Why THE CROWN Twists the Facts
For first-rate entertainment, you can’t look past The Crown. But Netflix’s epic series isn’t exactly an accurate history lesson
It’s almost expected that a television series based on a book will have a slightly different storyline. But when a series portrays someone’s life – a life that is well documented – you’d expect accuracy would be important. Not necessarily so. A few episodes into watching The
Crown, something odd begins to happen – so assiduously detailed is the Netflix series that it takes on the flavour of a documentary. After spending more than $130 million making the ten episodes in season one, Netflix went to great lengths portraying the British royal family’s super-rich lifestyle. Season two was no different, taking 398 different sets to recreate the opulent interiors of royal aeroplanes, trains and yachts – as well as Windsor, Balmoral and Sandringham Castles, and Buckingham Palace. The scenery and fashion are first-rate, but the series plays fast and loose with historical facts.
In October last year, Peter Morgan, the series writer, an anti-monarchist, publicly described the monarchy as “deranged” and “insane”. With a string of hit movies including The Queen (2006), Frost/Nixon (2008) and American Sniper (2014), in an interview with The Sunday Times Culture magazine, Morgan went on to say the Queen’s length of reign was like a “mutating virus” – impossible to stop. Firm words, indeed.
To see how free with the facts Morgan is, we set out to separate real-world fact from fiction in the award-winning series.
PHILIP, THE ‘FAILURE’
It’s hard to escape the idea that the Duke of Edinburgh must have, at some point, snubbed Peter Morgan. Throughout the series, he portrays Philip as rude, unsuitable, childish and obsessed with titles. While he can be rude, the rest makes for drama at the expense of truth.
Philip was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark and was a decorated naval officer when he began his relationship with Elizabeth. Doubts about his suitability as a husband were over his perceived ‘foreignness’, not character or rank. Parts of his childhood were spent in Germany, but most of his education was completed in England and Scotland. While his sister and her family did die in a plane crash, the idea that it was his fault and that his father blamed him is pure fiction. Philip did make a stand for his children to take the name Mountbatten, and both he and the Queen fought to stay at Clarence House after her ascension to the throne, because it was a better family home than Buckingham Palace.
But far from demanding a title, as portrayed in episode nine, there had been discussions for years about styling Philip as a Prince. The Royal Archives reveals an exchange between Winston Churchill and the Lord Chancellor from 1954 where they discuss him being either Prince Consort or Prince of the Realm. A minute from Churchill dated June 23, 1954, states the Queen “made the suggestion to the Duke of Edinburgh and that His Royal Highness refused to consider accepting any new title at present”.
His 1956 tour of the Commonwealth wasn’t a junket, but it did mean he avoided testifying at the divorce hearing of his friend, Mike Parker. The tour was a complex diplomatic undertaking and was well received. When he was named Prince in 1957, the official reason was to thank him for his work with the Commonwealth.
The Prince’s most famous actual flaw – his old-school racism – is barely touched on in the script. The incidents of snubbing Kenyan chieftains never happened and represent unlikely breaches of protocol.
There are, of course, a few moments that capture the kindness Philip is known for among family and friends. When John F. Kennedy muffs his entire meeting with the Queen, Philip steps in and puts him at ease, a job he carried out for thousands of people for more than 60 years as the selfdescribed “world’s most experienced plaque unveiler”.
PHILIP’S MOTHER, ALICE
The first episode of the series opens with Princess Elizabeth and Philip’s 1947 wedding. It’s here that Queen Mary and the Queen Mother (then Queen) peer over at Philip’s mother, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark: “Look at the mother, just out of a sanatorium,” says the Queen Mother. “And dressed as a nun,” sighs Queen Mary. “A Hun nun,” replies the Queen Mother.
Alice was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1930 and spent two years at a Swiss sanatorium – an issue returned to in season two. Before her breakdown, Alice served as a nurse in field hospitals during the Balkan Wars, was exiled during World War I, fled Greece with her husband, Prince Andrew, and five children in 1922, and endured her husband’s philandering during their exile in Paris. Many commentators suggest her stay in the sanatorium was convenient for her husband.
The Greek monarchy was restored in 1935, and Alice returned to Athens. During World War II, far from being ‘a Hun’, she hid a Jewish family on the top floor of her house in Athens, near the Gestapo headquarters; an act for which she was honoured by the Israeli government.
In 1949, Alice founded her own rel igious order that gave aid to Greece’s poor. She returned to England after the revolution of 1967. While she did wear a habit to the coronation, she is clearly shown wearing a fetching gown and floral hat in photos of the 1947 wedding. Alice was born in Windsor Castle and was Queen Victoria’s great-granddaughter. George V – Queen Mary’s husband – honoured her for her nursing and sent the cruiser that rescued her family from Greece during the revolution. Mary and her daughterin-law treating Alice as a deranged stranger is unfair and unlikely.
PHILIP’S INFIDELITY
It’s entirely possible the Duke of Edinburgh has not always been a faithful husband. Biographer Sarah Bradford asserts he has had liaisons with women who were young, beautiful and “highly aristocratic”. But, The Crown’s contention he had an affair with ballerina Galína Ulánova is unlikely. A famed dancer for the Bolshoi Ballet (not the Royal Ballet, as in the script), visiting London for the first time, Galína was 46 in 1956 and there is no record of her meeting the much younger Duke. Her schedule allowed little time for socialising. Despite having several husbands during her career, in retirement she settled down happily with a ‘female companion’, so he was probably not her type.
THE CORONATION
The actual crown is a focus of the series, but it is often wrongly depicted. For her coronation on June 2, 1953, the young Queen wore the St Edward’s Crown. Yet viewers see the St Edward’s Crown trotted out for a photo session later in the first season. That would never have occurred. St Edward’s Crown has been locked away in the Tower of London since 1953 until a 2018 BBC documentary The Coronation, where the Queen discussed the day. The Queen wore the Imperial State Crown to the state opening of Parliament each year up until 2017, when she wore a hat instead.
The events leading up to the coronation are fudged. The long delay was always planned as Britain still had rationing after the war. Elizabeth
installed Philip as Chairman of the Coronation Commission early on – and, unlike the script, it was the Archbishop of Canterbury, not the Duke of Norfolk, who tried to constrain the modernising Duke. Royal historian Hugo Vickers wrote in The Times that the Archbishop was able to push him out entirely from “the process and rite of coronation”, but Philip had his way when it came to televising.
Philip did not hesitate in paying homage to the Queen, according to Vickers’ research into the Archbishop’s papers, which state that he accepted going after the Archbishop himself, despite having the right to go before.
When the Duke of Windsor made it clear he wanted to attend the coronation, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, wrote to the former King’s lawyers to quash the idea. It’s true that Windsor watched it on television with friends.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, PM
The congregat ion standing for Sir Winston and Lady Churchill as they arrive at Westminster Abbey for the Royal Wedding in 1947 is a fact; but Winston’s disdain for Prime Minister Clement Attlee is not. Far from mocking Attlee, saying “an empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing St and Attlee got out,” Churchill’s Private Secretary Sir John ‘Jock’ Colville went on record saying Winston chastised others for using that joke at Attlee’s expense.
After winning the 1951 election, Churchill was expected to retire in favour of Conservative heir apparent Sir Anthony Eden. But after King George VI died, he stayed on to help the new Queen. Always one for a parade, he wanted to stay leader until the coronation on June 2, 1953. By then, Eden was gravely ill after a botched gall bladder operation and had remedial surgery on June 10. Winston suffered a stroke on June 23 – at a dinner party, not in bed and not following the shock of Eden’s operation, as the TV version portrays.
His confidants kept quiet about the stroke: Colville shooed the guests home and Winston’s family and doctor kept him going for a few days until he made it to Chartwell, his country home, where he deteriorated.
It’s likely the Queen didn’t know, but it wasn’t Lord Salisbury’s fault.
Churchill bounced back and remained PM until his 80th birthday in November 1954. The story about Graham Sutherland’s portrait is mostly true: Churchill did hate it, but a member of Lady Churchill’s staff burnt the portrait.
PRINCESS MARGARET
Princess Margaret suffers badly on screen with her romance with Group Captain Peter Townsend, depicted as thwarted by the Queen Mother and Tommy Lascelles, then PM Anthony Eden and the Queen. In 2004, it was revealed that in 1955 the government was prepared to change the law to make the marriage possible, while allowing Margaret to keep her royal title and income. Then in 2009, a letter surfaced from Margaret to Eden in which she tells the PM she is yet to “properly decide whether I can marry him or not”, saying “everything is so uncertain”.
It seems she had simply fallen out of love, rather than become a tragic, bitter figure. In reality, she was funny. When asked in New York in the 1960s how the Queen was, she reportedly replied: “Which one? My sister, my mother or my husband?” Though her fondness for drink is definitely not overstated.
THE QUEEN IN GHANA
The Queen’s foxtrot with Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah did happen. That’s almost the totality of fact in The Crown’s coverage of the event. While socialist, Ghana was never a Soviet state: rather, Nkrumah was a canny politician who needed funding to build the Akosombo Dam to provide hydroelectric power. The USSR did offer loans to African nations, loans that had better terms than British loans. The Queen’s dance did not end Nkrumah’s relationship with the Soviets, as he won the Lenin Peace Prize the following year.
The Crown depicts the Queen’s visit to Ghana as a reaction to being outshone by the Kennedys during their visit to England in June 1961. Towards the end of the episode, John