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, will be released in two parts, and the first four episodes arrive on Netflix on 16 November 2023.
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 will bring viewers into the 21st-century story of the Windsor dynasty, with the plotlines expected to end around 2005.
What historical events will 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 expected to be 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.
Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed
The early episodes of season 6 will likely 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.
She 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 will 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 will dramatise 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.”
What will happen in the second part of The Crown S6?
The next instalment of The Crown will follow the young princes, William and Harry, and the challenges they faced in the heightened spotlight following the death of their mother.
The latter episodes of season 6 will also no doubt dramatise 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 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’.”
The events dramatised in The Crown will end in 2005, a year that saw the future King Charles III marry Camilla, now Queen Consort.
The show has confirmed that the final series will include 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.”
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 Part 1
Season 6 Part 1 of The Crown will be available to watch on Netflix from 16 November 2023.