The Netflix show’s blending of fact and fiction has received more criticism than ever around its most recent season. Here’s how The Times reported on its plotlines.
LONDON — Before Season 5 of “The Crown” even arrived on Netflix, the show’s blending of fact and fiction was drawing criticism in Britain.
For each season, the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, focuses on a period in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, and the fifth installment covers 1991 to 1997. These years were always going to be provocative, spanning marital chaos, fragile mental health and public confessions of infidelity among members of the royal family.
But this season was also released just eight weeks after the queen’s death, and with King Charles III newly on the throne, criticism has seemed harsher than with other seasons. Figures like the actress Judi Dench and the former prime minister John Major, who features prominently in the new season, condemned the show’s approach to historical fact.
When Season 5 opens, Elizabeth is 65 years old, and Imelda Staunton has stepped into her loafers, corgis at her heels. The queen is also facing new challenges: The British public is questioning the relevance of the monarchy, and how much the institution costs; she feels increasingly distant from her husband, Philip (now played by Jonathan Pryce); the unhappy marriage between Charles (Dominic West) and Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) is being played out in increasingly public ways; and her sister, Margaret (Lesley Manville), is still feeling the cost of public duty.
Here’s a look at how those stories of a monarchy in flux were reported at the time. You can find more in the TimesMachine archive browser. (Warning: This feature contains spoilers for all 10 episodes of Season 5.)
Episode 1, ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’
The season opens with crackling black and white footage of a ship being launched in 1953: the Royal Yacht Britannia. The young queen (Claire Foy) tells the crowd: “I hope that this brand-new vessel, like your brand-new queen, will prove dependable and constant.”
The Times didn’t report such a prophetic speech at the time, but did describe the ship “sliding gracefully down to the sea” to the “cheers of several thousand men who helped to build her, their wives, and a brassy salute from a military band playing ‘Rule Britannia.’”
The episode then flashes forward to 1991, when the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are vacationing on Britannia, and London’s Sunday Times publishes a poll revealing that more than half of Britons wanted the queen to abdicate, and Charles to be put on the throne. “It’s outrageous,” says Philip as he reads the front page.
News starts swirling about Charles urging his mother to step down, and much of the uproar around this season has been directed at a subsequent scene in which Charles lobbies John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) to facilitate the queen’s abdication.
Last month, a spokesman for Major told the Daily Mail that such a discussion never took place, and emphasized that Major’s view on the royal family was depicted inaccurately by the show.
Episode 2, ‘The System’
Diana, lonely in Kensington Palace and dressed in her ’90s uniform of oversize sweatshirts, starts collaborating with Andrew Morton, a journalist who wants to write a book about her experiences in the royal family.
Morton’s 1992 biography “Diana: Her True Story” was an explosive book, in which the princess opened up about her struggles with bulimia and depression, and explained the “system” on which the royal family operates.
In “The Crown,” we see the book’s publication greatly upsetting the royal family, especially Charles, who calls it a “complete decimation of my character … everything I worked so hard for.” In reality, Buckingham Palace tried to discredit the book, “taking the position that the princess was emotionally unbalanced and that Morton was a self-promoting hack,” The Times reported at the time.
But Morton had little remorse, telling The Times in a 1992 profile: “What you see there is the British establishment out for tooth and blood from a working-class-boy-made-good who dares to write about the Princess of Wales.”
After Diana’s tragic death in 1997, the extent of her involvement in the book was revealed, including that she had “read the manuscript and made revisions in her own handwriting, then personally approved every page of the book and selected the cover photo,” The Times reported. Morton also released an extended version of the book, titled “Diana: Her True Story — In Her Own Words.”
Episode 3, ‘Mou Mou’
In the third episode we meet Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman who owned Harrods, the landmark London department store, from 1985 until 2010.
“Mou Mou” traces Al-Fayed’s infatuation with the royal family, including his early life in Alexandria and his later efforts to belong in European high society. We also meet his son, Dodi, who would become Diana’s lover and be with her in the fatal car accident in Paris. To help him ascend through the British class system, he hires a footman, Sydney Johnson, who had previously worked for the Windsors, and takes out a 50-year lease on Villa Windsor, the three-floor mansion on the outskirts of Paris that was once occupied by Edward VIII and his wife Wallis Simpson after his abdication.
Reporting on his ambition to turn the building into a museum as well as a private residence, The Times noted that by 1989, Al-Fayed had “spent three years and $14.4 million on recreating the mansion as it was 30 years ago.”
Episode 4, ‘Annus Horribilis’
On Nov. 20, 1992 a fire broke out at Windsor Castle, ripping through its private chapel and banquet hall.
In a report the following day, The Times quoted the chief royal spokesman, Dicky Arbiter, telling reporters that the queen’s reaction to seeing the fire was, “Probably the same reaction as yours if you saw your house burning down. She appeared very upset.”
Three days later, at a lunch in London celebrating 40 years since her accession to the throne, the queen broke with tradition, and spoke about her feelings in public.
“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis,’” she said, the Latin translating as “terrible year.”
The scene is recreated in the season’s third episode, as are the collapses, in 1992, of three royal marriages: Princess Anne divorced her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips; Prince Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of York announced they would divorce, before she was snapped canoodling with her financial adviser on holiday; and the very public breakdown of the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales.
After these painful disappointments, the fire dealt an “emotional blow to the queen,” wrote The Times.
Episode 5, ‘The Way Ahead’
Charles and Diana formally separated in December 1992, and Charles’s ongoing relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles became a nationwide scandal the next month, when the transcript and audio of a highly personal phone call between the couple was leaked by The Daily Mirror, in what came to be known as “tampongate.”
In 1994, in an effort to clear the air, Charles gave a rare televised interview with the British broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. As The Times reported, “in the course of a two-and-a-half-hour television documentary, the heir to the British throne admitted that he had committed adultery.”
It was “a stunning departure from royal tradition,” Nadine Brozan wrote in The Times, that would lead to the release, that same year, of Charles’s own tell-all biography titled “The Prince of Wales,” written by Dimbleby, which emphasized how Philip had pushed him into marrying Diana.
The episode also recreates Diana’s infamous “revenge dress,” which she wore to a London event the same evening as the Dimbleby interview. At the time, The Times reported “how dazzling she looked, and how oblivious she seemed to Prince Charles’s television appearance.”
Episode 6, ‘Ipatiev house’
This episode opens with a flashback to the execution of members of the Russian Romanov in Yekaterinburg at the hands of the Bolsheviks in July 1918.
The queen’s grandfather, King George V, was a cousin of Nicholas II, a Romanov who had been czar of Russia until he resigned in 1917. In “The Crown,” we see the British king receive a letter asking for a ship to be sent to bring the Romanovs to safety in England, and it is his wife, Mary, who decides not to send aid.
Letters have recently revealed, according to the British newspaper The Express, that King George himself worried that bringing Nicholas to Britain would stoke anti-monarchy feeling in the country. Still, about a dozen Romanovs, including Nicholas’s mother and sister, were evacuated from their Crimean estate by warships sent by King George, The Times has noted.
In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II traveled with Prince Philip to Moscow to meet the then-president of Russia, Boris N. Yeltsin. It was “the first visit of a British monarch to Russia, and Yeltsin and his spokesmen were quick to describe it as support for democratic reforms. ‘The queen would not have come to a totalitarian country,’ one spokesman said,” Steven Erlanger reported in The Times.
Episode 7, ‘No Woman’s Land’
In the seventh episode, we see Martin Bashir (played by Prasanna Puwanarajah) working hard to persuade Diana to give an interview on the BBC program Panorama.
Last year, an inquiry concluded that “Bashir deceived Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, to obtain the interview. And it faulted the British Broadcasting Corporation’s management for covering up Bashir’s conduct, which included creating fake bank statements to undermine a rival news organization,” Mark Landler reported. Both Bashir and the BBC issued apologies.
The show depicts Bashir working on the fake bank statements, and assuring Diana that “you’d be protected by the best brand name in the world, when it comes to journalistic integrity.”
Bashir left the BBC last year “to focus on his health,” just days before the findings of the inquiry into his Diana interview were published.
Episode 8, ‘Gunpowder’
“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Diana’s BBC Panorama interview explodes onto the screen, and the royal family deals with the fallout. The interview took place at Kensington Palace under great secrecy, and when it aired on the BBC on Nov. 20, 1995, some 15 million people around the world tuned in, The Times reported.
In the show’s recreation of the interview, we see Diana discussing her marriage and experiences in the royal family, but she also talked about several stories about her love life circulating in the British newspapers at the time, including her relationship with a former army officer, James Hewitt, about which a 1994 book called “Princess in Love” was written. In the interview, The Times reported, she said: “Yes, I was in love with him, but I was very let down.”
Episode 9, ‘Couple 31’
“How sad,” the queen remarks in the penultimate episode to Prime Minister John Major in a tone of great regret. “The biggest, most celebrated wedding in memory. Then this.”
Having encouraged Charles and Diana to stay together, we see the queen finally approving the termination of the couple’s marriage, and she convinces Major to act as an intermediary between the couple as they negotiate the split, a favor which has been confirmed by Major’s biographer.
Thus, “with the impersonal thwack of a rubber stamp,” The Times wrote, “the tumultuous marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales officially ended today, 15 years after it began.” The report added, “the Prince has formally declared that he will no longer foot his ex-wife’s bills, leaving her to pay all her expenses out of a lump-sum divorce settlement said to be at least $22.5 million.”
Episode 10, ‘Decommissioned’
The season’s final episode, set in 1997, explores the monarchy’s shifting relationship to an equally changing world.
One change, in June, was the handover of Hong Kong to China, ending 156 years of British rule. “Seconds after British soldiers lowered the Union Jack for the last time to the strains of ‘God Save the Queen,’ China’s red banner was raised, marking the transfer of this freewheeling capitalist territory to communist control,” wrote The Times.
The episode also dramatizes the Labour Party’s landslide election victory, and Tony Blair’s accession to prime minister. Under the headline “Britain Backs Labour,” the Times reported how “Tony Blair and the Labour Party swept to a victory of historic proportions in Britain’s national election on Thursday, ending 18 years of Conservative control.”
The crippling costs of repairs mean it’s also time for the queen to say goodbye to her beloved Britannia, which this paper referred to as “a floating platform for business diplomacy.” A season that begins with the boat’s first sail, closes with its last.
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