Porchie and Lilibet
A close friendship. Private phone calls. Jealous rage. A royal marriage in crisis – is TV hit The Crown guilty of poetic licence or gross impertinence? YOU decide when you read the real story of...
REVEALING the private life of the Queen as no drama has done before, the Netflix series The Crown has won widespread critical acclaim and seized the imagination of television audiences worldwide with its frank depiction of the Royal Family behind closed doors.
But while the portrayal of Prince Philip as a red-blooded young man with an eye for the ladies has attracted mere amused comment, the final episodes showing the early years of his marriage troubled by jealous rages leading to a frosty rift with Elizabeth will shock and even outrage many viewers.
These scenes, set in 1954, centre on the Queen’s friendship with the late Henry Herbert, who was Lord Porchester, or Porchie to those close to him, and would become the seventh Earl of Carnarvon and owner of the Downton Abbey backdrop Highclere Castle.
It is a friendship that historians of the Royal Family attest has a basis in fact. But the entirely platonic relationship has also for decades been the springboard for groundless rumours and the most outrageous untruths.
Now – on the very day that the Queen and Prince Philip celebrate the 69th anniversary of their marriage – the makers of The Crown stand accused by those same historians of ‘making bricks with very little straw’ by feeding upon these rumours in a drama that, in its portrayal of the couple’s early years, is strewn with ‘errors’ and composed of ‘pure invention’.
Lord Porchester shared a lifelong love of horses with the Queen and was eventually appointed her racing manager.
Scenes in The Crown are set earlier than that appointment, in 1954, the year after the Coronation.
A distraught Queen Elizabeth, played by Claire Foy, is seen confronting Prince Philip (Matt Smith) about the tensions threatening to destroy the couple’s floundering marriage. The young Monarch, then just 28, chastises her husband for being jealous over her close friendship with Porchie and accuses him of loving other women. In an extraordinary scene imagined by scriptwriter Peter Morgan, she declares: ‘I have nothing to hide from you.
‘Porchie is a friend and yes there are those who would have preferred me to marry him. Indeed marriage with him might have been easier, might have even worked better than ours.
‘But to everyone’s regret and frustration the only person I have ever loved is you and can you honestly look me in the eye and say the same? Can you?’
Although wholly fictitious, this alleged showdown may have the veneer of credibility for viewers drawn in by the compelling detail created at great expense in the £150million American drama.
In another scene, Porchie is shown proposing to his future wife, American Jean Wallop, in a swanky London restaurant. She accepts the proposal only after he reassures her that he ‘still doesn’t hold a torch’ for the Queen. Porchie tells Jean: ‘It is true she and I, we are close… It would have been a good match. I won’t deny it.’
The proposal scene is intercut with shots of an unhappy-looking Queen alone in her bedroom – and then pretending to be asleep when a drunken Philip returns home after a night on the tiles.
A different scene shows the Queen alone in her bedroom when she telephones Porchie, catching him as he is about to enjoy a romantic night in with Jean.
Porchester is surprised and somewhat embarrassed by the call and does his best to end it as quickly as possible.
Philip is later furious when he discovers his wife has given the aristocrat the number of a direct private line so he can reach her without going through the Bucking- ham Palace switchboard. When she insists she is simply doing a favour for an old friend who is ‘part of the furniture’, he tells her: ‘As long as you don’t sit on him soon.’
In one emotional scene during a dinner at 10 Downing Street with Winston Churchill, Philip mouths ‘sorry’ to the Queen, who is sitting opposite him, in an apparent apology for the rows.
This is not the first time the US drama series has highlighted alleged tensions in the Royal marriage.
Earlier episodes concentrated on the party-going Prince and his roving eye – he looks longingly at a waitress in a London club and later has his head turned by an air stewardess on a Royal flight, until the Queen catches him and gives him a withering look.
But these moments in the drama, so different from the public image of a long and happy marriage, have met a mostly sceptical response from historians.
Royal biographer Philip Ziegler said he had found no evidence of strains in the Royal marriage or any impropriety in the Queen’s relationship with Lord Porchester.
He said: ‘It sounds to me that the producers of The Crown are making bricks with very little straw indeed.
‘I have never come across anything which suggested the marriage was under any real strain at any point. The Queen’s friendship with Lord Porchester was a platonic and personal one. They were both passionate about horses.’
Author Christopher Wilson said it was ‘fraudulent’ to try to suggest the Queen and Lord Porchester, who died in 2001, were intimate.
He said: ‘I can tell you this: I knew
Porchie is a friend and yes there are those who would have preferred me to marry him. But to everyone’s regret and frustration the only person I have ever loved is you and can you honestly look me in the eye and say the same? Can you? THE QUEEN TO PRINCE PHILIP IN THE CROWN
Porchester, albeit not terribly well, and I saw him with the Queen on several occasions.
‘The body language between the two of them was not the body language of two lovers or two people who were attracted to each other.’
Wilson said there was no evidence to support the drama’s claims and he accused the producers of ‘pure invention’.
His response is echoed by the distinguished historian and biographer Hugo Vickers, who cautions: ‘The Crown is a work of fiction, based on the lives of real people. There are many huge errors of fact and interpretation. It is all made up.’
The rumours sparked by the Queen’s friendship with Porchester eventually led, many years after the time the drama is set, to the most outrageous lie of all – that he was the father of Prince Andrew.
The spurious claim is hinted at in The Crown when Philip taunts the Queen by highlighting the reputation of Porchester’s father as a philanderer.
He tells the Queen: ‘He has had so many affairs that an entire generation of British aristocrats was related to him.’
He adds: ‘An illegitimate Porchie in every great house in the land. High foreheads everywhere.’
The extraordinary claim about Prince Andrew was made in the US press by the late society diarist Nigel Dempster. But Christopher Wilson said that, over lunch one day, Dempster admitted to him making the whole thing up.
Royal biographer Margaret Holder also dismissed Demp- ster’s claim but acknowledged the truth in the Queen’s friendship with Lord Porchester. She said: ‘I think the episode is an interesting portrayal of a difficult relationship. There is no doubt that there was a close friendship between the Queen and Lord Porchester. They became close when they were teenagers.
‘Of course it is highly plausible that Philip could have resented a platonic friendship. He was very much a macho character and he would not have liked another man taking an interest in his marriage. That could have led to tension.’
THE ten-part series does include one Royal row based on fact. It happened as the Royal couple toured Australia in 1954, when Philip fled a chalet that served as the Royal residence as a furious Queen threw a tennis racket at him.
Extraordinarily, the episode was caught on a camera by an astonished news film crew outside.
In The Crown, the Queen manages to persuade the camera crew to hand over the footage so it cannot be shown to the outside world, although in fact it is likely they gave it instead to a courtier.
In recent years The Queen has made no secret of the debt she feels she owes to Prince Philip.
She has cited his devotion and support as one of the main reasons why she has been able to continue so successfully with her record-breaking reign.
It is true that Philip has been linked to a number of women as friends, including Lady Kennard’s daughter the Duchess of Abercorn, actress Anna Massey and Penny Romsey, his former carriage-riding partner.
But Ziegler scorns any suggestions of infidelity, saying there is no evidence to back up such claims. He said: ‘Prince Philip was an attractive man who liked women and I am sure in his youth and young manhood he got around a bit.
‘But I have no evidence whatsoever of a liaison which continued after his marriage. ‘
Wilson said Philip had dedicated his life to maintaining the Royal Family as a strong institution.
He added: ‘His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, was a tremendous philanderer and he let the side down like nobody’s business.
‘One thing that Philip learnt as he saw his own family crumbling was how to make the Royal Family strong and that was never to allow anyone to know anything of a personal nature, and that is his strength.’
As Royal biographer Penny Junor notes, the full truth about the Royal marriage will not come out in the lifetimes of the couple.
She said: ‘We just don’t know the truth about these things and we never will until they are dead and buried. The key point to remember is that the writers of the drama also don’t know the truth, and The Crown is a work of fiction.’
Lord Porchester’s son, the current Earl of Carnarvon, whose family home is Highclere, was unavailable for comment.
Last night Peter Morgan said: ‘Episode nine makes it absolutely clear that the Queen has never loved anyone other than the Duke of Edinburgh.’