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 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 latest, season four, with Olivia Colman playing the Queen as the matriarch of a growing royal brood, The Crown has provided an intimate and dramatic portrayal of many figures at the heart of the modern monarchy.
Season five of Peter Morgan’s drama will once again sport a new cast, with Imelda Staunton set to portray Her Majesty from the early 1990s onwards. Read on for our breakdown of the real history that inspired each season, and where the drama chooses to diverge from real events – plus don’t miss our episode-by-episode guides…
An early glimpse of our new Queen Elizabeth II, Imelda Staunton. pic.twitter.com/ZeMSA1hDnv
— The Crown (@TheCrownNetflix) July 30, 2021
(Note: this article contains spoilers for seasons 1–4 of The Crown)
Follow the links below to jump to each section:
- What real history to expect in 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 real history to expect in 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 will take us into the 1990s, and well within living memory, bringing a new cast, too. Imelda Staunton steps into the role of Queen Elizabeth II, with Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip. Dominic West will play Prince Charles, and Elizabeth Debicki takes on the role of Diana, Princess of Wales, both pivotal roles in the drama’s chosen action; a first-look trailer for the forthcoming season shows the various television interviews that the couple engaged in the 1990s, with an unidentified voice describing the media parrying as “all-out war”. Expect to see 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).
We can expect season 5 to cover 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. The casting of Natascha McElhone as Penelope Knatchbull – wife of Norton Knatchbull and a second cousin to Prince Charles – has led some to speculate that the drama will depict Prince Philip’s friendship with Knatchbull, with whom he participated in carriage-driving competitions.
Meanwhile, Leslie Manville will take 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 will also feature for the first time: a young Prince William will be played by Dominic West’s son, Senan West, and Prince Harry by Teddy Hawley – which surely means the drama will encompass the challenges of royal parenthood and childhoods.
As in previous seasons there will be further 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).
Blair had been Prime Minister for three months at the time of Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997, and it’s likely that this season will feature the tragic event that rocked the nation. “She was,” Blair said on the day the news broke to the world, “the people’s princess.”
What’s the real history behind The Crown season 4?
Season four of The Crown covers 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,” writes Sarah Gristwood in a historian’s review of the fourth season. While the bulk of the cast from season three remain in place, two notable historical figures join 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 picks 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 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”.
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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?
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Meanwhile, as the spotlights shifts ever more on to the new generation, the pressure on Prince Charles as heir apparent is 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 passes the ‘Balmoral tests’, Charles is prompted by his father to marry her. Though The Crown opts 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, is dramatised in detail. The series also includes (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 covers 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 covers 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 becomes 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
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Meanwhile, Helena Bonham Carter portrays 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 explores 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.”
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Episode 7 also explores 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 see 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 explores – and embellishes – 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
How many seasons of The Crown will there be?
Several cast changes have already been announced ahead of series five: Imelda Staunton will join the cast as a third iteration of Queen Elizabeth II, and Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret. Writer Peter Morgan has confirmed that The Crown will return for two more series – the sixth will be the final instalment of the royal drama.
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 takes 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.
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A key plot line in season three explores 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.”
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Aside from new romances, the series also explores Charles’s relationships with his parents, particularly his mother, as he is 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”.
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Elsewhere, episode five explores 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”.
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Early on in the series, viewers also bade farewell to John Lithgow’s Sir Winston Churchill, and The Crown features 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 considers 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 depicts yet another prime minister, Labour politician Harold Wilson (played by Jason Watkins), and also explores Prince Philip’s fascination with the 1969 moon landings.
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There are some episodes from this period that don’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”.
Elsewhere, the degeneration of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s marriage is inevitably dramatised. Their divorce – an enormous international story – seemingly indicates 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 pulls no punches in putting the royal marriage at the centre of the drama right from the start. The action opens on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1957, following 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 grapples 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, we see 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.
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In one of the series’ most poignant moments, Elizabeth discovers 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 considers Elizabeth II’s role on the world stage. The Queen has 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. It’s June 1961 and Britain is buzzing as John F Kennedy and his wife Jackie are expected in 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, we see Elizabeth learn of criticism uttered by Jackie Kennedy during a dinner party, in which she branded the monarchy “outdated” and the Queen “incurious”.
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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.
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Elsewhere in the series, still recovering from her failed relationship with Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret meets 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.
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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 begins with glamour, romance and a wedding at Westminster Abbey, by the end of the series, cracks in their relationship are beginning to show.
In a departure from the main thrust of marital tensions that continue through the series, another episode – ‘Vergangenheit’ – revisits the Duke of York (former Edward VIII, played by Alex Jennings). The episode focuses 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 explores 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).
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There is evidence linking Ward and Prince Philip; the former had sketched the Duke of Edinburgh. However, the series draws 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 continues 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 is unmasked as a Soviet Spy.
What’s the real history behind The Crown season 1?
Season one of the hit Netflix series dramatises the personal and political challenges facing Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in the mid-20th century. Set across ten stylish episodes, the show explores 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 is 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.
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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, has 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”.
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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,” says 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.”
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Elsewhere, series one follows 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.
We see the royal sisters coming into conflict when Elizabeth refuses 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.
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.
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The royal family’s relationship with the press is 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’, to be covered in series four.
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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.
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Seasons 1–4 of The Crown are available on Netflix now
This article was first published in November 2019 and has since been updated