‘The Crown’ took liberties with Royal meeting
The fourth season of “The Crown” opens with the moment many fans have been waiting for — the introduction of the future Princess Diana.
However, as with much of the Netflix docudrama, the beguiling scene is more fiction than fact.
The latest season was released on Sunday and its 10 hour-long episodes are based on the years between 1979 and 1990, although the show plays with the timeline a bit.
According to “The Crown,” the first time Prince Charles met Lady Diana Spencer she was dressed as a “mad tree” from a school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
In the scene, Prince Charles, played by Josh O’Connor, has called on the Spencer family’s ancestral estate, Althorp, but he has another love interest at the time, Diana’s sister Sarah. When Sarah is called away, leaving Charles alone in the grand entrance of the home, out pops a 16-year-old Diana, played by Emma Corrin.
“Sorry, I’m not here,” she says, adding that she was instructed to “remain out of sight,” but there is no other way to get to “that room over there.”
Prince Charles tells her “I haven’t seen a thing,” and then remarks, “It’s quite a costume,” sparking a discussion about their mutual love for Shakespeare’s play. All the while, Diana is dashing between shrubbery as she inches closer to Prince Charles.
“I’m Sarah’s younger sister by the way,” she says peering out at him from behind a green Venetian-style mask. “Please don’t tell her you saw me. I’ll get into terrible trouble. She wanted everything to be just perfect. She wouldn’t want me to scare you off.”
And how might she scare him off?
“Well, you know, by being a mad tree,” she says before dashing away.
Prince Charles promises to keep her secret, but, of course, the first thing he does is tell Sarah how he has just met her sister, who is six years younger.
“That’s sneaky of her. I told her to leave us alone,” Sarah says. “She was obsessed with the idea of meeting you ... Obsessed.”
The scene ends with Diana watching Charles and Sarah ride away on horseback through an upstairs window.
So, did any of this happen? “The Crown” does get a few things right. Charles did date Sarah first. (She later told a journalist she didn’t love the prince and “wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether he were the dustman or the King of England.”) And Charles did meet Diana at Althorp — but there has never been any report of a “mad tree.”
Charles was at Althorp in November 1977 for a grouse hunt. And Diana herself described their first meeting in an interview on the day the couple announced their engagement on Feb 24, 1981.
“It was 1977. Prince Charles came to stay as a friend of my sister Sarah’s for a shoot and so we met in a plowed field,” she said.
What did she think of him? “Pretty amazing,” Diana said.
Asked the same question, Prince Charles said: “I remember thinking, what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was. And great fun and bouncy and full of life and everything.”