled being a mother and grandmother with royal duty. But with careful judgment, hard work and a mischievous sense of humour, she forged a dynasty and inspired a nation
They might not be the first monikers to spring to mind when thinking of Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch who was renowned for her sense of duty and her dignified demeanour, but “Gary” and “Cabbage” are two of the nicknames bestowed upon her by her family. “Gary” was how Prince William knew his grandmother as a youngster, apparently confusing the word with “Granny”, while the Queen’s great-grandchildren Prince George and Princess Charlotte know the Queen affectionately as “Gan-Gan”. As for “Cabbage”, this was the fond nickname used by her husband Prince Philip – which might come from the French term of endearment, “mon petit chou”, translated to “my little cabbage”. Was Elizabeth II a mother when she came to the throne? As matriarch of “The Firm” (the insider name for the royal family) and the oldest monarch in British history, it’s perhaps easy to forget that Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952 at the age of just 25, the mother of two young children. Thrust into royal duties, she faced the immediate challenge of balancing the work of monarchy with the demands of motherhood, a battle which was present throughout her reign. Read more | A brief guide to the British royal family, by The Crown historian Robert Lacey Just 18 months after her accession in 1952, Elizabeth II was called upon to tour 13 countries, including Australia, over six months, without Charles, age five, and Anne, age three. The young children were famously greeted with handshakes upon the return of their parents, and though she dispensed with some of the more formal royal traditions – the children were not required to bow or curtsey to their mother – their childhoods were marked by absence. The prince and princess were largely raised in their younger years by governesses and other household staff, in the same way that Elizabeth and Margaret had been by “Crawfie”, in keeping with the manner of many upper-class families of the time. The children were required to understand that travel and time were part of the monarch’s commitment to rule. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-1450650980-a8ef201-e1776646626706.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II holds baby Prince Edward on a balcony as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, stands beside her in military uniform, smiling." title="The Queen holds a very young Prince Edward in her arms as she stands on the balcony at Buckingham Palace with the Duke of Edinburgh, June 1964. Edward was the most recent child to be born to a reigning British monarch (Photo by Getty Images)" /> It was a decade after Anne that the Queen gave birth to her third child, Prince Andrew, in 1960. Prince Edward followed in 1964, making the two sons the first children to be born to a reigning monarch since Queen Victoria. Ten years after her accession, many noted a difference in the Queen’s relationship with her two younger sons. Royal historian Robert Lacey suggests the Queen became “warmer and flexible”, able to step back a little from her duties. What were Queen Elizabeth’s relationships with her children like? Both Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip agreed that their children should not be hampered, as they saw it, by the social and educational constraints of homeschooling, which had previously been the norm for royals. Yet Charles’s education was far from straightforward. Prince Philip wished Charles to be sent to Gordonstoun school in Scotland, hoping to make his son in his own image. The Queen Mother (who favoured Eton, close to Charles’s Windsor home) wrote to the Queen in 1961, saying, “it is miles and miles away, he might as well be at school abroad. He would be terribly cut off and lonely up in the far north.” The Queen Mother’s fears for her sensitive grandson were not unfounded. Two years after the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992 (which saw the marriages of three of her children break down amid tabloid scandal, as well as a fire at Windsor Castle) an authorised biography of Prince Charles dealt perhaps the harshest blow to the Queen’s reputation as a mother. Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now The 1994 account, written by Jonathan Dimbleby, described the bullying and “crushing loneliness” Charles experienced at school, and a childhood characterised by long periods of his mother’s absence. Charles was said to feel “emotionally estranged” from his parents and yearning for affection that, in his view, they were “unable or unwilling to offer”. The book declared Charles’s bonds of affection to be much stronger with his nanny Mabel Anderson and detailed how the Queen would spend short windows of allotted time with her son in the morning before his daily walk and before bedtime. Historian Piers Brendon has suggested that in contrast to the “tremendously affectionate, and very welcoming and warm” Queen Mother, with whom Charles had a close relationship, Elizabeth II was “a very distant mother”. Read more | A brief history of royal mothers and childbirth Yet in a 2002 BBC documentary, Princess Anne said: “We understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch, in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make. “But I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think it’s extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true.” What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a grandmother? If the Queen’s reputation as a mother has been characterised as distant by some, there was a more palpable fondness for her eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. From the birth of her first grandchild – Peter Phillips, the son of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, born in 1977 – the Queen took on a new persona; the dutiful grandmother who inspired by example. “I’ve always been very close to my grandmother, and we speak often,” Peter Phillips told The Telegraph in 2016. “She has been an inspirational person throughout my life.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-1241123935-47c9c5f-e1776646682863.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II, wearing a bright green coat and hat, smiles at her great-grandson Prince George during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations." title="The Queen shares a moment with Prince George of Cambridge during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022. George is now second in line to the throne following his great grandmother’s passing (Photo by Getty Images)" /> In 2018, Princess Beatrice told of how her grandmother “goes out into the community with a genuine curiosity as to how she can be a force for good in the world”. Though duty evidently came first, there was also an enduring sense of fun that she shared with those close to her. Many royal sources have recounted how the Queen was an excellent mimic, and particularly fond of impersonating former prime ministers and US presidents she had known through the years (some favourite impressions were reported to be René from TV show ’Allo ’Allo! and Labour politician Tony Benn). One royal aide, Angela Kelly, shared how the Queen has “a wicked [mischievous] of humour”. Read more | The 8 most famous royal weddings in British history The Queen proved herself an adept grandmother in the 21st-century online world too, no more evident than when she joined her grandson Prince Harry in 2016, recording a sassy comedy video message to US president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama in order to promote the Invictus Games. At Christmas, even as her descendants started their own families, the Queen remained at the centre of the royals’ festive celebrations, bringing together the whole family at her Sandringham residence. At 6pm sharp, the tradition was for adults to exchange cheap joke gifts and Prince Harry could clearly get away with a little extra cheekiness towards his grandmother. On one such occasion he gave the Queen a shower cap with the slogan: ‘Ain’t life a bitch’. Elizabeth II’s ancestor Queen Victoria was notoriously meddlesome in the marriages of her grandchildren – as ‘Grandmama Queen’ she felt uniquely placed to orchestrate the marriages of her 42 grandchildren, manoeuvring them into seats of European power. The Queen did hold the power to exercise control over her descendants’ marriages­ – though not all; since 2013, the Succession to the Crown Act has meant that only the first six royals in line to the throne require the monarch’s permission to validate their marriages. So in 2018, Princess Eugenie could marry without the Queen’s consent (though it’s unlikely that she wasn’t consulted), whereas Prince Harry still had to obtain the monarch’s permission. This the Queen duly bestowed, writing in her official capacity: “My lords, I declare My Consent to a Contract of Matrimony between My Most Dearly Beloved Grandson Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales and Rachel Meghan Markle.” It’s clear though that her grandchildren valued the Queen’s approval beyond an official seal. And it seems that a sure way to impress the monarch was by getting on with her beloved corgis. “For the last 33 years, I’ve been barked at,” Harry told the BBC ahead of his 2018 wedding. That apparently wasn’t the case for the Duchess of Sussex. “This one walks in,” the prince joked, indicating his bride-to-be, “Absolutely nothing. Just wagging tails.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-960056422-947df8c-e1776646732976.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Prince Harry and Meghan Markle smile during their wedding ceremony inside St George’s Chapel, Windsor, surrounded by guests." title="The Duchess of Sussex wore a tiara owned by Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother, Queen Mary, during her wedding in May 2018 (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The Queen also publicly showed her support and welcome to her grandsons’ wives by lending them two significant family heirlooms for their weddings. The Duchess of Sussex wore the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary’s platinum and diamond bandeau tiara for her wedding in May 2018. The Duchess of Cambridge wore the Queen’s Cartier scroll tiara, purchased by the Queen’s father King George VI and given to Elizabeth on the princess’s 18th birthday. Long to reign over us More than seven decades after starting her own family, it’s clear that the late Queen imbued her dynasty with her own strong sense of duty and service. She served as the figurehead of the family, an inspiring example by which to measure their own public activities. Despite the familiarity, it’s also clear that the Queen was still able to keep her family on their toes. In 2018, Prince Harry gave the following advice to a group of visitors to Buckingham Palace: “If you suddenly bump into her in the hallway, don’t panic. I know you will. We all do.”
The young Elizabeth II: life before she was Queen
At the time of her birth, Elizabeth II was a princess who was never expected to succeed the throne. So how did she become queen? From her unconventional childhood to the crisis that made her a monarch, Kate Williams charts Elizabeth II's life within the royal family before she was crowned...
In April 1926, Britain was on the brink of the General Strike called by the TUC. There had been an economic perfect storm: the postwar crash in coal prices, combined with the government putting Britain on the gold standard, had put mining under pressure. After a government commission recommended reducing miners’ wages, the stage was set for an all-out strike of miners and other workers covered by the TUC, including railway and transport workers. But despite being in a crisis, the home secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks could not be excused from witnessing the legitimacy of a royal baby. The Duke and Duchess of York – George V’s second son, Bertie and his wife, the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – were expecting their first child. Although the baby was not a direct heir to the throne, Sir William still had to travel to 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, a home owned by Bowes-Lyons, where the child was due to be born. Read more | Queen Elizabeth II: 50+ facts about her life and reign The little girl was born by caesarean section at 2.40am on 21 April. “We have long wanted a child to make our happiness complete,” wrote the duke. The child was “a little darling with a lovely complexion”, decreed Queen Mary. “I do hope that you and papa are as delighted as we are to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have had another grandson?” wrote the duke to his father, George V. The baby was officially third in line to the throne, but since she was the child of George V’s second son – and female – she was destined to be pushed down the succession by sons born to her uncle, the Prince of Wales, and her father. She was called Elizabeth Alexandra Mary after her mother, great-grandmother and grandmother – after consorts, not queens regnant. The princess was destined for a good marriage and little more. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1404441219-533f6bb-e1776639421178.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A baby Queen Elizabeth II is held by her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, while her father, the future King George VI, looks on in a black-and-white family portrait." title="The Duke and Duchess of York with the infant Princess Elizabeth, 1926. The Duke would later become George VI following the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII in 1936 (Photo by Getty Images)" /> On 3 May, the TUC called the General Strike. Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin called it the “road to anarchy”, but the government played hard, drafting in volunteers and calling forth the middle classes to step in. By 12 May it had been called off and the following year the government outlawed sympathetic strikes and strikes intended to coerce the government, making another general strike impossible and restoring the existing structures of power. Two weeks later, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was christened by the archbishop of York at Buckingham Palace. The young princess was a favourite with her grandparents and one of the few people in the family not afraid of the king, whom she called ‘Grandpa England’. In early 1927, her parents departed on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, leaving her with her nannies. When they returned, they took a new house, 145 Piccadilly, near Hyde Park. It had 25 bedrooms, a lift and a ballroom but, by royal standards, Elizabeth was growing up in a cosy, normal house and her playmates in the gardens were the daughters of businessmen and doctors, not fellow princesses. In 1930, Princess Margaret was born. This time the home secretary, John R Clynes, had to trek up to Glamis Castle, the ancestral home of the Duchess of York. “I am glad to say that she has large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment a lady needs!” the duchess wrote. As they grew up, it became evident that the two little girls had very different personalities. Elizabeth was conscientious, dutiful and orderly – she couldn’t go to sleep without unsaddling and feeding all her nursery horses and lining them up neatly. Margaret was playful, determined and fond of pranks – she blamed any mistakes or spillages on her imaginary friend, Cousin Halifax. In 1933, when Elizabeth was seven, she received a new governess, Miss Marion Crawford. She had been recommended to the Duchess of York as a “country girl who was a good teacher, except when it came to mathematics”. Fortunately, the duchess was not looking for a challenging academic schedule. Both she and her husband had hated school (the duke had been ridiculed as a dunce). What the royal couple wanted for their daughters was a “really happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories”, which meant minimal lessons. The king had only one request: ‘‘Teach Margaret and Lilibet a decent hand.” Miss Crawford’s regimen was gentle. Elizabeth received lessons from 9.30 until 11 in the morning and the rest of the day was devoted to outdoor games, dancing and singing, with a rest period for an hour and a half. Unlike her parents, Elizabeth had an aptitude for learning and enjoyed history and literature but she had little opportunity for sustained study. Queen Mary criticised their education and recalled that she had busied herself with homework in the holidays – but to no avail. In her free time, Elizabeth was fondest of dogs and horses. She declared she wanted to marry a farmer so she could have lots of “cows, horses and dogs”. George V died in January 1936, and the Prince of Wales assumed the throne as Edward VIII. As king he was more dependent on his lover, Wallis Simpson, than ever. But although the foreign press discussed his relationship with the American divorcee at length, the British newspapers stayed quiet. In late October, Wallis filed for divorce from her second husband and it was clear that the king meant to marry her. The government was as determined to stop him, for it was thought the people would not accept a divorced consort. The empire governments mostly refused the idea outright. “It was plain to everyone that there was a great shadow over the house,” wrote Miss Crawford. Read more | The death of King George V – what happened? On 10 December, 10-year-old Elizabeth was about to write up her notes from her swimming lesson when she heard chants of “God Save the King” outside. She asked a footman what had happened and he told her that her uncle had abdicated and her father was king. She ran up to tell her sister the news. “Does that mean you will have to be the next queen?” asked Margaret. “Yes, some day,” replied Elizabeth. “Poor you,” said Margaret. In the face of crisis and change, Elizabeth adopted a technique she would use throughout her life: she stuck to her routine, attempting to appear unruffled. She wrote up her swimming notes, and at the top of the page she wrote: “Abdication Day.” Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now The jolly life of 145 Piccadilly was at an end. The family moved into Buckingham Palace and her father and mother – who had always been so present – became consumed by meetings, receptions and politics. The former king, now the Duke of Windsor, the Uncle David of whom the children had been so fond, was sent to Europe. Elizabeth attended her father’s coronation, accompanied by Queen Mary, writing that the abbey was covered in “a sort of haze of wonder as papa was crowned, at least I thought so”. Elizabeth was now heir to the throne. Queen Mary stepped up her campaign over education, and more history was introduced. In 1938, Elizabeth began receiving lessons from the vice provost of Eton, Henry Marten, on constitutional history. Marten’s teachings were important to Elizabeth’s perception of her role: he told her that monarchy was strengthened by adaptability and talked of the importance of broadcasting directly to her subjects. The palace and the government were concerned that the princess did not seem too isolated. The First Buckingham Girl Guide Pack was instituted, with 20 girls invited to the palace on Wednesday afternoons. They learned trekking in the palace grounds and practised signalling in the corridors. On 15 March 1939, German tanks entered Prague. The ‘peace’ created through appeasement by prime minister Neville Chamberlain was shattered. “Who can hope to appease a boa constrictor,” declared The Telegraph. The country moved towards war. In the summer of 1939, Elizabeth and her parents paid a visit to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where the king had studied. There she was introduced to Philip of Greece, 18 to her 13. The princess was fascinated by him. On 3 September 1939, Chamberlain announced on the BBC that Britain was now at war. The king broadcast later in the day, telling the people that this “grave hour” was “perhaps the most fateful in our history”. The princesses were staying at Birkhall, near Balmoral, on their annual summer holiday with Miss Crawford – and were soon joined by hundreds of evacuees from Glasgow. After Christmas at Sandringham, they went to Royal Lodge in Windsor, the pale pink walls painted green to fool enemy bombers. The queen refused to bow to pressure to send the children to Canada, out of the range of the enemy. Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War? In spring 1940, German troops invaded Denmark and Norway. Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister, declaring to the Commons that Britain must “wage war, by sea, land and air with all our might”. The dispossessed royals of Norway and Denmark arrived seeking safety in London. The princesses were sent to Windsor Castle, where they would remain for the rest of the war – along with the crown jewels, bundled up in paper in the underground vaults. The princesses were key to the propaganda strategy – the nation was told that they were in a secret location in the countryside, where they carried around their gas masks and grew their own carrots and potatoes in a vegetable patch. But the princesses were not exempt from the terrors of war – 300 bombs were dropped on Windsor Great Park over the course of the conflict. Often they were woken at night and sent into the underground vaults of the castle. Like Churchill, they slept in ‘siren suits’, zip-up all-in-one jumpsuits designed for warmth and practicality in bombing raids. The palace had repeatedly rejected requests for Elizabeth to speak on the radio. In 1940, with the Luftwaffe razing British cities to the ground, the king and queen changed their minds. In a time when US support for the war effort was critical, they agreed to allow the princess to broadcast on the BBC to the children of North America. On 13 October she gave her speech, expressing how she and her sister sympathised with those who had been evacuated, since “we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all”. The speech was a hit. “Princess yesterday huge success here,” reported a north American representative of the BBC. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1018089778-f154721-e1776639568862.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black-and-white image of a young Queen Elizabeth II seated at a desk reading from a script into a microphone, with Princess Margaret watching beside her." title="Princess Elizabeth (right) and Princess Margaret broadcast a morale-boosting speech for the “children of North America” in October 1940. The address was warmly received across the pond (Photo by Getty Images)" /> “This time we are all in the front line,” said the king in his Christmas message at the end of 1940. The bombing of British cities continued until April. Britain entered a sustained period of hardship. In 1941 it was the first country in the world to introduce conscription for single women. When Elizabeth turned 16, she begged her father to allow her to join the Labour Exchange. She was interviewed, but not placed – much to the relief of the king, who wished to protect his daughters. At the end of 1943, when Elizabeth was 17, Philip came to spend Christmas with the family. He was charmed by her admiration and what he described as the “simple pleasure” of family life, so unlike his own unhappy childhood. He returned to war enthusiastic about the idea of marrying the princess, and his cousin, George of Greece, made a suggestion to the king that the pair might wed. It was a misstep; the king was shocked and told George that Elizabeth was too young and Philip “had better not think any more about it at present”. The king didn’t wish to lose his daughter and the courtiers thought Philip “rough, ill mannered” (in the words of one). Worst of all was his background. As one courtier put it, “it was all bound up in one word: German”. The princess turned 18 in 1944 and began to assume royal duties. Her father insisted she be made a counsellor of state (usually only open to those who had reached 21) and she stood in for him when he was briefly in Italy, signing a reprieve on a murder case. She made her first public speech at a children’s hospital and launched HMS Vanguard in the autumn. But she wanted more – she desired to serve in the forces. In early 1945, the king relented and allowed her to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a trainee ambulance driver. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-1475851901-3f9d0ec-e1776639728760.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A young Queen Elizabeth II in Auxiliary Territorial Service uniform stands beside a military ambulance marked with a Red Cross." title="Princess Elizabeth served as a trainee ambulance driver and mechanic during the Second World War. Photographs of the young royal doing her bit for the country became a vital propaganda tool for the British government (Photo by Getty Images)" /> At the base in Aldershot, she was initially kept away from the other trainees and taken to eat in the officers’ mess, before the papers found out and the regime was quickly adjusted. The princess later said that it was the only time in her life that she had been able to test herself against people her own age. For the government, her training was a propaganda coup. Photos were taken of her wielding her spanner or standing by vehicles and she was on the front of every Allied newspaper. On 30 April, Allied forces occupied the Reichstag. Hitler took his own life in his bunker and the troops surrendered. On 7 May, the BBC interrupted a piano recital to announce that the following day would be known as Victory in Europe Day. The war was over. On VE Day, the princesses appeared with their parents and Winston Churchill on the balcony of the palace to wave at the crowds, Elizabeth in uniform. That evening, Margaret suggested that they go out to see the crowds. The king and queen relented and the girls set off, accompanied by Marion Crawford and various officers, wandering as far as Park Lane before returning back through Green Park to shout “we want the king!” with the crowds. “All of us were swept along by tides of happiness and relief,” recalled Elizabeth. Read more | “We sang, we danced and we all held hands”: celebrating VE Day Once the euphoria had subsided, the aftermath of war seemed grey, miserable and full of privations. “Food, fuel and clothes are the main topics of conversation,” wrote the king. He was exhausted by the effort of war and found it hard to adjust to daily life. At the same time, the people were fascinated by the princess and increasingly preferred to see her opening hospitals, presenting prizes and giving speeches. She was overwhelmingly popular: dignified, a veteran of the war and full of the glamour of youth. Cambridge University suggested she might be the first woman ever to receive an honorary degree, but the palace refused the offer. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/04/GettyImages-3354783-d77a9e1-e1776639818551.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip walk arm in arm outdoors, smiling at one another in a black-and-white photograph." title="Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip enjoy a walk during the first part of their honeymoon, which was spent at the Broadlands Estate, Hampshire, in November 1947. The couple would be married for 73 years (Photo by Getty Images)" /> In 1946, with the end of the war in Japan, Prince Philip returned to Britain and was sent to teach naval officers in Wales. He began to court Elizabeth in earnest, taking supper with her and Margaret in the nursery and taking the sisters out to restaurants or shows. Austerity Britain was delighted by the idea of a royal romance and the possibility of a wedding. The king and queen were dubious, but it was too late – Elizabeth was determined to marry Philip. In February 1947, the princess left the country for the first time for a tour to South Africa with her parents and sister. There, she celebrated her 21st birthday. She reviewed troops, attended a ball in her honour and gave her address to the empire. In it she pledged her future: “I declare before you that my whole life, whether it shall be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” She had spent a long time in the nursery but now she was 21, on the brink of marriage – and in less than five years, she would become queen. This article was first published in BBC History Magazine’s ‘Queen Elizabeth: 90 Glorious Years’ bookazine
Netflix's The Crown: history and storytelling
Annie Sulzberger, head of research for Netflix's flagship historical drama 'The Crown', explains how the show's real history elements are stitched into the storylines, and offers her take on dramatising the Windsors
Netflix's hit drama The Crown has come to a close after six seasons and 60 episodes, having dramatised the Windsor dynasty from the mid-20th century to the early years of the new millennium. While it has faced some controversy for its portrayals of living royals and storytelling choices, its mass appeal has seen it become one of the flagship historical dramas of the decade. Elinor Evans spoke to the show's head of research, Annie Sulzberger, to hear more about The Crown's approach to the real history it portrays on screen.
The Crown S6: the real history in the royal drama
The sixth and final season of The Crown covers history that is well within living memory for many viewers, but still has much to say on the sweeping story of the Windsor dynasty…
Season 6 of The Crown, the final season of show creator Peter Morgan’s drama, was released in two parts. The first four episodes arrived on Netflix on 16 November 2023, with the final episodes released on 14 December. Season 5 was the first season of the royal drama to be broadcast following the deaths of the Duke of Edinburgh on 9 April 2021, and Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022. The final season brings viewers into the 21st-century story of the Windsor dynasty, with the plotlines ending in 2005. What historical events does The Crown S6 cover? The final moments dramatised in season 5 saw Charles, Prince of Wales, and Diana, both suffering the after-effects of the so-called War of the Waleses, which played out in the British tabloids during the 1990s between the couple’s formal separation (announced by Prime Minister John Major in 1992) and eventual divorce in August 1996. “The marriage collapsed like a house of cards. Every detail was subject to insatiable scrutiny by the press,” writes historian Tracy Borman. During their PR battles, both royals had given primetime interviews that divulged personal struggles and intimate details about their marriage, and by 1997 tabloid interest in the divorced couple – and particularly Diana – was at fever pitch. The paparazzi interest in Diana – particularly in the summer months of 1997, before her death, aged 36, in a car crash in Paris – is the central subject of The Crown’s opening episodes. Previous seasons of the drama have traced and foreshadowed this escalating paparazzi interest, from the press ‘discovering’ Princess Margaret’s relationship with Group Captain Peter Townsend in season one, to Charles and Diana’s 1983 royal tour of Australia and the start of ‘Dianamania’ in season four. Diana’s final months can be characterised by the fraught balancing act of managing very public demands of royalty with the need for privacy and intimacy, in an age when royal life was being redefined by the clamour of mass media. View Green Video on the source website Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed The early episodes of season 6 cover Princess Diana’s trip to Saint-Tropez in July 1997, to stay on a yacht owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed (who was then most well known as the owner of Harrods, among other business ventures). The divorce agreement of the royal couple reached in August 1996 had specified that the couple would share custody of Prince William and Prince Harry. Due to Diana not being an official member of the royal family, she relinquished her title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ but was allowed to keep the title ‘Princess of Wales’. Diana stayed on the Al-Fayeds’ new luxury yacht, the Jonkial, in Saint-Tropez. She also stayed in the family’s 30-bedroom estate, Castle St Therese, with her sons Princes William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12. “There was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday,” wrote Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex in his 2023 autobiography Spare. “Everything about that trip to Saint-Tropez was heaven. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling," he writes. Sometime during the Saint-Tropez trip, it’s believed that Diana began a relationship with Mohamed’s eldest son, Dodi Fayed (though as shown in The Crown season 5, the press of the time reported that Dodi was engaged to American model Kelly Fisher when his relationship with Diana began). On being introduced to Fayed, Prince Harry wrote that he was "cheeky," but "nice enough." Following the press’ discovery of Diana’s relationship with Fayed, journalist and author David Barnett noted in 2017 that “there was an obsession with Diana, her every move was checked and documented and filed”. Paparazzi interest soon escalated to unforeseen heights. “In the months before [her death],” writes Barnett, “she had appeared with almost exhausting regularity on the front pages of the newspapers, and indeed had a profile that today we rarely see among the royals”. Diana’s campaign against landmines Diana’s year as a divorced woman “witnessed controversial relationships with surgeon Hasnat Khan and Harrods heir Dodi Fayed,” writes royal historian Sarah Gristwood, “but it also saw the anti-landmines campaign which stands as her lasting memorial.” In the year following her divorce, Diana began a prominent campaign for HALO Trust, which was first formed in 1988 to combat the devastation caused by landmines and other explosive remnants of war in Afghanistan, which had caused many civilian deaths. In January 1997, Diana was pictured touring an Angolan minefield in a ballistic helmet and flak jacket, during a Red Cross visit to the country, when she participated in a much publicised walk across a minefield. The drama chooses to focus on her visit to Bosnia in August 1997. In reality, Diana was criticised by some for her calls for an international ban on landmines, and branded by then Junior Defence Minister, Earl Howe, as a "loose cannon" (he felt her comments were out of step with government policy). But National Archives documents released in 2020 show that the princess herself dismissed the criticism of her campaign, and also spoke of future plans for a world tour to other heavily mined countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Kuwait. There’s no doubting the profile that Diana brought to the cause. “Shortly after her visit,” reports the Trust’s website, “the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty was signed, calling for all countries to unite to rid the world of landmines.” Queen Elizabeth II and Tony Blair As has been the case with every season of The Crown, the new episodes also see a new prime minister. In the final episode of season five, viewers saw Tony Blair elected in a landslide victory for Labour in May 1997. “There are moments in history when you can feel a nation changing course, and the summer of 1997 felt like one of them,” writes historian Dominic Sandbrook. “On the first day of May, the British electorate had unceremoniously slammed the door on 18 years of Conservative government, handing Tony Blair’s Labour party the biggest landslide in postwar history. When, in the small hours of the morning, Blair addressed Labour’s election-night party at the Royal Festival Hall, he began with the words: ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’” Recalling his first audience with Queen Elizabeth II, Blair described the late queen as “direct”, and the monarch reportedly denied the invite to call him ‘Tony’. Blair “was a man of a new generation,” writes historian Francis Beckett, “and his advice on the Queen’s family problems was less appreciated than his predecessor John Major’s had been.” The Queen also reportedly reminded him of her longevity, remarking that “You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.” On Sunday 31 August, three months after his election, Blair was in his constituency home in the northeast of England when he heard the terrible news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales Diana’s death in Paris prompted an extraordinary outpouring of public grief. “Outside her London home, Kensington Palace, well-wishers left more than a million bouquets,” writes Sandbrook. “At the family home, Althorp, so many people tried to bring flowers that the police begged them to stay away because the traffic chaos was endangering public safety.” Press attention at the time also focused on the reaction of the royal family – a subject that Peter Morgan has tackled in his other work, including the 2006 film The Queen. In reality, the royal family expected to grieve privately at Balmoral, but in the week between her death and her funeral there was an increasing clamour for public involvement in the family’s grief. “Show Us You Care,” demanded one tabloid headline. The Crown dramatises the tension between the private experiences of leading royals, and the public perceptions of their reaction. “In the febrile climate of blame – the tears in the street, the mounds of flowers outside her Kensington Palace home, the funeral in Westminster Abbey,” writes Sarah Gristwood, “it was prime minister Tony Blair who found the popular tribute. Diana had been, he said, ‘the people’s princess’.” When Diana’s funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on 6 September, more than one million people poured into the streets of London, while a further 2.5 billion people watched the worldwide television coverage. On the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, Sandbrook wrote for BBC History Magazine how the tragic event “remains an obvious landmark in our recent history.” “Yet the passions that surrounded it – the fury at the popular press, which was thought to have hounded her to her grave; the outcry at the royal family, who were criticised for their reluctance to mourn more publicly; even the enthusiasm for Tony Blair, who saw his public satisfaction rating rise to a record high – have now faded to the point when many feel almost embarrassed to recall them.” Prince William at school and university The next instalment of The Crown follows the young princes, William and Harry, and the challenges they faced in the heightened spotlight following the death of Princess Diana. William is shown at Eton, where he chooses to return to his schooling after the death of his mother in August 1997. In reality, the elder son of Charles and Diana fully immersed himself into his time at school, which began in 1995. He became a member of the Eton Society, the elite group of prefects who had the unique privilege of wearing whatever design of waistcoat they wanted. Read more | Off to school: how do the royal family educate their children? Harry reportedly enjoyed his time at Eton less than his brother and, always prone to mischief, admitted he wanted to be the “bad boy” at school. After leaving Eton, both boys kept up the tradition for male royals to go into the military, with Harry completing officer commissioning training at Sandhurst after first spending some time abroad. William joined him there after graduating from the University of St Andrews. Prince William and Kate Middleton Prince William met Catherine Elizabeth Middleton while studying at the University of St Andrews in 2001. The eldest of three children of businessman Michael Middleton and former air hostess Carole, Kate grew up in a village in Berkshire, and was educated at a series of privately funded schools before taking a degree in History of Art. When a friend once commented how lucky Kate was to be going out with William, “she is said to have quipped back: ‘He’s lucky to be going out with me,’” writes Sarah Gristwood. It seems that this was a feeling shared by the royal family. “We are so lucky to have her,” Prince Charles told wedding guests when the pair married. Historian Tracy Borman writes that “theirs is often heralded as one of the most successful royal partnerships in history – as well as the most ordinary.” Read more | How to marry a monarch “Rather than the pre-determined, delicately-negotiated relationships typical of most other royal marriages – particularly one involving a future king – theirs began at the University of St Andrews. “Their relationship continued after they had graduated from St Andrews,” writes Borman, “and despite intense speculation that an engagement was imminent, it would be one of the longest courtships in royal history. They eventually married in April 2011, almost ten years after first meeting.” More than two billion people worldwide are estimated to have watched the wedding. Tony Blair’s changing reputation The final series of the drama contrasts the public perception of the monarchy with the popularity of prime minister Tony Blair as the country approached the new millennium. On screen, viewers see Blair’s handling of the Kosovo War (1998–9), fought between Yugoslav forces under President Slobodan Milošević, and the Kosovo Liberation Army. During the conflict, Blair was determined to stand against Milošević, and worked with US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin to advocate for NATO forces to bomb Serb forces, who had carried out “the vile oppression” of Kosovo Albanians. Delivering a speech since known as the ‘Doctrine of the International Community” in Chicago in April 1999, he spoke to the US audience about Kosovo: “I want to put these events in a wider context – economic, political and security – because I do not believe Kosovo can be seen in isolation. “No one in the West who has seen what is happening in Kosovo can doubt that NATO's military action is justified.” Blair’s speech laid out an approach to humanitarian intervention that became important in understanding the government’s involvement in other conflicts, including foreshadowing Blair’s later decision to support the invasion of Iraq. These involvements saw public perception of the prime minister shift – as shown on screen in The Crown , which depicts crowds protesting outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. There were protests against the prime minister’s actions; in February 2003, a march of hundreds of thousands (estimates vary between 750,000 and 1.5m people) protested in London against the looming Iraq war, which would begin in 2003. One juxtaposition in The Crown drawn from real history sees Blair given a hostile reception by Women's Institute (WI) members, at one of the organisation’s conferences in June 2000. "I try to distinguish between the genuine values which underpin the best of Britain and the attitudes we can safely, rightly leave behind,” Blair told the crowd. “Old fashioned values are good values, but old-fashioned attitudes and practices can sometimes hold those values back.” As The Crown shows, his speech was not well-received; WI members heckled and slow hand-clapped the speech. In contrast, the Queen – a long-time member of the WI and great advocate of the organisation – received a warm welcome by the ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ crowd. The WI in Britain was first set up in 1915 to encourage women to grow their own vegetables and preserve food in order to aid the nation on the home front, and the Queen’s presence as a symbol of tradition and duty is shown as appealing to the women of ‘Middle England’. This historical example is not the only time viewers will see modernity and tradition pitted against each other – arguably a theme that has run throughout all six series of The Crown. In the series, Blair suggests a review of all the royal ceremonial positions that might seem unnecessary to the modern British public. These offices include the Admiral of the Wash (a real, ancient hereditary office within the navy, dating from the medieval era, which granted a nobleman responsibility for defending and protecting the coastal area of the Wash in north east Anglia) and the Warden of the Swans. Although the content of the Queen’s meetings with her prime ministers remains largely undocumented, and no publicly available review of the royal offices was conducted, it is true that Blair considered the cost of the royals to the taxpayer during his time as prime minister. In 2000, he signed a deal that froze the size of the civil list (the funding provided by the taxpayer for the upkeep of the royals) for the following 10 years. The death of Princess Margaret One episode also tackles the death of Princess Margaret, whom the show has chosen to provide many touchstones in its portrayal of the struggles between duty and personal desire. The series doesn’t shy away from charting the decline of the Queen’s younger sister. It depicts a grim, and very real, accident that saw Princess Margaret sustain severe scalding from boiling hot bath water, while staying in Mustique with friends. Princess Margaret’s final episode in the drama also underlines the ever-close relationship between the two sisters, who had lived through war, loss, and in many ways had symbolised the changing face of the 20th-century monarchy. In the ‘Ritz’ episode, The Crown recreates a little-known real event when the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, then aged just 19 and 14, ‘escaped’ the palace on VE Day 1945. They were granted permission by their father, King George VI, to join the crowds in London to celebrate (with chaperones). The Queen recalled the evening in a rare personal interview in 1985 with BBC Radio 4: “We were terrified of being recognised – so I pulled my uniform cap well down over my eyes. A Grenadier officer among our party of about 16 people said he refused to be seen in the company of another officer improperly dressed. So I had to put my cap on normally.” View oEmbed on the source website As shown in the drama, Princess Margaret died in February 2002, at King Edward VII Hospital in London. “The princess was last seen in public before Christmas 2001 at the 100th birthday party of Princess Alice, the dowager duchess of Gloucester,” writes Anne de Courcy. “Her final years were a sad contrast with the lovely young woman remembered by so many and, by the Queen, as ‘my beloved sister’.” Soon after Princess Margaret’s death, the Queen also mourned her mother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who died peacefully in her sleep in March 2002, at the age of 101. The wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla The events dramatised in The Crown end in 2005, a year that saw the future King Charles III marry Camilla, now Queen Consort, covering the events of the royal wedding in April 2005. Olivia Williams, who plays the future Queen Camilla in the drama’s final season, explained how she and Dominic West, who portrays Charles, managed their roles: “That was a challenge for us, to actually keep finding the joy between the two of them and to try and work out what the magical thing is between them that clearly makes them such a happy and successful and supportive and humorous couple now, in this very successful marriage.” At the real reception at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II offered a toast to the newlyweds in front of 800 guests, using horse racing references as she welcomed Camilla into the family. “They have overcome Becher's Brook and The Chair and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. They have come through and I'm very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.” The Queen’s plans for her funeral In its final episode, The Crown dramatises Queen Elizabeth II’s role in planning ‘Operation London Bridge’, the real codename for her funeral. The Queen really was involved in these plans for her final ceremony, and a number of her decisions reveal intriguing nods to the 17th century, writes Alice Hunt. “Hubert Parry’s music for the song ‘My Soul, There Is a Country’ was composed during the First World War, but the words are by Welsh royalist poet Henry Vaughan, written in the 1650s when there was no king,” writes Hunt. “The text used for Psalm 23 was from the Scottish psalter of 1650, compiled by the Puritan Francis Rous. And the poet John Donne (1572–1631) provided the words for the prayer “Bring us, O Lord God, at Our Last Awakening”. The final moments of the drama foreshadow the Queen’s death at Balmoral Castle on 8 September 2022 aged 96, and her funeral, an event of unprecedented scale that was watched on UK television by 29 million people. The drama chooses to end the show with the Queen’s choice of ‘Sleep Dearie, Sleep’, the same piper’s lament that concluded the Queen’s funeral in reality at Westminster Abbey on 19 September 2022, bringing the second Elizabethan age to an end. Catch up on the real the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5, with our episode guides: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide How to watch The Crown Season 6 Season 6 is available to watch on Netflix now.
Netflix’s The Crown: the real history behind the royal drama
Netflix’s sumptuous royal drama The Crown has explored many hidden intricacies of the British royal family, providing an engrossing portrait of the mid/late-20th century monarchy. Here's our ultimate guide to the real history behind the drama. Recap the historical stories behind seasons one to five of the drama, plus the real history behind season six…
How much of Netflix drama The Crown is drawn from real history? The show, which takes viewers behind the closed doors of royal life, undoubtedly strays into the realms of supposition on occasion. But much of the action is drawn the very real personal and political challenges that beset many members of the British royal family in the 20th and into the 21st century. From season one, which dramatised Queen Elizabeth II’s ascension and the early days of her reign with Claire Foy as the young monarch, to the middle seasons with Olivia Colman playing the Queen as the matriarch of a growing royal brood, and into the final stage of the story with Imelda Staunton as the late monarch, The Crown has provided an intimate and dramatic portrayal of many figures at the heart of the modern monarchy. Season 5 of Peter Morgan’s drama welcomed a new cast, with Imelda Staunton portraying the late Queen Elizabeth II from the early 1990s onwards. Season 5 was the first season to be broadcast following the deaths of the Duke of Edinburgh on 9 April 2021, and Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022. Read on for our breakdown of the real history that has inspired each season, and where the drama chooses to diverge from real events – plus don’t miss our episode-by-episode guides… (Note: this article contains spoilers for seasons 1–6 of The Crown) Follow the links below to jump to each section: What's the real history behind The Crown season 6? What's the real history behind The Crown season 5? What’s the real history behind The Crown season 4? What’s the real history behind The Crown season 3? What’s the real history behind The Crown season 2? What’s the real history behind The Crown season 1? What's the real history behind The Crown season 6? The latest season of The Crown continues to walk the tightrope that faced the drama in season 5. As historian Sarah Gristwood previously told us: “As The Crown moves into the 1990s, it was always going to have a hard row to hoe." The events of those years, she writes, “are at once too shocking and too familiar,” writes Gristwood. “What seemed pleasurably entertaining when the events depicted were safely in the past seems tone deaf once they come within the collective living memory." Figures who are dramatized on screen have voiced reservations, including former prime minister John Major. “Tony Blair (who succeeded Major as PM in 1997) has likewise declared the portrayal of his relationship with the royals as lacking any validity, and former minister Michael Heseltine declared it was “important” that they spoke out,” wrote Gristwood. The debate has become as much the story as anything we see on screen. The paparazzi interest in Diana – particularly in the summer months of 1997, before her death, aged 36, in a car crash in Paris – is the central subject of The Crown’s opening four episodes. Previous seasons of the drama have traced and foreshadowed this escalating paparazzi interest, from the press ‘discovering’ Princess Margaret’s relationship with Group Captain Peter Townsend in season one, to Charles and Diana’s 1983 royal tour of Australia and the start of ‘Dianamania’ in season four, and the ‘War of the Waleses’ that played out in the press in season 5. Season six, part one dramatises Diana’s final months, characterised by the fraught balancing act of managing very public demands of royalty with the need for privacy in an age when royal life was being redefined by the clamour of mass media. Further subjects are Diana’s campaign against landmines, and the accession of Tony Blair to the role of prime minister, and his subsequent relationship with the late Queen Elizabeth II. Read more about the real history in The Crown season 6 The final six-episode instalment of The Crown in part follows the young princes, William and Harry, and the challenges they faced in the heightened spotlight following the death of Princess Diana. William is shown at Eton, where he chose to return to his schooling after the death of his mother in August 1997 before heading to study at the University of St Andrews in 2001, where he met Catherine Elizabeth Middleton. Historian Tracy Borman writes that “theirs is often heralded as one of the most successful royal partnerships in history – as well as the most ordinary." The final series of the drama also contrasts the public perception of the monarchy with the popularity of prime minister Tony Blair as the country approached the new millennium, including an event drawn from real history that saw Blair given a hostile reception by Women's Institute (WI) members, at one of the organisation’s conferences in June 2000. As The Crown shows, his speech was not well-received; WI members heckled and slow hand-clapped the speech. In contrast, the Queen – a long-time member of the WI and great advocate of the organisation – received a warm welcome by the ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ crowd. This historical example is not the only time viewers see modernity and tradition pitted against each other – arguably a theme that has run throughout all six series of The Crown. One episode also tackles the death of Princess Margaret, whom the show has chosen to provide many touchstones in its portrayal of the struggles between duty and personal desire. The events dramatised in The Crown end in 2005, a year that saw the future King Charles III marry Camilla, now Queen Consort, covering the events of the royal wedding in April 2, and also imagining the Queen's involvement in planning ‘Operation London Bridge’, the real codename for her funeral. The final moments of the drama foreshadow the Queen’s death at Balmoral Castle on 8 September 2022 aged 96, and her funeral in 2022, an event of unprecedented scale that was watched on UK television by 29 million people. View Green Video on the source website What's the real history behind The Crown season 5? Season 4 of the drama ended with Margaret Thatcher’s resignation, and the unravelling of the marriage between Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales. The most recent season was decried by some, with royal historian Hugo Vickers saying that the fourth was “the least accurate” of the series so far. Season 5 of The Crown took viewers into the 1990s, and well within living memory, bringing a new cast, too. Imelda Staunton stepped into the role of Queen Elizabeth II, with Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip. Dominic West plays Prince Charles, and Elizabeth Debicki took on the role of Diana, Princess of Wales, both pivotal roles in the drama’s chosen action; the season covered the various television interviews that the couple engaged in the 1990s, with an unidentified voice describing the media parrying as “all-out war” – with the various media projects dubbed 'the War of the Waleses' by the tabloids. There is dramatisation of moments such as Diana’s so-called ‘revenge dress’, as well as Diana’s infamous 1997 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir (played by Prasanna Puwanarajah). Within weeks of the interview, as shown in the drama, the Queen suggested the couple should divorce – and quickly. Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles was dissolved in August 1996, after four years of separation. Catch up on the real the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5, with our episode guides: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide In early episodes of season 5, there was an exploration of the Queen’s annus horribilis (horrible year), a phrase she used to describe 1992, which encompassed the fire at in Windsor Castle and the respective breakdowns in marriages of three of her children. Natascha McElhone was cast as Penelope Knatchbull – wife of Norton Knatchbull and a second cousin to Prince Charles – and the drama chose to depict Prince Philip’s friendship with Knatchbull, with whom he participated in carriage-driving competitions. Meanwhile, Leslie Manville took on the role of the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret, who in the 1990s experienced more of the health issues already explored in previous episodes. The next generation of royals also featured for the first time: a young Prince William was played by Dominic West’s son, Senan West, and Prince Harry by Teddy Hawley – which allowed the drama to explore the significant challenges of royal parenthood and childhoods. Read more | Princess Diana: a "modern" mother who ripped up the rule book As in previous seasons there were storylines from the history of those in 10 Downing Street, with Jonny Lee Miller cast as John Major (Prime Minister from 1990–97) and, bringing 18 years of Conservative government to end, Bertie Carvel as Tony Blair (Prime Minister from 1997–2007). The final episode of the season saw Diana agreeing to a holiday with Mohamed al-Fayed, who offered the opportunity to stay on his yacht off Saint-Tropez. In the latter episodes, Diana is portrayed as increasingly besieged by paparazzi and living a seemingly lonely existence from her base in Kensington Palace, following the end of her relationship with surgeon Hasnat Kahn. Viewers were also introduced to Mohamed’s eldest son, Dodi (played by Khalid Abdalla) and the Harrods heir’srelationship with Kelly Fisher, a US swimwear model and aspiring actor. Meanwhile, the relationship between Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla Parker-Bowles developed, with Charles seeking greater acceptance for their relationship from his family. What’s the real history behind The Crown season 4? Season four of The Crown covered much more recent history than previous series – bringing the royals into the 1980s – but none the less compelling for it. Covering many events within recent memory, the fiction is constantly being fact-checked against history. “Word is the royals have rather liked The Crown so far, but this season may go down badly,” wrote Sarah Gristwood in a historian’s review of the fourth season. While the bulk of the cast from season three remained in place, two notable historical figures joined in the form of Lady Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) and prime minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson). Season three took viewers up to the year 1977 and the fourth season picked up in the late 1970s, with the arrival at No 10 Downing Street of Conservative politician Margaret Thatcher, the eighth prime minister to take office during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. One key thread that runs through the series is the late Queen’s relationship with Mrs Thatcher. What was it really like? Their dynamic was famously strained, though Thatcher was always deferential to the monarch; as Dominic Sandbrook writes, the prime minister was “a dewy-eyed monarchist, who told an interviewer that she would have been a ‘Cavalier’ in the Civil War, and she treated the Queen with such exaggerated deference that her low curtsies became a palace joke”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/11/Thatcher-unimpressed-–-credit-Mark-Mainz-508b554.jpg" width="4500" height="3000" alt="Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher and Stephen Boxer as Denis Thatcher in season 4 of 'The Crown'" title="Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher and Stephen Boxer as Denis Thatcher in season 4 of 'The Crown'. (Photo by Mark Mainz/Netflix)" /> Yet tensions arise as Thatcher brings the country to war over the Falkland Islands. The pair also clash over British sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the drama also explores both the Queen and Thatcher’s lives as mothers. In reality, writes biographer Charles Moore, additional unease came from the fact that “both were women, and neither had much experience of working with women at a high level”. Read more about the Queen and Thatcher’s relationship, and why did Margaret Thatcher & the Queen clash over apartheid in South Africa? Meanwhile, as the spotlights shifted ever more on to the new generation, the pressure on Prince Charles as heir apparent was brought into sharp focus as he is encouraged to find a suitable bride. Charles first met Diana in 1977 – the prince thought her “jolly” when he visited Althorp, the Spencer estate, when he was dating Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah. But it was in the summer of 1980, at a house party hosted by Diana’s friend Philip de Pass in New Grove, near Petworth, that Prince Charles first saw Diana Spencer as a potential girlfriend, when she expressed sympathy over the death of Lord Mountbatten, Charles’s much-loved great uncle and mentor. After a successful weekend visiting the royal family, during which Diana passed the ‘Balmoral tests’ in the drama, Charles was prompted by his father to marry her. Though The Crown opted not to cover the ‘fairy tale’ wedding day itself, the couple’s whirlwind engagement, and the increased feelings of isolation that Diana feels as a newcomer in the family, were dramatised in detail. The series also included (following prominent trigger warnings) harrowing depictions of Diana’s struggles with an eating disorder. “It was Diana’s tragedy,” says historian Sarah Gristwood, “to be chosen for what she did not have – experience, any sign of independent opinions – rather than for any more positive qualities.” The Crown S4 episode guide: the real history The Crown S4 E1 real history The Crown S4 E2 real history The Crown S4 E3 real history The Crown S4 E4 real history The Crown S4 E5 real history The Crown S4 E6 real history The Crown S4 E7 real history The Crown S4 E8 real history The Crown S4 E9 real history The Crown S4 E10 real history Much of season four covered Diana’s transformation from a shy teenager navigating her place in one of the world’s most famous families, to global icon. “Her effect on the world remains profound and inspiring,” said actor Emma Corrin. Elsewhere, the drama covered the first royal tour of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to Australia and New Zealand in 1983, and the birth of ‘Dianamania’. As Diana became ever more popular with the public, particularly because of her departure from tradition as a royal mother, the series is rife with depictions of Charles’s attempts to avoid being “comprehensively outshone by his incandescent young wife”. Inevitably, The Crown also explores the evolving relationship and love triangle between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, as the Prince of Wales becomes ever more distant from Diana. Find out more about Charles and Camilla’s relationship, along with the truth behind that bracelet <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/11/The_Crown_charles_diana_dance-3418fd0.jpg" width="1024" height="756" alt="Charles (Josh O'Connor) and Diana (Emma Corrin) in 'The Crown', left; and the real royal couple dancing in Sydney" title="Charles (Josh O'Connor) and Diana (Emma Corrin) in 'The Crown', left; and the real royal couple dancing in Sydney in 1983. (Images by Netflix/Des Willie and Getty Images)" /> Meanwhile, Helena Bonham Carter portrayed the turbulence of Princess Margaret’s life after the disintegration of her marriage to Lord Snowdon – drama which makes for uncomfortable viewing in episode 7. Season 4 explored Princess Margaret’s declining health, including an operation she underwent in 1985 to remove a portion of her left lung. “She smoked 60 cigarettes a day with the knowledge that her father died of lung cancer at 54,” Helena Bonham Carter told Town & Country. “She had a lung removed, and she carried on smoking. She was a total addict. There was too much of her life that she was allowed to get lost inside her head, and I think that’s the unfortunate thing.” Episode 7 also explored the lives of two little-known royal family members, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes Lyon, first cousins to Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. Elsewhere, in another standalone episode we saw the remarkable 1982 Buckingham Palace break-in, when an out-of-work painter and decorator named Michael Fagan scaled a wall of the palace and entered the Queen’s bedroom while she was sleeping. Episode 5 explored – and embellished– the story of one of the biggest royal security breaches of the 20th century. Browse our exclusive episode guides to the real history behind each episode of season 4 Read historian Sarah Gristwood’s review of season 4 of The Crown What’s the real history behind The Crown season 3? The first new element that viewers will have noticed in season 3 is a change of cast, with the two lead royals now played by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies. Helena Bonham Carter took over the portrayal of 'rebel royal' Princess Margaret, and “if Bonham Carter can capture even a fraction of her extraordinary, world-class rudeness, then audiences are surely in for a treat,” wrote Dominic Sandbrook for HistoryExtra. A key plot line in season three explored the early relationship of Prince Charles and Camilla Shand (later Parker Bowles) – played by Josh O’Connor and Emerald Fennell respectively. It was in the summer of 1971 when Charles, then 22, first met Camilla Rosemary Shand, wrote royal expert Marlene Koening for HistoryExtra. “A legend has been fostered that the couple were introduced at a polo match at Smith’s Lawn in Windsor, but, according to Jonathan Dimbleby’s authorised biography, The Prince of Wales (1994), the introduction was in fact made by a mutual friend, Lucia Santa Cruz, daughter of the Chilean ambassador to the United Kingdom, whom Charles had met when he was a student at Cambridge. “It was reportedly an “instant attraction” between Charles and Camilla. During an 18-month period their friendship blossomed into a love affair.” Aside from new romances, the series also explored Charles’s relationships with his parents, particularly his mother, as he was invested as the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1969. Another storyline is the 1969 fly-on-the-wall documentary which followed the royal family, and hasn’t been broadcast in its entirety since the 1970s. Historian Sarah Gristwood suggests that the film might have been intended to combat late 1960s polls that indicated the public viewed the royals as an "out-of-touch anachronism". Elsewhere, episode five explored an attempted coup to replace Prime Minister Harold Wilson, which involves Prince Philip's uncle, Lord 'Dickie' Mountbatten and Bank of England director Cecil King. Was the royal involved as much as Peter Morgan suggests in the season? Historian Andrew Lownie writes that "it’s clear Mountbatten was far more involved than he or other collaborators publicly stated". Mountbatten's political ambitions were nothing new, says Lownie, though "ultimately any evidence that his own role went any further than a few conversations remains hidden". Lord Mountbatten: Did Prince Philip’s uncle attempt to lead a coup against Harold Wilson’s government? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/GettyImages-82513289-ae6b916.jpg" width="1024" height="771" alt="CAERNARVON, WALES - JULY 1: (L-R) Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II and The Queen Mother is seen at the investiture of Prince Charles, Prince of Wales on July 1, 1969 in Caernarvon, Wales. (Photo by Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)" title="Anwar Hussein Collection" /> Early on in the series, viewers also bade farewell to John Lithgow's Sir Winston Churchill, and The Crown featured a few moments of the state funeral of Britain’s former prime minister and wartime hero. The 1965 event was a brilliant spectacle watched by more than 350 million people around the world. Upon Churchill’s death the Queen wrote to his widow, Clementine: “The whole world is poorer for the loss of this many-sided genius.” Contrary to myth, though, Churchill himself was not much involved in the planning of his own funeral. Another moving episode considered the Queen’s reaction to the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when a spoil tip collapsed onto the Welsh village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Meanwhile, the series depicted yet another prime minister, Labour politician Harold Wilson (played by Jason Watkins), and also explores Prince Philip’s fascination with the 1969 moon landings. There are some episodes from this period that didn't feature, as Sarah Gristwood explains, including the 1974 abduction attempt on Princess Anne. Inevitably, dramatisations will need to take certain liberties with invention, as we will never entirely see behind the curtain of royal family life – but, Gristwood says, "writer Peter Morgan’s great strength is using what is known in order to infer what is not". Read more | “No match for reality”: the missing history in series three of The Crown Elsewhere, the degeneration of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon's marriage was inevitably dramatised. Their divorce – an enormous international story – seemingly indicated one of the key themes of the series: their split was, as Dominic Sandbrook writes, “the first sign that the carefully manicured Victorian façade of the royal family was breaking apart under the pressures of the late 20th century”. The real history behind The Crown Want to know even more about the real events from history that inspired the drama? Read more from the experts… Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II: what was their relationship like? Prince Charles and Camilla: a history of their romance Why did Charles and Diana's marriage fail? The Queen’s “rebel sister”: 8 facts about Princess Margaret Historian Sarah Gristwood reviews The Crown season 4: “We’ve reached the issue of how fiction influences opinion in the real world” Buckingham Palace intruder Michael Fagan: what happened and why did he break in? Was the Queen opposed to the Falklands War? The Crown: the real history behind series 1–3 Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s wedding: everything you need to know Why was Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great-uncle, assassinated? Everything you need to know about Prince Charles Who is Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall? Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon: why did their marriage break down? Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip: 8 milestones in their marriage Who is Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II? What’s the real history behind The Crown season 2? Series two pulled no punches in putting the royal marriage at the centre of the drama right from the start. The action opened on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1957, following Prince Philip’s royal tour. The balance of power in the relationship between the Queen and her husband is tested as Philip grows resentful over his position in the family, outranked by his young son Charles. One of the trickiest topics addressed is Prince Philip’s rumoured marital infidelity. Throughout its second series, The Crown grappled with the question of whether the Queen’s husband – eager to escape the suffocating constraints of royal duty – was ever tempted to stray away from his wife. Although writer Peter Morgan remains pointedly ambiguous over whether or not stories of Philip’s indiscretions are true, The Crown had the prince flirting with an attractive female journalist, attending a raucous yet secretive gentlemen’s lunch club, and using a men-only royal tour on the Britannia yacht as a chance to let his hair down. In one of the series’ most poignant moments, Elizabeth discovered a photograph of the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova in her husband’s suitcase. A star dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, Ulanova was generally considered to be one of the greatest ballerinas of her time. Though she really did visit London in 1956, there is no evidence that she and Philip were involved in any sort of extra-marital affair. While a relationship with Galina Ulanova seems distinctly unlikely, Philip’s name was linked to several other women in the late 1950s and 1960s. Rumours of his infidelity served as a means of criticising his playboy antics and carefree lifestyle. However, with a distinct lack of any concrete evidence, they remain simply rumours, nothing more. Series two also considered Elizabeth II’s role on the world stage. In reality, the Queen met nearly a quarter of all the US presidents, but it is her encounter with the 35th president that is explored in The Crown’s second season. In June 1961 and Britain was abuzz as John F Kennedy and his wife Jackie visited London, with an invitation to dine at Buckingham Palace. Writer Peter Morgan imagines that the visiting couple’s popularity and glamour, particularly that of the First Lady, might have caused the Queen to feel old fashioned or out-of-touch. Indeed, viewers saw Elizabeth learn of criticism uttered by Jackie Kennedy during a dinner party, in which she branded the monarchy “outdated” and the Queen “incurious”. Although there is no evidence that the Queen was aware of such comments, there are sources that suggest the First Lady was critical of the Queen: in a 1995 memoir, American writer Gore Vidal wrote that Mrs Kennedy had reported the Queen to be “pretty heavy going”. The Crown goes on to link the Kennedys’ visit with the Queen’s 1961 visit to Ghana, suggesting that Elizabeth went to the newly independent country partly in order to prove her worth to the presidential couple. Though the Queen did go to Ghana in 1961 (and did dance the foxtrot with Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah), her visit was more likely a diplomatic bid to maintain good relationships with the country, rather than an attempt to counter the Kennedys' disparaging comments. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/GettyImages-3247110-b27051d.jpg" width="1024" height="744" alt="20th November 1961: Queen Elizabeth II dances with Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah (1909 - 1972) at a farewell ball held at State House, Accra. They, and the Duke of Edinburgh, are dancing to a version of 'High Life' composed specially for the occasion and entitled 'Welcome Your Majesty'. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" title="Living The High Life" /> Elsewhere in the series, still recovering from her failed relationship with Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret met her future husband, Antony ‘Tony’ Armstrong-Jones (Ben Daniels). In reality, the couple first met at a small dinner party given by the princess’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, in 1958, but they did not ‘click’ until a few months later when one of the princess’s admirers asked for a photograph of her and arranged for Armstrong-Jones to take it. “His easy flow of chat, wit and animal high spirits intrigued Margaret and it was not long before he became part of her circle,” wrote Lord Snowdon biographer Anne de Courcy in an article for HistoryExtra. Their engagement, says de Courcy, was the best-kept royal secret of the last century. Very few, knew of it – certainly not the women with whom Armstrong-Jones was involved at the time, including (as shown in the series) the actress Jacqui Chan and Camilla Grinling – who was by then married to Armstrong-Jones’s best friend, Jeremy Fry. (Armstrong-Jones had also conceived a child with Grinling, born while he and Princess Margaret were on honeymoon). Though their union began with glamour, romance and a wedding at Westminster Abbey, by the end of the series, cracks in their relationship were beginning to show. Read more | “Cheap men and expensive bottles”: Princess Margaret’s love affairs In a departure from the main thrust of marital tensions that continued through the series, another episode – ‘Vergangenheit’ – revisited the Duke of York (former Edward VIII, played by Alex Jennings). The episode focused on the duke’s Nazi sympathies, revealing that he did have a relationship with Nazi high command. The duke later admitted that he had been foolish and naïve about Adolf Hitler (in an interview with an American newspaper in 1966). The final episode of series two explored 1963–4 and the fall-out from the Profumo Affair, in which Secretary of State for War John Profumo admitted to having an improper relationship with 19-year-old model Christine Keeler. Keeler was also engaged in an affair with an attaché in the Soviet embassy in London, Commander Yevgeny Ivanov, which meant the affair was seen as a potential security breach as well as a sign of immorality. A key figure in the affair was an osteopath named Stephen Ward, who became embroiled under the accusation that he was procuring and providing young women for 'entertainment' in his society circle (he had introduced Profumo and Keeler). Read more | Sex, lies and spies: the real history of the Profumo Affair There is evidence linking Ward and Prince Philip; the former had sketched the Duke of Edinburgh. However, the series drew a direct link between the two, speculating that Philip had attended a number of Ward’s society parties (indelibly linked in the public eye with immoral behaviour). Royal historian Christopher Wilson has since commented on the plotline as a sign of the show becoming “more elastic” with the truth. This speculation on Morgan's part continued into series three, with royal art historian Sir Antony Blunt blackmailing Prince Philip with 'knowledge' of the royal's role in the Profumo affair, after Blunt was unmasked as a Soviet Spy. What’s the real history behind The Crown season 1? Season one of the hit Netflix series dramatized the personal and political challenges facing Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in the mid-20th century. Set across ten stylish episodes, the show explored events ranging from the wedding of Princess Elizabeth (played by Claire Foy) to Philip Mountbatten (Matt Smith) in 1947, to the final days of Winston Churchill’s (John Lithgow) premiership and the growing tensions over the Suez Canal. Obvious from the opening frames of the show was an intent to dramatise the humanity and fallibility of often inaccessible royal figures, as viewers meet Elizabeth’s father King George VI (Jared Harris) coughing blood into a toilet bowl, foreshadowing his premature death later in the series. The first episode takes place amid preparations for the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN (born Prince Philip of Greece). In a time of postwar austerity, the wedding needed to balance royal ceremony with sensitivity, as food and clothing rationing was still in effect. The British government provided Elizabeth with the 300 clothing coupons necessary for her ivory silk wedding dress, while the wedding breakfast featured partridges, which were not subject to rationing. Throughout the series, the drama is preoccupied with the balance between love and duty that has challenged so many royal couples – Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the Queen and Philip, Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend, Prince Charles and Camilla Shand (later Parker-Bowles). Robert Lacey, consultant historian to the series, explained writer Peter Morgan’s process when dramatising real historical events: “There’s a whole research team of ten working full time on the series so that every single episode can be based on solid history. Peter takes his inspiration from that, then checks the scripts with people like me, as well as with the people who were actually involved in the real events – the best sources of all.” But Lacey also allows that the history in the series is sometimes tailored, as “Peter pushes his imagination to outright invention – what you could call dramatic license, or as I would prefer to put it, dramatic underlining”. We see such license at play in series one in the creation of Venetia Scott – a favoured secretary of Prime Minister Winston Churchill – who never existed. Fictional characters are brought in to illustrate wider themes, says Lacey. Scott features prominently in the story of the Great Smog, a week or so in December 1952 when thick air pollution descended across London. It is estimated that 6,000 people died of breathing-related diseases in London that month – more than were killed in any single month of bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War. “The way that The Crown deals with that event dramatically,” said Lacey, “is to have Venetia Scott die, which obviously never happened, because she never existed. But her death under a bus symbolises the jarring reality which shook Churchill out of his complacency and galvanised him to help campaign, alongside Clement Attlee on a cross-party basis, for the reforms that led to Britain’s Clean Air Act of 1956.” Elsewhere, series one followed the nascent affair between Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) and Group Captain Peter Townsend (Ben Miles), a divorced father of two. It is not clear when they started their romance in reality; Townsend divorced in 1952, and some sources suggest that he didn’t become close to Margaret until after the death of her father, King George VI, on 6 February 1952. As depicted in the drama, Margaret’s relationship with Townsend was revealed to the public when an eagle-eyed journalist spotted the princess affectionately plucking a piece of lint from Townsend’s jacket during the Queen’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1953. Viewers also saw the royal sisters coming into conflict when Elizabeth refused to permit Margaret’s marriage to Townsend, on the basis that the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. This plotline is based on a real incident from the early 1950s. Despite the public showing support for the couple, in 1955 Margaret eventually gave Peter up in order to maintain her royal privileges. Although in a public statement Margaret asserted that she had “reached this decision entirely alone”, in The Crown we see the devastated princess bitterly blame the Queen for her heartbreak and begin to descend into a spiral of self-destructive behaviour. Where did it all go wrong for Queen Elizabeth's younger sister? In reality, we cannot be certain of the extent to which events caused a rift between the Windsor sisters who, despite everything, remained in close contact until Margaret’s death in 2002. Whether or not what we see on screen is an accurate reflection of what happened behind closed doors, it’s certainly a neat illustration of Elizabeth’s continued struggle to balance royal duty with family loyalty. The royal family’s relationship with the press was also addressed in series one, and viewers witness two moments in which great respect is shown for the monarchy’s privacy. The first takes place when the Queen is in Africa, shortly after she had become Queen. Knowing that she had just lost her father, “photographers bowed their head and put their cameras on the ground, not taking photographs. We know that happened – chapter and verse,” explains Lacey. Later in the series, tensions rise in Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage and journalists catch a row between the two on camera. Yet at the Queen’s solemn request, they hand the footage over to her – although this didn’t necessarily happen in real life (instead, says Lacey, the journalists opened the camera themselves to expose the film and ruin the footage). It’s a dynamic that changes in series two and surely will seem all the more stark as the show approaches the ‘Diana years’, covered in series four. Also in the series Philip is shown as a driving influence in the modernisation of the monarchy: he’s quick to renovate Clarence House into a modern family home and, in his position at the head of the Queen’s coronation committee, is firm in pushing against tradition to create a ceremony more in keeping with the times. He succeeds in allowing the ceremony to be televised, a defining moment for many in 20th-century history across Britain and the Commonwealth. Read more: Prince Philip: a life of duty and devotion The first series draws to a close in 1955–6 as Philip is banished to Australia for a five-month tour in a bid to settle strife in the royal marriage; the Queen grows into her role while the influence of senior statesmen such as Churchill wane, seemingly feeling out-of-step in a rapidly changing world. Anthony Eden succeeds the wartime hero as prime minister, and becomes increasingly consumed by the rising Suez Crisis. View oEmbed on the source website Seasons 1–5 of The Crown are available on Netflix now This article was first published in November 2019 and has since been updated
Netflix’s The Crown: history and storytelling
Netflix's hit drama The Crown has come to a close after six seasons and 60 episodes, having dramatised the Windsor dynasty from the mid-20th century to the early years of the new millennium. While it has faced some controversy for its portrayals of living royals and storytelling choices, its mass appeal has seen it become one of the flagship historical dramas of the decade. Elinor Evans spoke to the show's head of research, Annie Sulzberger, to hear more about The Crown's approach to the real history it portrays on screen. View Green Video on the source website
From marrying for love to securing a political alliance, historian Tracy Borman looks at how monarchs through history have chosen their partners
The last instalment of long-running Netflix series The Crown will chart the blossoming relationship between Prince William and Catherine (Kate) Middleton, now Prince and Princess of Wales. Theirs is often heralded as one of the most successful royal partnerships in history – as well as the most ordinary. Rather than the pre-determined, delicately-negotiated relationships typical of most other royal marriages – particularly one involving a future king – theirs began at St Andrews University. Neither was Kate from royal stock. Their relationship continued after they had graduated from St Andrew’s, and despite intense speculation that an engagement was imminent, it would be one of the longest courtships in royal history. They eventually married in April 2011, almost ten years after first meeting. Read more | The Crown S6: the challenges of telling the story of living royals William’s approach to choosing his future queen had been both thoroughly modern and, by royal standards, deeply unconventional. Looking back over the long history of the British crown, few other heirs to the throne have been able to exercise such a degree of personal choice. Calming troubled waters One of the most important motivations in choosing a queen has been to ease tensions between rival nations. This was certainly the case with Henry V, who took the throne in 1413. England and France had been battling it out in the Hundred Years’ War since 1337 and Henry was quick to take up arms. Having secured a triumphant victory at Agincourt in 1415, he concluded a treaty with the beleaguered Charles VI five years later. As well as recognising Henry as heir to the throne of France, it also provided for his marriage to Charles’s daughter, Catherine of Valois. The ink was barely dry on the treaty before the two kingdoms were at war again, but the marriage itself was a success because it gave Henry a son and heir, who took the throne as Henry VI at the age of just eight months upon his father’s untimely death in 1422. Catherine remained in England and later married a Welsh squire named Owen Tudor, thus spawning the royal dynasty of that name. Hostilities between England and Scotland were also eased – temporarily at least – by a 16th-century marriage alliance. James IV of Scotland had first been asked to consider Margaret, eldest daughter of his English rival, Henry VII, in 1497. But James was having too much fun supporting the pretender Perkin Warbeck, who was threatening to unseat the first Tudor king. He changed his mind after Warbeck’s execution, and consented to take Princess Margaret as his bride as part of the so-called Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1502, by which time she had reached the ripe old age of twelve. As with the marriage of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, James and Margaret’s union endured for longer than the treaty. Their marriage also had a profound impact upon the history of the monarchy, for their granddaughter was the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son, James VI, became the first king of Scotland and England. Boosting one’s legitimacy Another powerful incentive to take a wife has been to bolster one’s legitimacy. Nobody was more eager to do so than William of Normandy – later known as William the Conqueror. He was probably only about seven years old when he inherited the duchy from his father. Worse still, he was illegitimate. Although he grew into a fierce warrior who saw off Normandy’s enemies and extended its territories, he never shook off the stain of bastardy. He therefore chose a wife with more than enough royal blood for both of them. Matilda was the daughter of William’s neighbours – Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, and his wife Adela of France. As such, she could trace her descent to most of the royal houses of Europe – including Alfred the Great. Unfortunately, in Matilda’s eyes, William was punching well above his weight. When she heard of his proposal, she declared that she would not lower herself to marry a “base-born duke”. Furious, William rode over to Flanders and confronted his would-be bride, dragging her to the ground, rolling her in the mud and almost beating her to death “with his fists, heels, and spurs”. To everyone’s astonishment, just a few days later Matilda announced that she would marry none but William, since “he must be a man of great courage and high daring” to have ventured to “come and beat me in my own father’s palace”. They were betrothed shortly afterwards. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the marriage proved a resounding success, bolstering William’s claim not only to the duchy but to the throne of England, and producing no fewer than eight children. Fast forward 400 or so years and another ruler was looking to strengthen his hold on power by taking a wife whose legitimacy was greater than his own. Henry Tudor might have vanquished Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, but his battle to hold onto the throne was only just beginning. The problem was, he was descended from an illegitimate line: his great-great grandparents were John of Gaunt (the third son of Edward III) and his long-standing mistress Katherine Swynford. At the time of Henry VII’s accession, there were no fewer than 18 claimants with a superior right to the throne than his – including his prospective wife, Elizabeth of York, the firstborn child of Edward IV. Henry, a Lancastrian, hoped this marriage would win over his Yorkist rivals. He was right: the union of the warring houses – symbolised by the red and white Tudor rose – brought much-needed stability to the new dynasty. It also filled the royal nursery with heirs and spares. Getting ahead of your rivals The future Henry II had an eye to political and financial advancement when he chose Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, as his bride in 1152. Eleanor was one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe. As king and queen of England, their combined lands stretched from the Scottish border almost to the Mediterranean, and from the Somme in the north of France to the Pyrenees in the south. The icing on the cake was that Eleanor was a famed beauty and politically shrewd. As well as giving Henry eight children, she proved a highly able consort who wielded power on her husband’s behalf when he was off campaigning. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2017/07/GettyImages-463927859-245b51a.jpg" width="4220" height="3354" alt="Two scenes from the Chronique de St Denis, late 14th century. The left-hand scene depicts the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France in 1137. The scene on the right shows Louis departing by ship to go on the Second Crusade in 1147. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Two scenes from the Chronique de St Denis, late 14th century. The left-hand scene depicts the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France in 1137. The scene on the right shows Louis departing by ship to go on the Second Crusade in 1147. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Another, more famous Henry also chose a wife for political gain. When Henry VIII decided to marry his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, in 1539, he was desperately short of allies. His two greatest continental rivals, Charles V and Francis I, looked set to forge a new treaty. Like England, Cleves had rejected papal authority so it looked like a match made in heaven. Sadly, it proved anything but. Henry was famously revolted by his new bride when he saw her in the flesh for the first time. He was hardly an oil painting himself by then and Anne agreed to an annulment a little too eagerly. Filling the royal nursery Charles II, the ‘Merrie Monarch’, had already fathered numerous illegitimate children by his many mistresses by the time he restored the British monarchy in 1660. That was all well and good for a playboy prince in exile, but to secure his throne he needed a legitimate heir. He therefore chose Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess whom he judged would fit the bill nicely. Although they developed a genuine affection for each other, Catherine was unable to bear a child with to give Charles. Upon his death the throne passed to his younger brother James – with disastrous consequences. The eldest son and heir of George III was similarly devoted to his mistresses – one in particular. Maria Fitzherbert drove the future George IV to such fits of passion that it was rumoured he had secretly married her. Anxious for the succession, his father insisted that his wayward son take a suitable wife. Caroline of Brunswick, a German princess, brought the added bonus of wealth, which helped pay off some of her new husband’s colossal debts. They hated each other on sight but were married in April 1795 and conceived a child on their wedding night – their only conjugal encounter. A daughter, Charlotte, was born the following January and her parents separated two months later. For love Marrying for love is not a luxury traditionally afforded to kings and their heirs. But just occasionally, the heart has triumphed over the head. Take the popular Yorkist king, Edward IV, for example. Tall and handsome, he had a string of mistresses before becoming king in 1461. Two years later, he caused a scandal of epic proportions that nearly cost him his throne. Apparently on a whim, he married the beautiful but impoverished widow Elizabeth Woodville – when he could have had his pick of Europe’s princesses. Although Elizabeth proved a fertile wife, her ambitious family caused divisions at the heart of the royal court and when Edward died suddenly in 1483, the kingdom was plunged into crisis. His two sons disappeared in the Tower of London shortly afterwards and his brother Richard seized power. It's perhaps no surprise that Britain’s most-married monarch, Henry VIII, chose some of his wives for love. Anne Boleyn drove him to such passion that he stopped at nothing to make her his wife: separating England from Rome, making himself supreme head of a new Church of England and sparking widespread rebellion. But his ardour rapidly cooled when Anne failed to give him a son, and he had her executed on trumped up charges of adultery just three years after marrying her. Later, Anne’s cousin, Catherine Howard, caught Henry’s eye when she was just a teenager. Seeing her as an opportunity to recapture his lost youth, Henry fawned after her like a lovesick puppy. But this marriage would go the same way as his second: Catherine was condemned for adultery (justifiably this time) and sent to the block. The most famous example of a king choosing to follow his heart rather than his head is Edward VIII. He was already head over heels in love with Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, when he became king in January 1936. For a while, he laboured under the misapprehension that he would be able to marry her. But at the time, the Church of England forbade marriage to divorcees, and as head of that church the new king could hardly ignore the decree. By December that year, he had decided to give up the throne for “the woman I love”. Many predicted that the abdication crisis would be the end of the monarchy. But Edward’s younger brother, known to the family as Bertie, took the reins as George VI, managed to steady the “rocking throne”, as he put it. Ever since then, royal heirs have been encouraged to put duty ahead of love when it comes to choosing a wife – with mixed results. Tracy Borman is a royal historian. Her books include Crown & Sceptre: A New History of the British Monarchy from William the Conqueror to Charles III (Hodder & Stoughton, 2022)
The Crown S6: the challenges of telling the story of living royals
As the final season of the hit Netflix series The Crown reaches our screens, the show’s head of research, Annie Sulzberger, speaks to Elinor Evans about the importance and process of interrogating power
Elinor Evans: The final season of The Crown charts the story of the royal family from 1997 to 2005. Are there any unique challenges of telling the stories of living royals, and of the Windsor dynasty in particular? Annie Sulzberger: Sometimes the biggest issue is our collective memory, because we remember things in the moment. If, for example, you asked the public today how many people died in the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, they would say two. In fact, there were three – but that third victim got little coverage in the newspapers. Read more | Charles and Diana: a history of their marriage Most of the information about the crash did not come out until 2008, when Operation Paget [the Metropolitan Police inquiry established in 2004 to investigate conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death] was published. All of a sudden, you could rebuild that entire summer through very credible testimony from close friends, bodyguards and the Ritz staff who went with Dodi to buy the ring that we feature in the series. We needed those 10 years of investigations to get to the fundamental material with which to build our story. If we had stopped in 1997, and used only resources from then, pretty much what you would have been stuck with is the emotional responses to a moment in history, because that’s all we had at the time. But nobody had quite figured out truly what had happened, and what Diana was feeling about Dodi. View Green Video on the source website I think sometimes collective memory can be a harder thing to deal with when it comes to the monarchy, because they don’t often do interviews themselves. We get most of our information from newspapers, vox pops, and the public at large – but that is not how you attempt to piece together history. This is one of the reasons why our show stops in 2005. You need to allow time for the true story of those moments to emerge. If we were still depicting the story up to 2023, we would only have today’s newspapers or interviews to help us shape the narrative. Why do you think the royal family are fair game for portrayal on programmes such as The Crown? I believe that in any democracy – which we have in the UK, even though it is a constitutional monarchy – we have the right to interrogate our public institutions, and the monarchy is a public institution. I find it interesting that nobody has a problem with us depicting Harold Wilson, John Major or Margaret Thatcher, yet some people feel that the royal family are untouchable. I simply don’t believe that’s true. If these two spheres of power are meant to function together, then we have to treat them equally. Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher? I feel a great responsibility to understand those people as well as I possibly can. But where that’s taken is not up to me – I’m not the writer of the show – but it’s my job to feel that I’ve left an impression of a person as rooted in history as possible. That’s hard, because it’s not just history – it’s perspective. But it’s rooted in as much information as we can gather and confidently put forward. View Green Video on the source website The show takes us into Downing Street at various points across the 20th and 21st centuries. How do you go about reconstructing life and events behind those closed doors? The National Archives holds cabinet agendas and minutes, so we know exactly what was covered in every cabinet meeting. And lots of people who worked as cabinet members or civil servants within Downing Street have written memoirs or published diaries – they’ve gone home that night and written about what happened. During Tony Blair’s time as prime minister, [Downing Street press secretary and, later, director of communications and strategy] Alastair Campbell took unbelievable notes about every day that he was at Downing Street. Earlier, you had Bernard Donoughue [who published diaries spanning several Labour governments] and others. A lot of PMs write autobiographies, and a lot of historians write well-vetted biographies. The reporting of government has a less gossipy nature [than some other media coverage]. So you might say, well, we know The Guardian will always slant this way, and The Daily Telegraph will slant that way. But whatever the outlet, you can trust an official account that says, for example, this many items have been presented for the budget. The variety of characters and storylines portrayed in The Crown is one of the elements that’s allowed people to connect with the series. Do you have a favourite you’d like viewers to think about more closely? If I had to choose a favourite episode, it would be that in which Charles goes to Aberystwyth University [in 1969, to learn Welsh ahead of his investiture as Prince of Wales], exploring his relationship with his Welsh tutor, Edward Millward. We were fortunate to speak to Edward’s daughter, who acted as a conduit to him – he was very ill at the time we were researching. More broadly, that episode looked at the dangers Charles was facing during a Welsh militant bombing campaign. There were accounts that he was given a bulletproof vest to wear underneath his investiture uniform, because the threat of assassination was so high. However, we realised that the real story wasn’t about the outside political forces on Charles, but about his evolution under the tutelage of someone with whom he had a new kind of dynamic. It became such a simple story about a young man’s growth and awakening. Those scenes where he’s with the Millwards highlight the family life he wished he’d had – that closeness – and the sense of isolation he experienced back home. It was such a simple, beautiful story, and we could never have got anywhere near that depth without the Millward family’s help. Are there any historical details that captured your interest but were left on the cutting room floor? Lots of small things that we spent hours researching didn’t make the final edit, or were simply brushed past in a scene. I spent a lot of time checking which medals the tribal leaders wore when Elizabeth landed in Kenya in 1952, for example, trying to figure out how this religious leader of Zanzibar got a [particular] medal. And then, by the time it was actually filmed, it was just a flash-in-the-pan moment. In one scene, Dominic West [the actor who plays Charles in the final two seasons] was eating asparagus at Highgrove. Our amazing etiquette adviser, David Rankin Hunt, stopped him and said: posh people don’t eat asparagus with knives and forks – they use their fingers. So we reset and reshot it with Dom picking up the asparagus with his fingers. It’s important to have so many voices who can chime in with their experience, because I don’t think I would have been able to look up the way in which two posh people would have eaten asparagus back in 1992. Finally, could you share your sense of the place of history as drama in 2023? If done correctly, it’s incredibly elucidating. It’s not journalism, it’s not on-the-ground reporting – but it’s how we digest our past to help us understand the moment we’re in, or where we’re going. It’s really important to have creative freedom when you’re making historical drama, because I fundamentally think that – in the same way that Hilary Mantel said in her Reith Lectures – history has long been about a very small percentage of the population written by an even smaller percentage of the population. It’s about aligning perspectives to try to build a picture, and it’s a lot more subjective than people are willing to acknowledge. As an example, the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945. That’s a concrete fact – but how victorious Britain felt at that time, or how individuals in the war felt, all of that is perspective. So I wish a show such as this was taken less as docu- mentary and more as a way to help us process the people in our lives about whom we actually don’t know very much, but who are in positions of power, and as a way to try to humanise them and our history. Annie Sulzberger is head of research for The Crown. The final episodes of the series are available to watch on Netflix from 14 December
“Haunted, in more ways than one”: A historian’s review of The Crown S6, part 1
Historian Sarah Gristwood reviews the first episodes of the royal drama’s final season. Centring on the final months of Diana, Princess of Wales, part one invokes an eerie blend of memory and invention, and plays with our knowledge of what lies ahead…
As actor Claire Foy said in the Netflix teaser for the sixth and final season of its flagship drama, the crown is a symbol of permanence. She, in her role as the young Elizabeth II, meant the crown she embodied, the one on her head – but you could say the same of The Crown too. A final sixth season, taking the narrative into the 21st century, was originally on – then off – then on again. It is now being shown in two separate chunks; and rightly so, because although the first four episodes are about the crown and its putative future, in personal terms they are all about Diana, Princess of Wales. Even the evocative poster image shows Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana – alone but always on view – perched on the end of the springboard aboard the Al Fayed yacht in the summer of 1997, seemingly contemplating a dive into an uncertain future. These first four episodes cover a little more than eight weeks, and with such a tight focus its central performance is all-important. Debicki does not disappoint. Her voice – that voice we all remember from the real Diana’s Panorama interview – is almost spookily right. Images we all recognise are recreated with astonishing accuracy (though the famous landmines walk has been transposed from her Angola visit to her Bosnia one in August 1997). But in those very memories lies the challenge – that we’re coming up to, as the New York Times put it, “one of the most analyzed periods in recent British history”. And as they watch this season, many viewers (in the UK at least) will have an alternative narrative running simultaneously in their head as they match up the drama with their own recollection. Read more | The Crown S6 part 1: the real history in the royal drama The Diana of Debicki and writer/creator Peter Morgan is a woman coping with the chaotic circumstances around her –though nods are made to reports which described, instead, a woman adrift, vibrating distractedly between her anti-landmine crusade and a life of luxury. Much in the first two episodes seems almost too much like the story we already knew; though Morgan imaginatively explores also the relationship between Diana and Dodi Fayed (appealingly played by Khalid Abdalla). Dodi’s father Mohamed (Salim Daw) is cast as the ambitious fixer – something of a deus ex machina, indeed – portrayed as pushing his son towards Diana. It’s in episode three that things really get inventive. At the Ritz in Paris, just hours before their death, Diana and Dodi are shown having a profound, insightful conversation which allows them each to recognise past mistakes, and resolve on a path ahead. As promised, the fatal crash is not seen on screen, though heard nonetheless. But it’s in episode four – ‘Aftermath’– that the controversial question of good taste presents itself most clearly. Read more | The Crown season 6 cast vs their real-life counterparts “Uncomfortable viewing” When Peter Morgan first gave us his take on these events, in his feature film, The Queen, 17 years ago, William and Harry (played here by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) were kept discretely out of view. Now, by contrast, we see Prince Charles (Dominic West) coming in to tell his sons of their mother’s death, and the boys’ reaction. It makes seriously uncomfortable viewing even for us – and excruciating, surely, for anyone who had actually been there. Diana does indeed, as already reported, appear as a ghost to both her former husband and her mother-in-law (Imelda Staunton, once again). With Charles, Diana’s tone is rueful but affectionate; with the Queen, instructive. Elizabeth II had always, Diana tells her, shown the nation “what it meant to be British”. Now is the moment to prove she could be also “a mother to the nation” as Charles had phrased it, lamenting that the Queen had been unable to be a mother to him. Read more | What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother? This season is haunted, in more ways than one. By literal ghosts; by the ghosts of all those other past books, films, documentaries covering these same few weeks; and by the knowledge of what lies ahead (slyly acknowledged from episode one, when the Queen tells Tony Blair – of Diana’s wish for a continued public role – that “it’s hard to be half in anything”, giving shades of Harry and Meghan). And haunted, too, by all of our feelings about Diana, and about the monarchy. The Queen tells the ghostly Diana she has sparked something like revolution. In fact, it proved to be not a revolution, but a much-needed reform. The aftermath of Diana’s death was – as Charles puts it in the series – “the biggest thing that any of us have ever seen”. But lessons were learnt (though the Sussexes have since queried how thoroughly) and history has shown that the popularity of many senior royals bounced back with surprising speed. “A mission statement for the British monarchy” In many ways, this final series of The Crown is a mission statement for the British monarchy. We have Charles bluntly telling his parents they could no longer have it both ways, “being a private family when we want, and a public one when it suits us”. It’s true, and it’s their tragedy. Gyles Brandreth once complained that The Crown was turning the royal family into a soap opera. The easy retort is that they did that to themselves. But that is to ignore the real vulnerable people behind the stories just as surely as did the paparazzi, shown here in all their remorseless brutality. A further six episodes, covering Charles and Camilla’s wedding, and William’s first encounters with Kate, will be released on 14 December (with talk of a prequel to follow). Will this last season help or hurt the reputation of the real monarchy? On the podcast | Dominic Sandbrook on Queen Elizabeth II's century of change Andrew Marr suggested in the Sunday Times that its members should ultimately be grateful to The Crown, for keeping their profile high in ever-less-reverential days. But that is on what one might call a professional level, not a personal one. Dodi’s ghost tells his father we can only heal if we tell the truth. On the evidence so far, it’s debatable whether Peter Morgan’s truth will do anything to heal still-open wounds within today’s divided royal family. Catch up on the real the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5, with our episode guides: The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship” The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide
The Crown season 6 cast vs their real-life counterparts
Season 6 of The Crown continues to tell a fictionalised tale of the British royal family, beginning in the 1990s. But how does the cast compare to their real-life counterparts?
Netflix’s The Crown has taken the world by storm with its heavily dramatised retelling of the British royal family, beginning in 1947 with the wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. The sixth and final season of the show – arriving in two parts, with the first four episodes streaming from 16 November and the remainder from 14 December – will take us deep into living memory. This season will cover 1997 until 2005, with part one expected to focus on the paparazzi interest in Diana – particularly in the summer months of 1997, before her death, aged 36, in a car crash in Paris. Read more | “Haunted, in more ways than one”: A historian’s review of The Crown S6, part 1 Read more | The Crown S6 part 1: the real history to expect from the royal drama The hit series garnered controversy for walking the fine line between fact and fiction. Among its detractors was actor Judi Dench, who wrote in an open letter to The Times that the closer The Crown comes to the present day, “the more freely it seems willing to blur the line between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism”. In part, The Crown’s attempts at realistic storytelling relies on how similar the cast looks to the royals they’re portraying. Let’s look at those appearing in the final series… The Crown Season 6 cast: how much do they look like the real royals? Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana Part one of the new season will focus on the death of Princess Diana, and how it shook both the nation and the royal family. Following Diana’s death in a car crash on 31 August 1997, well-wishers left more than a million bouquets outside Kensington Palace. More than one million people also crowded the streets of central London during her funeral on 6 September. Dominic West as Prince Charles In April 2011, at the age of 62, Prince Charles (now King Charles III) became the longest-serving heir apparent. The previous record, of 59 years, two months and 13 days, had been held by his great-great-grandfather, King Edward VII, heir apparent to his mother Queen Victoria. On 8 September 2022, Charles became King following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker-Bowles Charles and Camilla were married on 9 April 2005, 34 years after their first meeting. The Sunday Telegraph’s headline simply read ‘Husband and wife – at last’. Queen Elizabeth II toasted at their reception with: “They have overcome Becher's Brook and The Chair and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. They have come through and I'm very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.” Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was the longest Britain has seen – during her time on the throne, she celebrated six Jubilees, visited 116 countries, and wore an estimated 5,000 hats. Jonathan Pryce as Prince Phillip The real Prince Phillip was married to Queen Elizabeth II for over 73 years, making theirs the longest marriage in British royal history. Prince Philip had, said Elizabeth II in a speech on her golden wedding anniversary, “quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years”. Ed McVey as Prince William Ed McVey is Prince William in the second half of The Crown, which will follow the burgeoning relationship between him and Kate Middleton at the University of St Andrews. William began a geography degree after completing a gap year, in which he travelled to Mauritius, Africa, Belize and Chile. Rufus Kampa will appear as a younger Prince William in part one of this final season. Luther Ford as Prince Harry Luther Ford will play an older Prince Harry in part two of this final series, while Fflyn Edwards is a young Prince Harry alongside Rufus Kampa in part one. Consequently, we’ll see more of Princess Diana as a mother. The real Diana was insistent that William and Harry experience some normality, and gave them experiences such as a trip on the London Underground and eating in McDonald’s. She also took Prince William to visit a homeless shelter when he was 11. Meg Bellamy as Kate Middleton Catherine Middleton grew up in Berkshire, and took a degree in History of Art. She met Prince William at the University of St Andrews in 2001, and is said to have begun dating him in 2003. After a brief split in 2007, the couple’s engagement was announced three years later. They married on 29 April 2011. Claudia Harrison as Princess Anne The daughter of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip, in season 5 of The Crown we saw her meet Timothy Lawrence. The real Anne is still married to Lawrence, who is her second husband. Together they live at Gatcombe Park, an 18th-century country house on a 730-acre estate in Gloucestershire. Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret This season of The Crown will cover the period that includes the death of Princess Margaret, Elizabeth II’s younger sister. Margaret died in 2002 at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London, with her son and daughter at her side. “Her final years were a sad contrast with the lovely young woman remembered by so many,” writes historian Anne de Courcy, “and, by the Queen, as ‘her beloved sister’.” Khalid Abdalla as Dodi Fayed Diana grew close to film producer Dodi Fayed, and is believed to have begun a relationship with him sometime during a trip to St Tropez in July 1997. Dodi also lost his life in the same car crash as Diana. Salim Daw as Mohammed Al-Fayed Mohammed Al-Fayed was a successful businessman, and the father of Dodi (Khalid Abdalla). He died on 30 August 2023 at the age of 94.