Season 5 was the first season of the royal drama to be broadcast following the deaths of the Duke of Edinburgh<\/a> on 9 April 2021, and Queen Elizabeth II<\/a> on 8 September 2022.<\/p>\n The final season will bring viewers into the 21st-century story of the Windsor dynasty, with the plotlines expected to end around 2005.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s formal separation (announced by Prime Minister John Major<\/a> in 1992) and eventual divorce in August 1996.<\/p>\n \u201cThe marriage collapsed like a house of cards. Every detail was subject to insatiable scrutiny by the press,\u201d writes historian Tracy Borman<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013\u00a0and particularly Diana \u2013\u00a0was at fever pitch.<\/p>\n The paparazzi interest in Diana \u2013 particularly in the summer months of 1997, before her death, aged 36, in a car crash in Paris<\/a> \u2013 is expected to be the central subject of The Crown<\/em>\u2019s opening episodes.<\/p>\n Previous seasons of the drama have traced and foreshadowed this escalating paparazzi interest, from the press \u2018discovering\u2019 Princess Margaret\u2019s relationship<\/a> with Group Captain Peter Townsend in season one, to Charles and Diana\u2019s 1983 royal tour of Australia and the start of \u2018Dianamania\u2019<\/a> in season four.<\/p>\n Diana\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The early episodes of season 6 will likely cover Princess Diana\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n 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 \u2018Her Royal Highness\u2019 but was allowed to keep the title \u2018Princess of Wales\u2019.<\/p>\n Diana stayed on the Al-Fayeds\u2019 new luxury yacht, the Jonkial<\/em>, in Saint-Tropez. She also stayed in the family\u2019s 30-bedroom estate, Castle St Therese, with her sons Princes William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday,\u201d wrote Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex in his 2023 autobiography Spare.<\/em> \u201cEverything about that trip to Saint-Tropez was heaven. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Sometime during the Saint-Tropez trip, it\u2019s believed that Diana began a relationship with Mohamed\u2019s eldest son, Dodi Fayed (though as shown in The Crown<\/em> season 5, the press of the time reported that Dodi was engaged to American model Kelly Fisher<\/a> when his relationship with Diana began).<\/p>\n On being introduced to Fayed, Prince Harry wrote that he was \u201ccheeky,\u201d but \u201cnice enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the press\u2019 discovery of Diana\u2019s relationship with Fayed, journalist and author David Barnett noted<\/a> in 2017 that \u201cthere was an obsession with Diana, her every move was checked and documented and filed\u201d.<\/p>\n Paparazzi interest soon escalated to unforeseen heights. \u201cIn the months before [her death],\u201d writes Barnett, \u201cshe 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\u201d.<\/p>\n Diana\u2019s year as a divorced woman \u201cwitnessed controversial relationships with surgeon Hasnat Khan and Harrods heir Dodi Fayed,\u201d writes royal historian Sarah Gristwood<\/a>, \u201cbut it also saw the anti-landmines campaign which stands as her lasting memorial.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cloose cannon\u201d<\/a> (he felt her comments were out of step with government policy).<\/p>\n But National Archives documents released in 2020<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no doubting the profile that Diana brought to the cause. \u201cShortly after her visit,\u201d reports the Trust\u2019s website<\/a>, \u201cthe Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty was signed, calling for all countries to unite to rid the world of landmines.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As has been the case with every season of The Crown<\/em>, the new episodes will also see a new prime minister. In the final episode of season five<\/a>, viewers saw Tony Blair elected in a landslide victory for Labour in May 1997.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are moments in history when you can feel a nation changing course, and the summer of 1997 felt like one of them,\u201d writes historian Dominic Sandbrook.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the first day of May, the British electorate had unceremoniously slammed the door on 18 years of\u00a0Conservative government, handing Tony Blair\u2019s\u00a0Labour party\u00a0the biggest landslide in postwar history. When, in the small hours of the morning, Blair addressed Labour\u2019s election-night party at the Royal Festival Hall, he began with the words: \u2018A new dawn has broken, has it not?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Recalling his first audience with Queen Elizabeth II, Blair described the late queen as \u201cdirect\u201d, and the monarch reportedly denied the invite to call him \u2018Tony\u2019.<\/p>\n Blair \u201cwas a man of a new generation,\u201d writes historian Francis Beckett<\/a>, \u201cand his advice on the Queen\u2019s family problems was less appreciated than his predecessor John Major\u2019s had been.\u201d<\/p>\n The Queen also reportedly reminded him of her longevity, remarking that \u201cYou are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Princess Diana\u00a0had been killed in a car crash in Paris.<\/p>\n Diana\u2019s death in Paris prompted\u00a0an extraordinary outpouring of public grief<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOutside her London home,\u00a0Kensington Palace, well-wishers left more than a million bouquets,\u201d writes Sandbrook. \u201cAt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Press attention at the time also focused on the reaction of the royal family \u2013\u00a0a subject that Peter Morgan has tackled in his other work, including the 2006 film The Queen<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s grief. \u201cShow Us You Care,\u201d demanded one tabloid headline.<\/p>\n The Crown will dramatise the tension between the private experiences of leading royals, and the public perceptions of their reaction.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the febrile climate of blame \u2013 the tears in the street, the mounds of flowers outside her Kensington Palace home, the funeral in Westminster Abbey,\u201d writes Sarah Gristwood<\/a>, \u201cit was prime minister Tony Blair who found the popular tribute. Diana had been, he said, \u2018the people\u2019s princess\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n When Diana\u2019s funeral was held at\u00a0Westminster Abbey<\/a>\u00a0on 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.<\/p>\n On the 20th anniversary of Diana\u2019s death, Sandbrook wrote for BBC History Magazine<\/em> how the tragic event \u201cremains an obvious landmark in our recent history.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYet the passions that surrounded it \u2013 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 \u2013 have now faded to the point when many feel almost embarrassed to recall them.\u201d<\/p>\n The next instalment of The Crown<\/em> will follow the young princes, William and Harry, and the challenges they faced in the heightened spotlight following the death of their mother.<\/p>\n The latter episodes of season 6 will also no doubt dramatise the death of Princess Margaret<\/a>, whom the show has chosen to provide many touchstones in its portrayal of the struggles between duty and personal desire.<\/p>\n \u201cThe princess was last seen in public before Christmas 2001 at the 100th birthday party of Princess Alice, the dowager duchess of Gloucester,\u201d writes Anne de Courcy. \u201cHer final years were a sad contrast with the lovely young woman remembered by so many and, by the Queen, as \u2018my beloved sister\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n The events dramatised in The Crown will end in 2005, a year that saw the future King Charles III<\/a> marry Camilla, now Queen Consort.<\/p>\n The show has confirmed that the final series will include the royal wedding<\/a> in April 2005.<\/p>\n Olivia Williams, who plays the future Queen Camilla in the drama\u2019s final season, \u00a0explained<\/a> how she and Dominic West, who portrays Charles, managed their roles: \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Season 6 Part 1 of The Crown will be available to watch on Netflix from 16 November 2023.<\/p>\nWhat historical events will The Crown<\/em> S6 cover?<\/h2>\n
![\"Diana](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/11\/TheCrownSeason6FirstLook3-2-971d1c3.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C412\" "\\"Diana")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Diana\u2019s relationship with Dodi Fayed<\/h2>\n
![\"Khalid](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/11\/TheCrownSeason6Image49-f099f9a.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C412\" "\\"Khalid")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Diana\u2019s campaign against landmines<\/h2>\n
![\"Elizabeth](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/11\/TheCrown602Unit00673-2-5bfa64f.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C412\" "\\"Elizabeth")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Queen Elizabeth II and Tony Blair<\/h2>\n
![\"Queen](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/11\/TheCrownSeason6Image66-8a5c8a7.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Queen")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>The death of Diana, Princess of Wales<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/11\/GettyImages-73389659-b80ac92.png?quality=90&resize=619%2C413\" "\\"A")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>What will happen in the second part of The Crown S6?<\/h2>\n
![\"Rufus](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/11\/ThCrownTrailerImages8-17ba606.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Rufus")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Catch up on the real the history behind each episode of<\/strong>\u00a0The Crown<\/em>\u00a0season 5, with our episode guides:<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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How to watch The Crown<\/em> Season 6 Part 1<\/h2>\n