The Crown: first look
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‘I don’t know why Peter Morgan has taken this line. The story is good enough without embellishing’
THEIRS is a relationship that has endured more than its fair share of drama.
So royal biographers have expressed incredulity that the makers of The Crown felt the need to embellish the true story of the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall’s early romance with fictionalised scenes, which they warned “could cause a lot of damage”.
Viewers of the third series of the Netflix drama, which launches on Nov 17, will see the introduction of a young Camilla Shand as she begins dating the heir to the throne. But experts laughed off scenes that depict Lord Mountbatten and the Queen Mother colluding to stage an intervention in their burgeoning romance to forcibly split them up.
Christopher Wilson, author of A Greater Love – Charles and Camilla, said history would “find it difficult” to put the pair in the same room. “I don’t think the Queen Mother was any great fan of his,” he said. “She always treated him with suspicion, always.”
He added: “I don’t know why [creator] Peter Morgan has taken this line. The story is good enough without embellishing it.”
Penny Junor, who has written biographies of both the Prince and the Duchess, suggested it was a clear use of “dramatic licence” that she feared could “cause a lot of damage”.
The storyline is one of several notable events that the series explores during the period 1964 to 1977. Other episodes focus on the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster, after which the Queen was widely criticised for failing to immediately visit, the BBC’S doomed 1969 fly-on-the wall royal documentary and the death, in 1972, of the Duke of Windsor.
It sees Camilla, played by Emerald Fennell, and Prince Charles (Josh O’connor) embark on their fledgling relationship. But when the prince confides in his great uncle, Lord Mountbatten, that “she’s the one”, he panics and tells the Queen Mother he had encouraged it to allow the prince to “sow his wild oats”. The pair hatch a plot to separate the lovers for good, with Lord Mountbatten, played by Charles Dance, resolving to engineer an eight-month naval posting overseas to “bring him to his senses” while entrusting the Shand and Parker Bowles families to the Queen Mother, who suggests the system is too fragile to allow for “unpredictable” and “dangerous” elements.
Prince Charles is sent to the Caribbean and a wedding date is set for Miss Shand to marry Mr Parker Bowles.
Mr Wilson said the idea that such a plan was hatched to break the pair apart was laughable. “I can discount them cooking up any kind of plot,” he said.
“By the time Camilla actually met Prince Charles she was already four years into a five-year campaign to get Andrew Parker Bowles up the aisle.”
He added: “Lord Mountbatten gave shelter and support to Prince Charles.
He did not introduce him to Camilla or pull them apart. In that respect it’s entirely wrong. The strength of his relationship with the future king lay in him saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ not ‘no, no no’.”
Ms Junor said the Duchess was “potty” about Mr Parker Bowles when she met Prince Charles. “He was a commanding officer, Charles was very much a work in progress at that point, there was no competition between the two men,” she told The Daily Telegraph, adding that Mr Parker Bowles had repeatedly cheated on her and she was “perhaps hoping to make him a bit jealous”. ♦the Duke of Sussex will be reunited with his brother, the Duke of Cambridge, for Remembrance Day events, marking the first time they have been seen together in public since Prince Harry addressed rumours of a rift. The brothers will attend the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday and attend the Cenotaph service on Sunday.