It's officially a right royal wrap: after seven years and six seasons, Netflix's flagship show The Crown has finally come to an end.
It spans seventy years of the Royal Family's history: drama, tragedy and scandal very much included. The final season has its fair share of all of these, covering the blossoming relationship between William and Kate Middleton, the Queen wrestling with the weight of responsibility, and even the rise of Tony Blair.
But with many events still fresh in the minds of many viewers (the Crown ends just twenty years in the past), what actually happened in real life, and what is mere fabrication? We've unpicked the most contentious elements of the final season's second half (read all about the first half here) to figure out just how true to life the show really is. The answer, as ever, is a mixed bag.
Charles and William’s frosty relationship
The main aspect of episode one is the frosty relationship between Charles and William – the former is shown trying to reach out to his son, who repeatedly rebuffs him. Later on, the pair have a charged confrontation about Charles’ supposed part in Diana’s death, with William blaming his father. In the show, he says it is at least partly his fault.
“You didn’t actually drive the car, but you drove her into the arms of those that did,” William snarls at his father. All very dramatic – but the truth is, nobody really knows what the relationship between the pair was at this time. The Royal Family have certainly never spoken about it, and given this happened behind closed doors, there is no way of knowing whether it’s true.
William receiving fanmail at school
One of the most striking elements of The Crown’s first episode is William returning to Eton to find his understanding housemaster Dr Andrew Gailey waiting for him with two bags: one sack of fanmail and one sack containing condolence messages from fellow students.
Did this happen? There certainly was a lot of fanmail (after Diana’s funeral, The Sun reported that 600 letters of condolence were sent to William at school), but Eton was a great haven both for William and, later, Harry. Gailey was indeed William’s housemaster, and had a reputation for being respected and well loved. He clearly went out of his way to make school life bearable for William. Privacy was paramount: this was a place that protected the boys, and a place they clearly enjoyed being.
Harry offering William champagne in a teacup
“I filled it with champagne,” Harry tells William, handing him a teacup as the pair loiter in Buckingham Palace after the Queen’s Golden Wedding anniversary service. A nice thought – but given that Harry was actually thirteen around the time of the anniversary, it’s probably not accurate. The same applies for Harry raiding the hotel’s minibar to drink whiskey and beer when the boys hole up in Canada.
Willsmania
“It was madness. Like the arrival of some pop star,” Charles tells Camilla over the phone after William’s arrival at the Golden Wedding anniversary celebrations. Hordes of screaming young girls lined the streets outside his car: but did this actually unfold?
This did happen. After their mother’s death, the tragedy thrust both Harry and William into the spotlight. For teenage girls, William was suddenly catnip. Articles written by news publications around the time of the Golden Wedding service describe him as getting a “pop-star reception” from hordes of screaming girls.
Did William hate the attention, as he seems to do in The Crown? News reports describe him as blushing, but also “lapping it up”: he arrived at the Royal Naval College after the ceremony with a bunch of flowers given to him by a fourteen-year-old girl.
The same is true of the boys’ arrival in Vancouver, which did apparently descend into chaos: reports from the time again mention a “pop-star’s welcome”. That said, William was infamously uncomfortable in the presence of cameras: more so than Harry, though this would of course change as they grew older.
Charles’ skiing holiday
Desperate to forge a connection with William, Charles proposes the three of them go for a skiing holiday in Canada – the first visit to North America since Diana’s death. This did happen: they went to Whistler Mountain and Vancouver. In both places they ended up doing press photocalls.
In The Crown, this is something William fiercely objects to. “It’s something we’ve got to learn to live with,” Charles says, to which William responds, “But I hate it.”
That said, William’s shock and dismay at having to do the press call is stretching the imagination: he would have been aware of this obligation beforehand and (by all accounts) enjoyed at least some of it.
Plus, the trip might not have been as arduous as the show makes it seem. The boys enjoyed the holiday and spending more time with their father; at this point, they certainly came across as a strong family unit and Bruno Sprecher, the family’s ski instructor, told The Times that their relationship actually became stronger. “He had time to spend with them. Before, the princess didn’t let him.”
The Queen was jealous of Tony Blair’s success
The Nineties and Noughties were a difficult time for the Queen: faced with plummeting popularity in the years after Diana’s death, she watches with envy as Tony Blair’s ratings rise and rise. She even has a nightmare at the start of episode six about Blair being crowned “King Tony”, while a choir sings a rendition of Things Can Only Get Better, and organises a series of focus groups to find out the British public’s opinion of the monarchy. The results are grim – according to these polls, the public think the Royal Family is “out of touch” and “wasteful of public money.”
Was she really jealous of Blair? That’s never been mentioned, but it is true that they didn’t enjoy the warmest of relationships. Tim Shipman at The Sunday Times once wrote that the Queen told a French diplomat Tony Blair was her “least favourite” Prime Minister.
Blair certainly did enjoy a spike in popularity after Diana’s death – his “People’s Princess” speech touched a chord with the nation, and according to a private poll, his popularity rating reached a stunning 93 per cent in the months after her death.
And as for the focus groups: the Royal Family certainly have used them over the years, though it’s not certain if the Queen ever requested any.
Tony Blair’s modernising advice
As a result of all this agonising, the Queen eventually does end up asking Blair for advice on modernising the Royal Family. He duly gives it: all the old-fashioned roles, including that of herb grower, swan warden, napkin folder; they all have to go.
The Queen eventually decides not to take his advice: “Modernity is not always the answer,” she says. “Sometimes antiquity is too.” Was this true? While we can never know for sure (what the Queen and Prime Minister discussed in their meetings is strictly private), Blair did play a part in modernising the royal family’s finances, though perhaps not in the way most people imagine.
In July 2000, Blair announced a deal where the civil list (the amount of money the royals receive from the taxpayer) would be frozen for 10 years, which was intended to correct the overfunding that occurred during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure. Around the same time, Cabinet Office minister Mo Mowlam was also made to issue an apology after suggesting the Royal Family should move out of Buckingham Palace and into “a good modern building” to save taxpayer’s money.
Blair’s failed speech at the Women’s Institute
This is one of the stranger moments in The Crown: a speech he gave to the Women’s Institute at its annual conference. Rather than sticking to safer issues, Blair bizarrely decides to talk politics, attempting to pitch Labour as a party for traditional values. It goes down like a lead balloon to the audience of 10,000, with the women heckling Blair mercilessly.
Could it be true: a clanger for Blair at the height of his popularity? Well, yes: in fact, things got so bad that the chair of the WI, Helen Carey, had to intervene to calm the women in the audience down. Later on, Tory leader William Hague used the incident as ammo, telling Blair it was “the mark of an out of touch prime minister that you don’t know why you’re out of touch.”
Kate Middleton’s first glimpse of William
Yes, The Crown is fictional, but this whole scene does feel like something straight out of a fairytale: while shopping with her mother Carole, a young Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy) spots William and Diana selling Big Issues on the street. She even buys a copy from Diana, who tells her, “that’s very generous” – while William and Kate share a charged look as he hands over the mag.
As might be expected, this is firmly in the realms of fantasy; the pair actually met at university in St Andrews. Kate has spoken before about how she never met the real-life Diana before her death. However, Diana was a supporter of the Big Issue – she often bought copies from a nearby vendor in Sloane Square, and William has made headlines several times for selling copies “undercover.”
William’s first romance
Could it be true: William had a girlfriend before Kate? The Crown says yes. At the start of their time at university, he is shown to be dating a brunette named Lola Airdale Cavenish Kincaid: Kate is introduced to her as his “girlfriend”. Kate, for her part, is dating a boy named Rupert, but the pair swiftly bond when they bump into each other at the library.
As is often the case, some of this rings true. Kate was dating an aspiring lawyer named Rupert Finch, and William had a brief flirtation with a woman named Carly Massy-Burch, from the year above. She was studying English language and creative writing, and the pair met when William auditioned for a play. They dated for a few months – a friend said that “William was very taken with her, which was completely understandable” – but broke up just before he started going out with Kate.
Carole the helicopter parent
Carole Middleton, Kate’s mother, doesn’t come out of The Crown’s final season looking good. The series depicts her as a cunning strategist, encouraging Kate to make a play for William and influencing her to go to St Andrews, where he was studying, rather than her original choice of Edinburgh.
Carole fails to hide her disappointment when Kate brings back a boyfriend who isn’t William; Kate even jokingly compares her to Mrs Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Later on, Carole tells Kate to wear heels for her appearance at the famous fashion show, the better to show off her legs; a following confrontation between the pair shows Kate telling her mother, "you don’t know him. What if William isn’t right for me? What about what I want? Once you had the idea fixed in your head you never stopped."
The real truth is slightly more opaque. Omid Scobie’s book Endgame suggests that Carole “calculatingly placed Kate right at the centre of young Prince William’s world”, adding that "the Middletons – mostly Carole – saw that the pretty and grounded Kate was ready to carry the family name further to the top... so, they began orchestrating her life, ensuring she was at the right places at the right time and spoke the right way."
It's true that Carole had ambitions and made sure her daughter received the best schooling, but the Middletons were also sneered at as social climbers in the Noughties. One source told the Daily Mail that Carole was “pushy, rather twee, and incredibly middle-class. She uses words such as pleased to meet you, toilet, and pardon.” A later piece in the Daily Mail, published around the time that the couple briefly split, speculated that Carole was "too pushy for the royals".
“Mrs Middleton has acquired a reputation for being pushy and it has been suggested she manoeuvred her daughter into William’s orbit and then tried to engineer a match," it read. "According to Clarence House sources, her overweening ambitions for her daughter grated on Prince William's friends and courtiers, especially since the former air stewardess's aspirations clashed with her own humble origins.”
And as for Kate’s decision to switch universities, she made the decision after it was announced where William would be going: St Andrews. Was that intentional? She’s never said.
"We wanted to present [Carole as] more of a maternal figure wanting the best for her daughter – someone who has actually worked very hard to gain her position in society in the upper middle class," Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for The Crown, told the Standard. "It has been her work and ideas and ventures that have gotten them there, not the father’s. That was something we wanted to hold on to."
The end result, she says, was less "You’ve got to go bag the Prince of Wales, the future king" and more "If my daughter enters this world, I have the confidence that she will end up in this social circle that will set her up for the rest of her life. And I am ambitious for her.’”
Harry was sent to rehab for smoking weed
Rebellious Prince Harry: not only is he partaking in a bit of underage drinking, he’s also smoking weed on the sly. In one heart to heart with William, he scoffs that “it will be in all the papers and they’ll make me look like a lost cause. Again. And people will say, ‘poor boy, ever since his mother died…’” He then admits that their father, Charles, sent him to rehab for it.
This did actually happen – kind of. Charles became aware of reports that Harry had been smoking and partying at Highgrove, and took him to Featherstone Lodge for a few days to straighten him out.
Given that Harry later admitted to smoking in the ground of Kensington Palace in 2015 and went onto explain how it “really did help me,” this may not have worked.
The Queen snuck out of Buckingham Palace on VE Day
In a rather unexpected change of tack, episode eight of The Crown winds back the clock all the way to VE Day, where it depicts a young Princess Elizabeth and Margaret escaping the Palace without the permission of their parents to dance in the street with the celebrating crowds.
Margaret suggests they go to the Ritz, and from there, Elizabeth visits the 'Pink Sink' (a basement club best known as a secret meeting place for gay men) to dance the jitterbug with American GIs. At the end of the night, the pair swear to keep the events a secret forevermore.
Surprisingly, this did actually happen – or at least, some parts of it did. With their parents’ permission, Elizabeth and Margaret (in a group of 16 people) went along Trafalgar Square to the Ritz, where Margaret Rhodes recalled doing the conga. The night ended shortly after, as the group snuck back into the Palace – no Pink Sinks, sadly, were ever visited.
William spends the Golden Jubilee with the Middletons
The Golden Jubilee in June 2004 saw an entire weekend of frenzied celebrations to mark the Queen’s 50th year on the throne. But William, the show says, didn’t attend – instead, he visits the Middleton family for lunch.
As he explains, the Queen “gave me a pass to miss all this”, but he can’t help but feel guilty, so he jumps in the car and makes it to Buckingham Palace in time to put in an appearance on the famous balcony with the rest of his family.
Quite apart from the fact that London would certainly have been too crowded for William to drive back in time, there was no “pass”: he attended the Golden Jubilee with the rest of his family and was seen at the Jubilee Service at St Paul’s Cathedral, the lunch afterwards and the Jubilee Parade.
Princess Margaret suffers her first stroke in Mustique
Princess Margaret, a lifelong smoker, suffered a series of debilitating strokes towards the end of her life, the first of which happened in Mustique. The Crown depicts her showing off during a dinner party hosted by Harding Lawrence and his wife Mary, drinking whisky and smoking while also reciting a racy poem.
Halfway through, she collapses and is rushed back to England. Did this happen? Yes, her first stroke happened at age 67 in February 1998, and it was at a dinner party with the Lawrences. Though she wasn’t reciting poetry, she did slump forward in her chair and her hosts had to revive her with oxygen. After that (and a brief stay in hospital), she was flown back to Britain to be treated further.
Margaret scalds herself in the shower
After the events in Mustique, there’s further tragedy for Margaret. While washing her hair in the shower, she turns up the hot water - and then suffers another stroke, slumping over. She is only rescued when somebody notices the steam coming from under the bathroom door - but by this time, her feet have been badly scalded.
This did happen, while Margaret was staying at her home, Les Jolies Eaux in February 1999. She was alone, so we don’t know exactly what happened – and indeed, whether it was a stroke – but her friend Anne Glenconner wrote that Margaret had meant to turn off the hot tap, but instead turned off the cold. As a result of this, Margaret was confined to a wheelchair.
Mohamed Al-Fayed makes allegations about his son’s death
The story of Dodi and Diana didn’t end with their deaths – or at least, that’s what The Crown says. It shows Mohamed Al-Fayed giving a series of interviews to the press, saying that the pair were “murdered” and sparking a full-scale policy enquiry into the accident.
In the aftermath of his son’s death, a devastated Mohamed also starts making allegations against the royal family, adding that the royals were “gangsters” and “terrorists” and that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s child. This is then heard by William over the radio as he prepares to go for a run.
In reality, Mohamed did make these claims – he once called the royal family “gangsters in tiaras” – but the investigation into Diana’s death (dubbed Operation Paget) happened two years after those interviews, in January 2004. Lasting for three years, it involved 14 investigators who interviewed 300 witnesses; the final, 832-page report was published in December 2006.
The Queen changes her mind about resigning
Charles’ wedding to Camilla in 2005 is a neat end-point for The Crown’s final season, but it also comes with a fair amount of emotional drama. As the wedding approaches, the Queen is wrestling with the decision about whether or not to give up the throne and allow Charles to become King. She is due to make a speech at Charles’ wedding: will she use it to announce that she’s giving up the throne?
She is then visited by the ghosts of her former selves (aka Claire Foy and Olivia Colman) who urge her not to and suggest that the younger generations aren’t ready for the responsibilities it involves. Accordingly, she finally chooses not to abdicate.
Is it true? Not really. The Queen never attended Charles and Camilla’s civil marriage, but she did make a speech on the day of the wedding where she gave the couple their blessing. As for whether she intended to step down: we don’t know, but she certainly didn’t end up doing so. When she died in September 2022, it was still as Queen.
William and Kate’s first kiss is interrupted… by the Queen Mother dying
Talk about bad timing. After the infamous fashion show, William and Kate finally connect. She tells him she wanted to do “something drastic” to see if he was interested; he clearly is. And as they lean in for their first kiss, William is interrupted by his bodyguard, who tells him that the Queen Mother has died.
As ever, these events have been tweaked: the fashion show happened on 26 March 2002, but the Queen Mother died four days later, on the 30th – while William was away on a skiing holiday with his family in Switzerland.
