Was the Queen really jealous of Tony Blair? The Crown season 6, part 2, fact-checked
As the final half-dozen episodes of The Crown arrive on Netflix, it is certain that Peter Morgan, his co-writers and the show’s various historical advisors have listened to the outcry occasioned by the many inventions and embellishments of the truth in earlier seasons, and decided to double down on its signature combination of invention and speculation.
After the relative sobriety of the (superior) first and second seasons, which blended documented fact with a generous helping of dramatic licence, it seems that, as the show delves into events that have taken place in living memory, its creators decided that the only way to maintain interest in well-documented recent history is with a level of fabrication that will leave audiences alternately outraged and exhilarated, depending on how they view the subject.
The Crown has never made the slightest pretence to be anything other than a fictitious drama increasingly loosely based on the lives of the Royal Family. If you’re still watching it by now, in the final stretch, you will know better than to expect accuracy. But how factually suspect is it?
Episode 5: Willsmania
Did Prince William accuse his father of being complicit in his mother’s death?
There were hints in earlier episodes of The Crown that Morgan would at least nod to some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana’s death – witness Prince Philip saying to her, at the end of season four, “let’s just say I can’t see it ending well for you” if she decided to leave the Royal Family. Yet it still comes as a considerable shock that this episode includes a moment where an upset and emotional William explicitly asks Prince Charles at Highgrove “don’t you think there might be a connection between where we all are now and your part in it?”
His appalled father replies “I hope you’re not insinuating what I think you are…your mother’s death was a terrible tragedy”, before William goes on to justify his question by saying “she should never have been anywhere near the Fayeds…you didn’t have to drive the car but you drove her into the arms of those who did, by making her so unhappy, by loving someone else.”
It’s a jaw-dropping moment that, intentionally or otherwise – and ironically, given the subject of episode nine of this season – will fuel any number of conspiracy theories, even as Dominic West’s Charles responds “If you want to make that connection, then that’s your right, but I find it deeply upsetting and unkind…that accident was not in any way my fault, and to even suggest it was is outrageous and I resent the accusation.” It is, of course, entirely without any foundation in fact. Although Prince Harry did suggest in January this year that his mother’s death that “a lot of things are unexplained”, even he has never suggested that his father – or anyone else in the Royal Family – had any involvement with the tragic accident.
Did William receive sackfuls of fan mail while a pupil at Eton?
In an affecting scene early in the episode, when a grieving William returns to school for the autumn term shortly after Diana’s death, he is shown receiving hundreds of supportive letters from his fellow pupils, even those who have never met him and only know him by repute. This was in fact true; over half the school (around six hundred boys) wrote to William to express their condolences, and as one pupil put it, “it was simply a show of solidarity.” It was undoubtedly more comforting for William at Eton than the reception that greeted Prince Harry at his prep school, Ludgrove, where the subject was simply not mentioned, either by teachers or pupils.
The treatment of William’s time at Eton in the episode is a strange mixture of small details being observed entirely correctly and larger examples of fabrication. At one point, William’s housemaster Andrew Gailey suggests that he has some insight into what his charge is going through because his wife suffered from leukaemia a few years before; this is indeed the case, as Gailey’s wife Shauna was indeed diagnosed with the illness a decade before.
Yet Gailey is also shown carrying enormous sacks of fan mail sent by (largely female) admirers into William’s bedroom before eventually disposing of it at the prince’s request. There is no record of this taking place, and although William would undoubtedly have received letters from well-wishers and admirers alike as a schoolboy – and particularly after his mother’s death – its depiction seems exaggerated for dramatic effect.
Was the relationship between William and Charles poor in the aftermath of Diana’s death?
In addition to the charged moment in which William asks his father about his perceived culpability in his mother’s accident, the episode depicts the two at loggerheads throughout, with Charles complaining of his son that “he’s so monosyllabic these days he’s almost hostile” and resentful of what he calls his “pop star” status. William, meanwhile, is shown as being furious on a private family skiing trip to Whistler in early 1998 when he is asked to participate in a photocall with journalists, complaining “[I] hate the press, hate the crowds”, leading to both his father and grandmother being concerned about the future king loathing the people he will one day rule over.
Eventually, Charles and William are reconciled through the agency of Prince Philip – who describes emotional turmoil with the euphemism ‘shoulder pain’ – and the episode ends with father and son emotionally embracing in the grounds at Highgrove. It is impossible to say whether any of this has any basis in accuracy, but the depiction of William being miserable in Whistler may be partially true; contemporary news reports suggested that, while Charles and Harry made time for well-wishers upon their arrival in Vancouver, William snubbed onlookers, heading straight into his hotel.
Certainly, relations between father and son have not always been easy; as the royal journalist Robert Jobson wrote in his recent biography of King Charles, “William has even been known to speak forcefully to his father. One exchange between them was so heated that it left Charles shaken.” Yet there is no way of knowing if the levels of tension depicted here owe anything to fact, or are simply dramatic invention.
Did Charles and Camilla not see each other for a long time after Diana’s death, on the grounds he was ‘a prisoner of public opinion’?
There is a scene of Charles and Camilla conversing on the telephone and mourning the fact that, in the charged atmosphere that has hung over the country since the events of August 31 1997, they were unable to see one another without causing outrage. This is broadly accurate. While Charles had been taking steps towards introducing Camilla into both his broader social circle and his family before his former wife’s death, he had to put a temporary halt to their public engagements together, mindful of public opinion.
However, by the spring of 1998, they were again being seen together, holding a joint reception for close friends at Sandringham in March that year, and the 16-year old William met Camilla for the first time at St James’s Palace on June 12 1998, in what was, apparently, a spontaneous and unplanned encounter, and one not depicted in the show. The media statement issued by the royals confirming the meeting was a marvel of dismissiveness: “Yes, Prince William and Mrs Parker Bowles have met. Meetings between the children and Mrs Parker Bowles are a private family matter, which we are not prepared to discuss, and we hope for their sakes, the media will now leave this very personal matter alone.”
Episode 6: Ruritania
Was the Queen irritated by Tony Blair’s popularity?
After being stuck on the sidelines for the first half of the series – presumably in an attempt not to retread territory covered in Morgan’s earlier script for The Queen – it’s time for Bertie Carvel’s Tony Blair to step forward and assume centre stage. The opening fantasy scene, in which the Queen imagines Blair being crowned in a new British republic, sets the tone, although the show’s suggestion that he was nicknamed ‘King Tony’ by the American papers is imagination.
The antagonistic relationship between the two dominates the episode, as the Queen refers to the new Prime Minister as “a unifying national symbol” and tells him – with some jealousy - that “you are by some margin the most celebrated leader on the world stage”. Yet did she genuinely believe, as the show implies, that Blair’s popularity would outstrip that of the Royal Family’s, leading to potential existential crisis for the institution?
It is undeniably true that, following his 1997 landslide election victory – and, in events omitted from The Crown, his adroit management of public reaction after Diana’s death – that Blair was an unusually popular Prime Minister; one poll in late September 1997 suggested that 93 per cent of the population believed that he was doing a good job. Yet the Queen did not warm to his presidential style of leadership, refusing to accede to his request to be called ‘Tony’ rather than ‘Mr Blair’ or ‘Prime Minister’, and was irritated by his desire to move their weekly audience from its accustomed spot on a Tuesday afternoon to a Wednesday, so he could prepare for PMQs earlier that day. It also did not help – as the episode accurately suggests – that Blair’s wife Cherie was far from a monarchist and did not show the deference to the royals that was generally expected from a prime ministerial spouse. Therefore, when it is suggested that Blair was one of Elizabeth II’s least favourite PMs, this is commonly regarded as accurate.
Did Blair suggest sweeping reforms to the institution of the monarchy, to the Queen’s horror?
With contemporary polls suggesting that the Royal Family were out of touch with public opinion, and with only 10 per cent agreeing that the monarchy should continue in its current form, the episode suggests that the Queen turned to Blair for his advice on how to make the monarchy more popular. His suggestions – which include everything from reforming primogeniture so that an eldest daughter might inherit the throne to abolishing apparently anachronistic ceremonial roles such as ‘the queen’s herb-strewer’ and ‘the warden of the swans’ – went down extremely badly (although Charles suggests that ‘one or two concessions’ may not be a poor idea) and the potential ‘purge of honorifics’ is ignored and the Queen remains victorious.
It’s an interesting idea but complete fiction. Blair was and presumably remains a monarchist to his core, unlike his wife, saying in 2002 that monarchy was “fundamentally a better system” and said of the Queen that “People see her surrounded a lot by the pomp and ceremony of the monarchy, which is an integral part of it.” Although he is yet to comment on the accuracy of the storylines of The Crown – or his presentation by Carvel – Blair was prescient about many of the exaggerations and falsehoods associated with the royals, saying “When I became prime minister and started to know a little bit more about what was actually happening I gave up pretty much believing anything you read about the royal family.”
Was it expected that the Home Secretary would be summoned to witness the birth of the Queen’s first child, before George VI vetoed the practice?
One of the more bizarre stories brought up in the episode is the detail that it used to be customary for the Home Secretary of the day to witness the birth of the next in line to the throne, and this would have been the case for the-then Princess Elizabeth and the birth of Prince Charles, had her father not decided that it was an archaic and intrusive custom and put a stop to it.
Initially, the king and queen were in favour of the tradition being maintained, but the-then private secretary Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles considered it ridiculous. When he encountered Norman Robertson, the Canadian high commissioner, he complained about its existence, and then Robertson gave him an unexpected get-out clause when he observed that, should the British Home Secretary be present at the birth, then so should the other Home Secretaries from the Commonwealth Dominions, meaning that a total of seven politicians would have been present for the birth. This was clearly ridiculous and impractical, and so the tradition was laid to rest, never to return.
Did Blair come a cropper when he addressed the WI in early 2000?
Although it is commonly assumed that it was Iraq that did for Blair’s lasting reputation, there was signs from earlier in his premiership that he was only human, after all, and one of these is depicted in amusingly vivid detail at the conclusion of the episode. Blair addressed the Women’s Institute national conference in June 2000 and in what the Labour-supporting Guardian newspaper described as “an extraordinary error of political judgement”, attempted to turn his speech into a political address, extolling the triumphs of his party. He was met with slow handclaps and booing, and his spokesman Alastair Campbell said afterwards, in an abashed tone, “I have no intention of getting into a war of words with the WI.” The contrast with the Queen, who – as the episode shows earlier – was a committed WI member and remained a member of the movement for 80 years, frequently addressing its meetings – exemplifies the difference between the two in fact and fiction alike.
Episode 7: Alma Mater
Did a 15-year old Kate Middleton and her mother Carole see Diana and William selling The Big Issue in Dec 1996?
There have been several different accounts of when William and Kate met for the first time. Received wisdom is that they first encountered one another when they were students at St Andrews in 2001, both studying history of art. However, royal biographers have suggested that the two crossed paths for the first time when William was nine and came to play in a hockey match at Kate’s prep school, also named St Andrew’s, and that although the two were unlikely to have met then, it has also been suggested that Kate would have come across William while at the sixth form at Marlborough College via a combination of mutual friends and the ever-expansive public school networking circuit.
Neither of these encounters are shown in The Crown’s seventh episode. Instead, the show imagines that a teenage Kate and her mother encountered Diana and William selling the Big Issue in December 1996. While the late Princess of Wales was a committed advocate for the homeless and campaigned on issues surrounding it, she never took to the streets to sell the magazine, nor was accompanied doing so by her son, and so there would never have been any such meeting with his future wife.
Did William date a girl named Lola Kincaid before Kate?
The episode imagines that, before William and Kate became a couple, he was dating an aristocratic girl named Lola Kincaid and that there was a degree of froideur between the two when it became obvious, after a chance encounter in the library, that William was more attracted to the middle-class Kate than he was to his supposed girlfriend. All of this is complete fiction, even down to the very existence of ‘Lola Airdale-Cavendish-Kincaid’, who may or may not be a version of William’s girlfriend Carley Massy-Birch, a self-described “country bumpkin” who briefly dated the prince in what she called “a regular university romance”.
The depiction of Kate’s romance with her fellow student Rupert Finch is broadly accurate, but the appearance of Lola – swearing at photographers as she and William leave a screening of Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, a film released in August 1999, over two years before the action is set – is pure make-believe.
Did Kate Middleton’s mother Carole scheme to bring her and William together?
The ever-excellent Eve Best, who plays Carole Middleton in the show, also played Lady Macbeth at the Globe in 2001. Some would say that this was appropriate experience to portray a woman who has been said to have put pressure on her daughter to study at St Andrews with the intention of meeting and falling in love with Prince William. Although the episode portrays Carole in a relatively balanced fashion, suggesting that her desire for her daughter to meet William is as much for his sake as hers – “That poor boy needs a nice, normal girl” – those who believe that the former air hostess manipulated Kate into attending St Andrews rather than her first choice of university, Edinburgh, will have their suspicions confirmed by the storyline here.
But is it true? Carole has never publicly commented on the rumours, and in a rare 2018 interview with the Daily Telegraph merely said, of no longer reading any stories about herself, “Well, I thought it was better to know what people thought. But it doesn’t make any difference. I’m not really sure how I’m perceived now.” Others have been less equivocal. In Tina Brown’s impeccably sourced The Palace Papers, Brown writes: “It is unlikely Kate would be where she is today without her mother’s canny help in negotiating a royal romance” and, writing of Carole’s “considerable strategic flair”, suggests that “Carole’s fingerprints are all over Kate’s first move on the royal chessboard.” From trolley dolly to grandmother to the next king is a remarkable journey: only someone truly committed – even ruthless – would be able to make it.
Was William the only member of the Royal Family to get an A at A-level?
There is an amusing scene in which the Royal Family gather to see William open his A-level results, and although Prince Philip jokingly suggests that he expects his grandson to get straight As, the family are delighted with William’s achievements: an A in Geography, a B in Art and a C in Biology. Princess Anne cheerfully remarks that he is the first member of the royals ever to have achieved an A grade, and, at the time, this may well have been true. It is not known which A-level grades she, Edward and Andrew achieved, but Charles managed a B in History and a C in French – enough, back in the day, to assure him a place at Cambridge – and Harry ended up with a B in Art and a D in Geography.
Other Royals have done better academically subsequently; Kate achieved As in Maths and Art, and a B in English, Princess Beatrice took an A in Drama and Bs in History and Film Studies, and Princess Eugenie’s As in Art and English and B in History of Art were considered so impressive that her parents put out a press release trumpeting her achievements.
Did William nearly quit university?
Much of the episode shows William’s life at St Andrews as being a lonely and miserable one; eating Pot Noodles in his room by himself, having to apologise to Kate after objectifying women as ‘fit’ and considering leaving university, saying of his course that “I struggle to see the point of it.” This is exaggerated. It is true that he did find his first term an unsatisfying one, but his biographers have suggested that this was more because he found St Andrews small and provincial compared to his previous surroundings. Robert Lacey suggests that Charles agreed that he could change university to Edinburgh but it was felt that there would be such embarrassment for the Firm if he left his studies – even to transfer elsewhere – that Prince Philip’s advice that he should “knuckle down and not wimp out” was heeded, and a transfer to the more simpatico degree subject of geography was obtained instead.
By this stage, William had met Kate on the course and formed a friendship, and Tina Brown claims that “In a series of earnest conversations, she urged William to drop his art history, a subject in which he had little or no interest.” In this episode, this is portrayed simply as Kate sending him a text counselling him not to quit university: a necessary shorthand for a more complicated situation.
Episode 8: Ritz
Did Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret leave the Palace incognito on VE Day?
A major recurring thread in this episode – which pays off heartbreakingly at the end – concerns the famous incident in which the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were allowed to leave Buckingham Palace and mingle incognito with celebratory revellers on VE Day, May 8 1945. While the basic details themselves are accurate, the show takes a great deal of dramatic licence with several of the events depicted. While Elizabeth was indeed dressed in her service gear – she had been a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service from 1944 onwards, after she had turned eighteen – she and Margaret did not go out accompanied by Margaret’s future paramour Peter Townsend and Elizabeth’s friend Porchey, as the episode suggests, but with their former nanny Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, their French tutor Marie Antoinette de Bellaigue, some Guards officers, and a royal equerry.
However, these are relatively minor fabrications. Many will be more surprised by the episode’s suggestion that, at one point, Elizabeth slipped the bonds of her protectors to dance the Jitterbug in the company of American GIs in the Pink Sink, the basement bar at the Ritz, and that she coyly alludes towards the end of the episode of having kissed one of the soldiers.
While the Pink Sink did exist – and was a favoured spot for illicit homosexual encounters – there is no record of Princess Elizabeth visiting it, then or at any other time, nor of her (and, eventually, Margaret) dancing the Jitterbug with gay abandon. The episode follows in the footsteps of several other books and films that have imagined what the royal princesses got up to on their night out of Buckingham Palace, and bears no more relation to the facts than the relatively little known about their licenced escapade.
The king wrote in his diary of the day’s exploits: “Poor darlings, they have never had any fun yet.” Had they had the kind of fun that the episode suggests, he would have been rather less sanguine.
Did John Betjeman write a filthy poem about Princess Margaret?
Before Princess Margaret is shown suffering a ‘teeny, tiny’ stroke in Mustique, she holds court to her friends and acolytes, and recites a smutty poem that she claims that the former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman wrote about her, and sent to his friend Sir Maurice Bowra. It’s undoubtedly strong stuff, beginning “Green with lust and sick with shyness/Let me lick your lacquered toes” and then continues in similarly bawdy detail, much to the delighted consternation of the hangers-on around her.
The poem does indeed exist, but it isn’t by Betjeman. Instead, it’s by Bowra, a famously waspish Oxford don who, amused by his poetic friend’s emotional reaction to being presented with the Duff Cooper Prize by Margaret in 1958, wrote the scabrous lines as a parody of Betjeman’s rather less shocking ‘In Westminster Abbey’ (“Let me take this other glove off/As the vox humana swells”).
It is unclear whether the implication is that Margaret herself is unaware of the false attribution of the poem or – as I suspect is more likely – that the show’s researchers were either misled or simply didn’t care, but it is a slight on the memory of Betjeman. However, his affection for Princess Margaret, and friendship with her, was true; his long-term companion Lady Elizabeth Cavendish was her lady-in-waiting, and the three frequently socialised together.
Did Princess Margaret have her 70th birthday at the Ritz in the company of the Queen? And did the Queen make a speech praising her? And was Prince Philip absent?
The episode shows the gradual decline of Princess Margaret after a series of strokes that result in her mobility and joie de vivre alike being impaired, including a horrific incident where she was badly scalded in her bath because she was unable to turn off the hot tap. All of these is accurately presented. One element of dramatic licence, however, comes in the depiction of her 70th birthday celebrations at the Ritz, as she returned to the scene of her VE Day celebrations in August 2001, just a few months before her death on February 9 2002.
While the setting is certainly accurate, the episode places some emphasis on the Queen attending without Prince Philip, feeling emotionally abandoned by him, and instead wishing to be there in the company of her long-standing friend Porchey, as well as making a heartfelt and emotional speech about Margaret. While it is impossible to know whether the Queen made a public address of this kind, photographs and the guestlist for the event show that she attended with Philip – as usual – and that the episode’s creation of a division between the couple is fiction.
Talking of Porchey, though, one apparently bizarre detail is entirely accurate. He did die of a heart attack after watching the events of 9/11 unfold on television, and his death was ignored in the ensuring media coverage.
Episode 9: Hope Street
Did William and Kate first become an item after she appeared in a ‘risqué’ themed fashion show at St Andrews?
By this point of the final series of The Crown, it was clear that Morgan and his fellow screenwriters wished to cover more ground than they had available screentime for, and so numerous events and timelines were conflated together, to misleading, even confusing, effect. The depiction of William and Kate’s romance is the most obvious example. In Hope Street, the impression given is that William and Kate declared their mutual feelings for one another after she appeared in a see-through dress at a student fashion show, and kissed for the first time before William’s protection officer was obliged to interrupt to tell him that the Queen Mother had died on the same day.
The two were, however, now an official item, and William is shown meeting Kate’s family on the Golden Jubilee weekend, before dashing back to Buckingham Palace to take his place alongside his family on the balcony. The two are then shown moving in together, along with some other students, at a house on Hope Street in St Andrews; the symbolic impression of the name is far from subtle.
There are an awful lot of factual inaccuracies in this storyline, and it deviates from the truth more or less after the depiction of the fashion show in which William was famously smitten by Kate, declaring to one friend “Wow, Kate’s hot!” Yet the two did not become an item until considerably later – reports vary but most have suggested that it was not until the following year, 2003 – meaning that the entire Golden Jubilee subplot is a fabrication, along with the juxtaposition of their first kiss and the Queen Mother’s death; the fashion show took place on March 26 2002, and William’s great-grandmother died on March 30. While they did indeed move into a house together in the autumn of 2002, along with two other friends, it was as housemates rather than a romantic couple.
Coincidentally – or otherwise – the Princess of Wales opened a women’s refuge in Southampton in June this year, designed to keep women who are in the justice system together with their children. Its name? Hope Street.
Why did Operation Paget come about?
As the penultimate episode of the show continues to delve into the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, it depicts the Metropolitan Police’s enquiry into the circumstances of the events of August 31 1997, which was largely brought about by Mohamed al-Fayed’s increasingly deranged and furious comments about the Royal Family’s purported involvement in the deaths of Diana and his son Dodi. The reason for its necessity was that al-Fayed made several comments that suggested that the Royal Family and the security services had been responsible either for murdering the pair, or at the very least conspiring in the accident.
Over the course of a two-year investigation, led by the Met commissioner Sir John Stevens, a range of witnesses – including Prince Charles – were interviewed, and, as shown in the episode, Charles is read a letter from Diana to her butler Paul Burrell in which she writes: “This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning an accident in my car. Brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy. Camilla is nothing but a decoy so we are being used by the man in every sense of the word.”
The broad outlines of the detail are accurate, but the chronology is, again, wildly misleading. The implication given is that al-Fayed gave a television interview in 2002 in which he talked of “the Dracula British royal family” and stating his false claim that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s baby, that this led Stevens to open his investigation, and that it was concluded with Stevens giving a televised address in which he refuted all the claims made by al-Fayed and his lawyers, before al-Fayed announces his intention of leaving the country after announcing that the Royal Family can burn in hell.
Stevens published his 832 page report in December 2006, and then there was a coroner’s inquest between 2007 and 2008 that came to the conclusion that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed by a combination of the gross negligence of their driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi tailing them. There was no set-piece public speech by Stevens, and while al-Fayed did indeed refer to the royals in dismissive and vampiric terms, he did so in court in February 2008, during which time he attacked Stevens’s report as “completely false” and suggested that “dark forces” were responsible for a cover-up. And al-Fayed never left the country, remaining in Britain – albeit never with his much longed-for British passport – until his death earlier this year.
The episode also exaggerates the extent to which the public believed that Diana had been murdered. The character Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s private secretary, cites a poll suggesting that 78 per cent of Britons believe that “some element of foul play may have been involved in the crash”. In fact, although there were numerous polls between Diana’s death and the conclusion of the inquest, none of the credible ones ever suggested that more than half the population considered that there was likely to have been anything more to the events than a tragic accident. The only evidence otherwise was an (admittedly self-selecting) Daily Express story from September 2007 that declared that 89 per cent of its readers believed that Diana was murdered; this may have had its basis in the paper’s endless front-page stories suggesting exactly that, without a shred of credible evidence.
Was the relationship between Prince William and Prince Harry falling apart by 2002?
The estrangement between the royal brothers is now so widely publicised as to be common knowledge, and it is unsurprising that this episode foreshadows contemporary events, as, in the aftermath of the Queen Mother’s death and funeral, William and Harry are shown arguing, as the future king castigates his younger brother for playing the fool and for being involved in smoking weed, only for Harry to retort “to be the likeable rogue, you first need to be likeable”, resulting in both having to apologise to one another while at the Queen Mother’s funeral. While William has remained tight-lipped about the breakdown in relations between the pair, Harry has offered detailed accounts of his falling out with his brother in his memoir, Spare, and elsewhere.
Although he suggests that the relationship between the two did not truly fragment until after Harry’s marriage to Meghan in November 2018, there had been tensions between the two dating from at least 2005 – the year of the Nazi uniform incident – and possibly dating back to their time at Eton, when William supposedly said “Pretend we don’t know each other”, although this, to be fair, is hardly unknown when an elder sibling does not wish to be embarrassed by association with a younger one.
Yet there is no indication that the two were arguing and on unusually poor terms at this stage of their relationship – undoubtedly Harry would have disclosed details in his memoir if there had been this residual tension – so this incident can be put down, as so often, to dramatic licence writ large.
Episode 10: Sleep, Dearie, Sleep
Did the Queen seriously consider abdicating and announcing her intention to do so at Charles and Camilla’s wedding?
The idea of the Queen’s potential abdication has been used in several episodes of The Crown, most notably in season five’s opener, ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’, in which Charles unsuccessfully attempts to persuade John Major to convince his mother to cede the throne to him, and the final episode of the season, Decommissioned, in which he has a similar – and apparently more fruitful – conversation with the modernising new Prime Minister Tony Blair. So it isn’t a huge surprise that the finale of the show revolves around the idea of the Queen giving up the throne so that the Prince of Wales can take over, nor that she decides that the time to abdicate would be just before her eightieth birthday, when Charles marries Camilla; it is, as Prince Harry remarks in the episode, “the wedding present Pa most wants, for him and Camilla”.
It would not be The Crown without jaw-dropping moments of invention, and so not content with suggesting the provocation – which has absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever – Morgan imagines that Imelda Staunton’s Queen has conversations with the two previous versions of her younger self, Olivia Colman’s briskly no-nonsense incarnation (“No need to go on….your first loyalty has always been to the Crown…stepping down is the right thing to do, as a queen and as a mother”) and Claire Foy’s more idealistic younger model, who declares “‘I’ve never heard so much nonsense…have you forgotten the oath that you took?” After initially deciding to abdicate – and the self-penned speech in which she will say this being trailed as “a big announcement” – she does nothing of the kind, instead making (invented) jokes about the Grand National and “a small family wedding in the Windsor area.”
A recurring theme throughout the episode is that the Queen is the last worthy holder of the office of monarch, and this is made explicit when the Foy version says to Staunton “It comes naturally to you…they seem to make such a mess of it”. Naturally, Elizabeth II does not abdicate, and despite the soul-searching that she engages in, she continued to reign for a further 17 years, frustrating her son’s hopes until well into his seventies.
Did Charles’s family object to his wedding to Camilla?
While it is unknown when and where Charles proposed to Camilla – the show suggests over the breakfast table at Highgrove – it is generally accepted that the Queen was not thrilled by the news, as the episode makes clear. The royal objection to Camilla was less to do with her personally and more that the monarch, as a religious woman, looked unfavourably on the idea of two divorced people remarrying in a church service; hence a scene in which Elizabeth convenes a gathering of bishops to ask their advice, before deciding that it would be more difficult if Charles was living in sin with Camilla if she died than if he was married in a secular service and then received a blessing in church.
This is all broadly accurate, but what is unclear is to what extent the episode’s portrayal of the antipathy that Harry, in particular, felt towards Camilla is factual. The details that he said “why can’t they just carry on as they are” and telling his brother that he is a “f______ company man” for not objecting to the match, owe a great deal to his memoir Spare. In it, Harry described Camilla as “dangerous” and “a villain” who had thrown her stepson-to-be under a bus in order to enhance her own reputation and thereby smooth the way for her to marry Charles, and he wrote that both he and William begged their father not to marry her, describing her as a “wicked stepmother” – a description that was briefed to the papers had left Camilla hurt.
Given the episode’s depiction of a seething and resentful Harry – and a more acquiescent William – it’s interesting to wonder if Morgan or his researchers read Harry’s memoir, or if the dislike that he felt for Camilla is simply well-known in Palace circles.
Did Prince Harry dress up as a Nazi for a fancy dress party?
It is one of the aspects of Harry’s personal lore that, in 2005, he attended a ‘colonial and native’ themed fancy dress party dressed as a member of the Afrika Korps, and pictures of him in the outfit were sold to the newspapers by another guest, who surreptitiously took them on his camera phone. Harry has subsequently described this as “one of the biggest mistakes of his life” and its reasonably faithful depiction in The Crown will bring back unpleasant memories for him – if, of course, he chooses to watch this series, with the far greater trauma that it contains. Harry subsequently claimed that William and Kate egged him on – something alluded to when he angrily calls his brother Mr Morality – although the episode shows Harry choosing his outfit with the two of them, rather than telling them over the phone, as really happened.
It is, however, a pure fabrication – if an amusing one – that the Princes’ friend Guy Pelly dressed up as their grandmother at the same party, and at one point took to the stage in full Elizabeth regalia to sing Queen’s I Want To Break Free. But it is true, as the episode suggests, that Harry was punished by being made to do farm work by his father. This revelation, which appeared in the Sunday Mirror, subsequently formed part of Harry’s court case against Mirror Group Newspapers, as he claimed that the story was obtained by phone hacking.
