HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2025-02-12T13:12:41.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/princess-diana/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The Crown S6: the challenges of telling the story of living royals]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-crown-s6-the-challenges-of-telling-the-story-of-living-royals/ 2025-02-12T13:12:41.000Z 2023-12-08T11:06:35.000Z Elinor Evans: The final season of The Crown charts the story of the royal family from 1997 to 2005. Are there any unique challenges of telling the stories of living royals, and of the Windsor dynasty in particular?

Annie Sulzberger: Sometimes the biggest issue is our collective memory, because we remember things in the moment. If, for example, you asked the public today how many people died in the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, they would say two. In fact, there were three – but that third victim got little coverage in the newspapers.

• Read more | Charles and Diana: a history of their marriage

Most of the information about the crash did not come out until 2008, when Operation Paget [the Metropolitan Police inquiry established in 2004 to investigate conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death] was published. All of a sudden, you could rebuild that entire summer through very credible testimony from close friends, bodyguards and the Ritz staff who went with Dodi to buy the ring that we feature in the series.

We needed those 10 years of investigations to get to the fundamental material with which to build our story. If we had stopped in 1997, and used only resources from then, pretty much what you would have been stuck with is the emotional responses to a moment in history, because that’s all we had at the time. But nobody had quite figured out truly what had happened, and what Diana was feeling about Dodi.

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I think sometimes collective memory can be a harder thing to deal with when it comes to the monarchy, because they don’t often do interviews themselves. We get most of our information from newspapers, vox pops, and the public at large – but that is not how you attempt to piece together history.

This is one of the reasons why our show stops in 2005. You need to allow time for the true story of those moments to emerge. If we were still depicting the story up to 2023, we would only have today’s newspapers or interviews to help us shape the narrative.

Why do you think the royal family are fair game for portrayal on programmes such as The Crown?

I believe that in any democracy – which we have in the UK, even though it is a constitutional monarchy – we have the right to interrogate our public institutions, and the monarchy is a public institution. I find it interesting that nobody has a problem with us depicting Harold Wilson, John Major or Margaret Thatcher, yet some people feel that the royal family are untouchable. I simply don’t believe that’s true. If these two spheres of power are meant to function together, then we have to treat them equally.

• Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher?

I feel a great responsibility to understand those people as well as I possibly can. But where that’s taken is not up to me – I’m not the writer of the show – but it’s my job to feel that I’ve left an impression of a person as rooted in history as possible. That’s hard, because it’s not just history – it’s perspective. But it’s rooted in as much information as we can gather and confidently put forward.

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The show takes us into Downing Street at various points across the 20th and 21st centuries. How do you go about reconstructing life and events behind those closed doors?

The National Archives holds cabinet agendas and minutes, so we know exactly what was covered in every cabinet meeting. And lots of people who worked as cabinet members or civil servants within Downing Street have written memoirs or published diaries – they’ve gone home that night and written about what happened. During Tony Blair’s time as prime minister, [Downing Street press secretary and, later, director of communications and strategy] Alastair Campbell took unbelievable notes about every day that he was at Downing Street. Earlier, you had Bernard Donoughue [who published diaries spanning several Labour governments] and others. A lot of PMs write autobiographies, and a lot of historians write well-vetted biographies.

The reporting of government has a less gossipy nature [than some other media coverage]. So you might say, well, we know The Guardian will always slant this way, and The Daily Telegraph will slant that way. But whatever the outlet, you can trust an official account that says, for example, this many items have been presented for the budget.

The variety of characters and storylines portrayed in The Crown is one of the elements that’s allowed people to connect with the series. Do you have a favourite you’d like viewers to think about more closely?

If I had to choose a favourite episode, it would be that in which Charles goes to Aberystwyth University [in 1969, to learn Welsh ahead of his investiture as Prince of Wales], exploring his relationship with his Welsh tutor, Edward Millward. We were fortunate to speak to Edward’s daughter, who acted as a conduit to him – he was very ill at the time we were researching.

More broadly, that episode looked at the dangers Charles was facing during a Welsh militant bombing campaign. There were accounts that he was given a bulletproof vest to wear underneath his investiture uniform, because the threat of assassination was so high. However, we realised that the real story wasn’t about the outside political forces on Charles, but about his evolution under the tutelage of someone with whom he had a new kind of dynamic. It became such a simple story about a young man’s growth and awakening.
Those scenes where he’s with the Millwards highlight the family life he wished he’d had – that closeness – and the sense of isolation he experienced back home. It was such a simple, beautiful story, and we could never have got anywhere near that depth without the Millward family’s help.

Are there any historical details that captured your interest but were left on the cutting room floor?

Lots of small things that we spent hours researching didn’t make the final edit, or were simply brushed past in a scene.

I spent a lot of time checking which medals the tribal leaders wore when Elizabeth landed in Kenya in 1952, for example, trying to figure out how this religious leader of Zanzibar got a [particular] medal. And then, by the time it was actually filmed, it was just a flash-in-the-pan moment.

In one scene, Dominic West [the actor who plays Charles in the final two seasons] was eating asparagus at Highgrove. Our amazing etiquette adviser, David Rankin Hunt, stopped him and said: posh people don’t eat asparagus with knives and forks – they use their fingers. So we reset and reshot it with Dom picking up the asparagus with his fingers. It’s important to have so many voices who can chime in with their experience, because I don’t think I would have been able to look up the way in which two posh people would have eaten asparagus back in 1992.

Finally, could you share your sense of the place of history as drama in 2023?

If done correctly, it’s incredibly elucidating. It’s not journalism, it’s not on-the-ground reporting – but it’s how we digest our past to help us understand the moment we’re in, or where we’re going.

It’s really important to have creative freedom when you’re making historical drama, because I fundamentally think that – in the same way that Hilary Mantel said in her Reith Lectures – history has long been about a very small percentage of the population written by an even smaller percentage of the population. It’s about aligning perspectives to try to build a picture, and it’s a lot more subjective than people are willing to acknowledge.

As an example, the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945. That’s a concrete fact – but how victorious Britain felt at that time, or how individuals in the war felt, all of that is perspective. So I wish a show such as this was taken less as docu- mentary and more as a way to help us process the people in our lives about whom we actually don’t know very much, but who are in positions of power, and as a way to try to humanise them and our history.

Annie Sulzberger is head of research for The Crown. The final episodes of the series are available to watch on Netflix from 14 December

]]> Sarah Gristwood <![CDATA[“Haunted, in more ways than one”: A historian’s review of The Crown S6, part 1]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/historian-reviews-crown-season-6-part-1/ 2024-08-20T08:57:05.000Z 2023-11-16T12:14:36.000Z As actor Claire Foy said in the Netflix teaser for the sixth and final season of its flagship drama, the crown is a symbol of permanence. She, in her role as the young Elizabeth II, meant the crown she embodied, the one on her head – but you could say the same of The Crown too.

A final sixth season, taking the narrative into the 21st century, was originally on – then off – then on again. It is now being shown in two separate chunks; and rightly so, because although the first four episodes are about the crown and its putative future, in personal terms they are all about Diana, Princess of Wales.

Even the evocative poster image shows Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana – alone but always on view – perched on the end of the springboard aboard the Al Fayed yacht in the summer of 1997, seemingly contemplating a dive into an uncertain future.

These first four episodes cover a little more than eight weeks, and with such a tight focus its central performance is all-important. Debicki does not disappoint. Her voice – that voice we all remember from the real Diana’s Panorama interview – is almost spookily right.

Images we all recognise are recreated with astonishing accuracy (though the famous landmines walk has been transposed from her Angola visit to her Bosnia one in August 1997).

But in those very memories lies the challenge – that we’re coming up to, as the New York Times put it, “one of the most analyzed periods in recent British history”. And as they watch this season, many viewers (in the UK at least) will have an alternative narrative running simultaneously in their head as they match up the drama with their own recollection.

• Read more | The Crown S6 part 1: the real history in the royal drama

The Diana of Debicki and writer/creator Peter Morgan is a woman coping with the chaotic circumstances around her –though nods are made to reports which described, instead, a woman adrift, vibrating distractedly between her anti-landmine crusade and a life of luxury.

Much in the first two episodes seems almost too much like the story we already knew; though Morgan imaginatively explores also the relationship between Diana and Dodi Fayed (appealingly played by Khalid Abdalla). Dodi’s father Mohamed (Salim Daw) is cast as the ambitious fixer – something of a deus ex machina, indeed – portrayed as pushing his son towards Diana.

It’s in episode three that things really get inventive. At the Ritz in Paris, just hours before their death, Diana and Dodi are shown having a profound, insightful conversation which allows them each to recognise past mistakes, and resolve on a path ahead.

As promised, the fatal crash is not seen on screen, though heard nonetheless. But it’s in episode four – ‘Aftermath’– that the controversial question of good taste presents itself most clearly.

• Read more | The Crown season 6 cast vs their real-life counterparts

“Uncomfortable viewing”

When Peter Morgan first gave us his take on these events, in his feature film, The Queen, 17 years ago, William and Harry (played here by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) were kept discretely out of view. Now, by contrast, we see Prince Charles (Dominic West) coming in to tell his sons of their mother’s death, and the boys’ reaction. It makes seriously uncomfortable viewing even for us – and excruciating, surely, for anyone who had actually been there.

Diana does indeed, as already reported, appear as a ghost to both her former husband and her mother-in-law (Imelda Staunton, once again). With Charles, Diana’s tone is rueful but affectionate; with the Queen, instructive. Elizabeth II had always, Diana tells her, shown the nation “what it meant to be British”. Now is the moment to prove she could be also “a mother to the nation” as Charles had phrased it, lamenting that the Queen had been unable to be a mother to him.

• Read more | What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother?

This season is haunted, in more ways than one. By literal ghosts; by the ghosts of all those other past books, films, documentaries covering these same few weeks; and by the knowledge of what lies ahead (slyly acknowledged from episode one, when the Queen tells Tony Blair – of Diana’s wish for a continued public role – that “it’s hard to be half in anything”, giving shades of Harry and Meghan). And haunted, too, by all of our feelings about Diana, and about the monarchy.

The Queen tells the ghostly Diana she has sparked something like revolution. In fact, it proved to be not a revolution, but a much-needed reform. The aftermath of Diana’s death was – as Charles puts it in the series – “the biggest thing that any of us have ever seen”. But lessons were learnt (though the Sussexes have since queried how thoroughly) and history has shown that the popularity of many senior royals bounced back with surprising speed.

“A mission statement for the British monarchy”

In many ways, this final series of The Crown is a mission statement for the British monarchy. We have Charles bluntly telling his parents they could no longer have it both ways, “being a private family when we want, and a public one when it suits us”. It’s true, and it’s their tragedy.

Gyles Brandreth once complained that The Crown was turning the royal family into a soap opera. The easy retort is that they did that to themselves. But that is to ignore the real vulnerable people behind the stories just as surely as did the paparazzi, shown here in all their remorseless brutality.

A further six episodes, covering Charles and Camilla’s wedding, and William’s first encounters with Kate, will be released on 14 December (with talk of a prequel to follow). Will this last season help or hurt the reputation of the real monarchy?

• On the podcast | Dominic Sandbrook on Queen Elizabeth II's century of change

Andrew Marr suggested in the Sunday Times that its members should ultimately be grateful to The Crown, for keeping their profile high in ever-less-reverential days. But that is on what one might call a professional level, not a personal one. Dodi’s ghost tells his father we can only heal if we tell the truth.

On the evidence so far, it’s debatable whether Peter Morgan’s truth will do anything to heal still-open wounds within today’s divided royal family.

Catch up on the real the history behind each episode of The Crown season 5, with our episode guides:

• The Crown S5 E1: ‘Queen Victoria Syndrome’ and a second honeymoon
• The Crown S5 E2: Prince Philip’s ‘keeper of secrets’ and Andrew Norton’s book on Princess Diana
• The Crown S5 E3: exiled royals and the al-Fayeds
• The Crown S5 E4: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend
• The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival
• The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship”
• The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal
• The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks
• The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana
• The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide

]]> Emma Mason <![CDATA[Charles and Diana: a history of their marriage]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/prince-charles-princess-diana-meet-marriage-children-divorce-bulimia-childhood-camilla-royal-tour/ 2025-02-12T13:12:48.000Z 2023-11-14T12:10:09.000Z Who was Diana, Princess of Wales?

Maiden name: Diana Frances Spencer

Born: 1 July 1961 at Park House, the home that her parents rented on Queen Elizabeth II’s estate at Sandringham

Died: 31 August 1997, in a car accident in Paris (aged 36)

Married to: Prince Charles (m. 1981–96)

Height: 1.78 m

Children: Prince William (born 1982) and Prince Harry (born 1984)

Grandchildren: Prince George (born 2013); Princess Charlotte (born 2015); Prince Louis (born 2018); Archie Mountbatten-Windsor (born 2019)

Parents: John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer & Frances Roche

Siblings: Lady Sarah McCorquodale (1955–present); Jane Fellowes, Baroness Fellowes (1957–present); John Spencer, died within 10 hours of his birth on 12 January 1960; Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer (1964–present)

Educated: Silfield Private School in Gayton, Norfolk; Riddlesworth Hall School near Thetford; West Heath Girls’ School in Sevenoaks, Kent; Institut Alpin Videmanette in Rougemont, Switzerland

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When did Diana Spencer meet Prince Charles?

It was in the summer of 1980, at a house party hosted by Diana’s friend Philip de Pass in New Grove, near Petworth, that Prince Charles first saw Diana Spencer as a potential girlfriend. Sitting next to each other on a bale of hay at a post-polo barbecue, an 19-year-old Diana expressed her sympathy for Charles over the loss of his beloved great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, who had been murdered by the IRA a year earlier. “My heart bled for you when I watched the funeral; I thought, ‘It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you’,” said Diana. This, says Penny Junor, was exactly what Charles needed to hear.

“Mountbatten was a very important figure in Charles’s life and he was in a fragile state at that point,” says Junor. “Diana really touched a nerve in Charles, she said just the right thing to him, at the right moment, and he was moved by her.”

This encounter was not, however, the first time Charles and Diana had met. The pair had been introduced two years earlier, in 1977 – Charles thought her “jolly” when he visited Althorp, the Spencer estate, when he was dating Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah (a relationship that ended in early 1978). Diana had also attended Charles’s 30th birthday party along with her sister at Buckingham Palace in November 1978, and in January 1979 Diana again met Charles when she and Sarah were guests of Queen Elizabeth II at a weekend shooting party at Sandringham.

After that weekend, Charles occasionally invited Diana to the ballet as part of a group or to dinner with friends. The relationship was, at this stage, purely platonic – Diana was fun to have around. It was not until their heart-to-heart about Lord Mountbatten in 1980 that Charles first saw Diana as girlfriend material.

Keen to spend more time with Diana, Charles promptly invited her to Balmoral to join him and a group of friends staying there for a summer holiday. Diana enchanted and delighted. “She seemed to be the perfect girl,” says Junor. “She was funny, she was fun, everybody seemed to love her – she made everyone laugh and she seemed to adore Charles.

“She was, on paper, absolutely perfect as a bride for him. At the time it was thought Charles’s bride must be a virgin, an aristocrat and a member of the Church of England. Now, we should remember that by the 1980s, after the 1960s sexual revolution and the introduction of the contraceptive pill, there were very few aristocratic virgins around, and as time went by – Charles was by this point in his 30s – they were getting fewer and fewer.

“So, here was this girl who appeared to be absolutely lovely; perfect marriage material. And she appeared to be very uncomplicated. She was fresh and naïve and full of the joys of life. Or so it seemed.”

But, says Junor, pressure began to mount on Charles and Diana almost immediately.

*“*Ever since Charles was around the age of 18 the press had been looking at every girlfriend and asking, ‘could this be our next queen?’. They delved into the background of all of these women, which put an awful lot of them off. It was very difficult for Charles to meet and get to know somebody. And this is exactly what happened with Diana: she met Charles and almost immediately the press discovered that he was seeing her. The paparazzi camped outside the door to her flat in London; everywhere she went she was photographed and harassed. It was impossible for the two of them to get to know one another in any sort of ‘normal’ way.”

Charles was also under pressure from his father, Prince Philip, to stop ‘playing the field’ and get married. It was time for Charles, who was now in his 30s, to settle down and find a wife, his father thought. “The bottom line being, of course, that every heir requires an heir of his own in order to keep the monarchy going,” says Junor.

Did Prince Philip tell Charles to marry Diana?

The catalyst came in the form of a memo sent by Prince Philip to his son in early 1981 urging him to make up his mind. You either marry this girl or you let her go, he wrote.

But, says Junor, this memo was fatefully misinterpreted by Charles. “The royal family communicates with one another in very strange ways,” she said.

“Rather than just picking up the phone or having a chat face-to-face, it was all done through memos*.* Charles misread his father’s memo: he thought he was being told that he must marry Diana – and so he asked her to marry him.”

When did Prince Charles and Diana Spencer get engaged?

Charles proposed to Diana on 6 February 1981 at Windsor Castle. But it was a tragic mismatch, says Junor. Charles and Diana had, at this point, barely spent any time together – Diana later claimed that she and Charles had met only 13 times before they became engaged. “And most of that time they'd not spent alone together,” Junor adds. “So they really didn't know one another at all.”

• Read more | How accurate is The Crown’s portrayal of Charles and Diana’s engagement?

Diana’s mental health

Diana soon began to struggle in her new role. Aged just 19 and having been living happily in a flatshare in London with a group of girl friends, Diana was taken away from everything she knew and moved into a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace.

“It was awful for her, and lonely,” says Junor. “As soon as she moved into Buckingham Palace she appeared to be a very different girl from the girl she had been at Balmoral – she suddenly became very weepy and jealous of anywhere Charles went and anyone he saw. Her moods went up and down; shooting to stardom in a very short space of time was too much for her.

“Meanwhile Charles, who was on a perpetual rollercoaster of engagements that he couldn’t get off, didn't quite know how to cope with this; he didn't know what was going on.”

Diana was struggling with her mental health and with the eating disorder bulimia, says Junor. “She’d had a very traumatic childhood; she was a very damaged little girl who had grown into a very damaged young woman*,*” says the royal biographer. Diana’s parents had endured an unhappy marriage and separated when she was just six years old.

Diana Spencer's early life

A year-and-a-half before Diana was born, her mother, Frances Ruth Roche, who was already the mother of two girls, Diana’s elder sisters, had given birth to a baby boy who died when he was just 10 hours old. Diana was born 18 months later, in July 1961, followed by a much-wanted male heir: Diana’s younger brother, Charles.

When Charles was around the age of two or three, Diana’s mother met Peter Shand Kydd, an heir to the wallpaper fortune built by his father, Norman Shand Kydd. The pair began an affair and later decided to become a couple. “Frances thought she could finally be happy, and she had every intention of taking her children with her,” says Junor.

But, tragically, Frances lost custody of Diana and her three siblings following an intervention by her mother, Ruth Roche, Baroness Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. “Appalled that her daughter had run off with a ‘man in trade’, Baroness Fermoy gave evidence in the custody proceedings against her own daughter,” says Junor.

“She told the court Frances was a bad mother, and as a result, custody of all four children went to Diana’s father. This is, I believe, why Diana’s mother later became a reclusive and very sad woman. It was because she had lost her children.”

Diana, aged just seven and completely unaware of the custody proceedings, was left feeling abandoned and as though her mother did not love her enough to take her with her. “And then she worked out that actually she was a bit of a nuisance,” says Junor. “Her mother and father had wanted a boy, and that boy had died. Diana later told journalist Andrew Morton [who wrote the authorised 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story], her parents had tried for another boy but ended up with Diana.

“Diana felt very unloved and unwanted, and she took those feelings into her adult life – she was always desperate to be loved but expected people to abandon her.”

Diana’s bulimia

Diana struggled with bulimia for many years before seeking professional help.

It’s difficult to know when exactly it started, but it was “in full swing” by the time of their honeymoon, says Junor. She may initially have been treated for anorexia.

“I think that the eating disorder was a manifestation of a much greater disorder,” says Junor. “Her mental health was poor; she had struggled mentally from childhood.

“Bulimia and anorexia are very destructive conditions; they’re very hard to live with,” says Junor.

Revelations of Diana’s bulimia were first published in Andrew Morton’s 1992 authorised biography, Diana: Her True Story. She later spoke about her struggle with the condition in her famous 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. [In 2021, an independent inquiry found that Bashir had used deception to secure the interview]

“I think she felt that nobody could help her,” says Junor. She saw various conventional therapists but also turned to a number of alternative, complementary therapists including astrologers and crystal healers.”

Wwhere and when did Charles and Diana and get married?

The wedding of Charles and Diana married at St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 July 1981 in what has been described as the wedding of the century. “I think Charles and Diana both knew they were making a mistake when they walked down the aisle,” says Junor.

“But it would have taken somebody very brave to cancel at that point. Charles had always said that marriage for him must be for life and it was therefore very important that he marry the right girl – ‘If I’m deciding [on] whom I want to live with for 50 years – well, that’s the last decision on which I [would] want my head to be ruled by my heart.’

“So although I don’t think he was actually in love with Diana, I think he thought he could grow to love her. Fundamentally I think he had every intention of making his marriage work.

“A lot of people believe that Charles used Diana; that he never loved her and he never had any intention of honouring his marriage vows. They think he just needed his heir and his ‘spare’ and that once that was achieved, he went off with the woman he’d always loved, Camilla. That is very much the story that a lot of people like to believe.

“Having spoken to a great many people who were around at the time, I happen to believe that story is completely wrong. I have always felt that it was just a very tragic mismatch; these two people were just completely wrong for one another. I really do not think that Charles used Diana or intended to use Diana, but once he was inside that marriage life was utterly unbearable for both of them.”

• Read more | Prince Charles and Camilla: a history of their romance

Was Charles still seeing Camilla when he married Diana?

Charles’s relationship with Camilla had ended when she married Andrew Parker Bowles in the summer of 1973. Camilla settled into her new life as a wife and mother and her friendship with Charles remained platonic in the years that followed. But the pair restarted their affair shortly after the birth of Camilla’s second child, Laura, in early 1978, and in 1979 Charles turned to Camilla for consolation for his grief following the death of Lord Mountbatten. Camilla was “his best friend, his soul mate, and, and after the death of his great-uncle, lover,” writes Marlene Koenig in this article for HistoryExtra. This second affair lasted until Charles’s engagement to Diana in 1981.

“Camilla’s husband, unfortunately, was very unfaithful to her, so she was very lonesome in her marriage,” says Junor. “And Charles made her feel good. Who can blame her for enjoying that relationship while Charles was single? But she knew that once Charles became married, the physical side of their relationship would end. She was under no illusion that it would carry on. And when Camilla realised that Diana was jealous of her, she stepped right back.”

Tensions were made worse by the fact that Charles had failed to tell Diana about his history with Camilla when they first began dating, says Junor. Early on in his relationship with Diana, they even went to stay with the Parker Bowles’s, but Charles did not disclose the fact Camilla was his ex-girlfriend. Instead, Diana found out on the grapevine “through Buckingham Palace gossip,” says Junor. “As a 19-year-old, Diana would have been hugely upset by that, and very jealous,” she adds. “She probably felt like a bit of a fool”.

• Read more | Everything you need to know about Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall

Diana and The G&F bracelet

The last time Charles and Camilla saw one another before he married Diana was just a few days before the wedding. They had one final lunch together, during which Charles gifted Camilla a bracelet inscribed with the letters ‘G’ and ‘F’, which is thought to have stood for ‘Gladys’ and ‘Fred’ – their nicknames for one another.

Shockingly, Diana had discovered the bracelet just two weeks previously, in the office she shared with Charles’s right-hand-man, Michael Colborne. Prince Charles had asked Colborne to buy jewellery as presents for a number of women with whom he had been close during his bachelor years, as a way of thanking them for their companionship.

“All the jewellery had been delivered to the office that Diana was sharing with Colborne and put on his desk,” Junor explains. “Colborne was called away to a meeting down the corridor. He left the jewellery on his desk and when he came back he met Diana storming out of the office. He quickly realised she had unpacked the boxes, discovered the bracelet and got into a jealous rage.”

Camilla attended Charles and Diana’s wedding but the pair did not then see one another or communicate for nearly five years – apart from when Charles notified her of the birth of his first son, William.

Princess Diana's sons: the births of William and Harry

In June 1982, less than a year after Diana and Charles married, their first son, Prince William, was born.

This was, for the most part, a happy time for the couple, says Junor. “I’ve interviewed people who visited Kensington Palace in the early 1980s – they describe Diana charging about the house playfully looking for William who had run away and hidden under his father’s desk at bedtime.

Others describe Charles chasing Diana up the stairs. I think there were definitely good times. Diana would later tell journalist Andrew Morton that the period just before Harry was born [in 1984] was the happiest the couple had had together.

“Diana very much enjoyed being a mother, she absolutely loved William and Harry with every fibre of her being. If you are someone who desperately needs love – as, I would argue, Diana did – there’s nothing quite like a baby to fulfil that need. So having children was the best possible thing for Diana.”

Tensions in Prince Charles and Princess Diana's marriage

But tensions in the marriage were escalating and Diana’s moods were changeable. “She was incredibly complicated,” says Junor. “There were behaviours that she exhibited privately but not publicly, and I think this is why the public has always found it very hard to believe anything other than Diana’s story. Andrew Morton’s biography, for example, is absolutely Diana’s story, but it’s her story, it’s not the story.

"The truth is we’ve never heard Charles’s side. Apart from admitting adultery to Jonathan Dimbleby [in his televised 1994 interview] he has never talked about their marriage or criticised his ex-wife in all these years.

“Ultimately I think Charles did everything he could to try to make Diana happy. But she wanted 101 per cent of Charles’s attention all the time, and he was just not the man who would ever have been able to give that to her because the bulk of his attention has always gone on his work.”

Tensions also arose as the press and public lavished attention on Diana over-and-above Charles. During their 1983 tour of Australia – which features in season four of The Crown – Charles is said to have bemoaned the fact he was being outshone by his wife. Junor, who joined the royal couple on their very first royal tour – of Wales shortly after their honeymoon – says Charles was often overshadowed by Diana to the extent it was “painful to watch”.

During royal tours of towns and cities, thousands of people would line both sides of the street and Charles would meet-and-greet those on one side, Diana the other. “There were audible sighs and groans from people on Charles’s side,” says Junor. “They would hand Charles bouquets of flowers and ask him to pass them to his wife.”

The press were also “obsessed” with Diana, says Junor. Charles would give a speech about an issue dear to him, such as the environment or a charitable cause, but – much to his frustration – newspaper reports the next day would be dominated by photos of Diana, with commentary on her hairstyle, her weight and her clothes, and often speculation as to whether she was pregnant. There would be no mention of his speech.

“After a while, this began to really grate on Charles,” says Junor. “He had spent his whole life being in the spotlight. Members of the royal family do their own engagements, they’re used to being the star of the show. So when Charles suddenly found himself being kicked into the wings, with his wife – for all the stupidest reasons, like a hairstyle – suddenly the star, who could blame him for getting a bit peeved?”

Read more about the start of ‘Dianamania’ here

Would Diana have had a career if she hadn’t met Charles?

“I suspect not,” says Junor. “She was not very well educated. And because she was the product of a divorced couple I think each parent probably spoiled her; I don’t think there was any real discipline in her life.

“If she started something and wanted to give up, she gave up: she’d gone to finishing school but didn’t like it, so left; she’d done jobs she hadn’t enjoyed, so she’d given them up. And one thing that the royal family has in spades is discipline; their lives are regimented, and I think Diana found that very difficult.

“Diana had left boarding school with no real qualifications at all and she wasn’t a great reader of books. In the late 1970s she studied ballet and briefly taught at the Vacani School of Dance, and she had looked after children briefly as a kindergarten teacher.

“She had dabbled in lots of things she liked. But with no qualifications she was never going to go anywhere great. She really didn’t need to work; she had plenty of money. So if she hadn’t met Charles, she probably would have married someone posh and had children, staff and nannies – and an active social life.”

What was Diana’s relationship like with the Queen and Prince Philip?

To begin with, both the Queen and Prince Philip were very enthusiastic about Diana, says Junor. They’d known her as a child because her family lived at Park House on the Sandringham Estate; her father was an equerry to the Queen. Diana was also a similar age to Prince Andrew and she used to attend parties with him.

“When Diana stayed at Balmoral in the summer of 1980, the Queen and Prince Philip thought she was enchanting,” says Junor. For many years Charles kept secret the difficulties he and Diana were having in their marriage. “The Queen and Prince Philip were blissfully unaware,” says Junor. “But as time went by and they came to learn of the problems in the marriage through the press, they became very irritated with her. Diana’s behaviour was damaging the monarchy, and if there’s one thing the Queen cares about above all else, it’s the monarchy. She is safeguarding it for the future; that’s the prime task for any monarch.” 

• Read more | Did the Queen really forbid Charles and Diana from divorcing, as is shown in The Crown?

When did Charles and Diana’s marriage break down? When did Charles start his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles?

Diana would later tell Andrew Morton that she realised her marriage to Charles was over around the time their second son, Harry, was born, in 1984. According to Diana she was crushed by comments Charles supposedly made following the birth. “Something inside of me died,” the princess told Morton.

By 1986 the marriage had collapsed and Charles was at what Penny Junor describes as “a critical sort of low”. Two mutual friends, concerned for Charles, independently contacted Camilla and urged her to reach out to him. She picked up the phone to Charles and their friendship restarted from there.

“Some years later Charles would confirm that Mrs Parker Bowles was a good friend, but insisted he had been faithful to Diana until their marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’,” writes Marlene Koenig.

Charles and Camilla first saw one another again in 1986 when Charles invited her and her husband, Andrew, for tea at Highgrove. Over the coming months Charles and Camilla’s friendship developed and by around 1987 the pair were romantically involved again, says Junor. “Andrew was still being horribly unfaithful to Camilla and she didn’t feel loved or cherished by him in their marriage,” says Junor.

“Meanwhile Diana by this time had had affairs with several men, the first of which was probably with her bodyguard, Barry Mannakee. James Hewitt [a former cavalry officer in the British Army, with whom Diana admitted to having an affair] was also well in the picture by the time Charles went back to Camilla. Charles and Diana were leading very separate lives by this point.”

When did Charles and Diana separate and divorce?

Charles and Diana lived largely separate lives from around 1986, and Charles’s affair with Camilla continued. In December 1992, after years of speculation by the tabloid press that the marriage was in jeopardy, British prime minister John Major announced that the couple had formally separated.

In the summer of 1994, Charles’s interview with Jonathan Dimbleby was televised “in which he admitted infidelity and revealed both a lack of sympathy for Diana… and a worrying distance from his family,” writes Sarah Gristwood in this article for HistoryExtra.

This revelation, says Junor, compelled Andrew Parker Bowles to divorce Camilla. The pair announced their divorce in January 1995. A few months later, in November 1995, Princess Diana gave her famous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir in which she told viewers “there were three of us in this marriage – so it was a bit crowded”.

• Did Charles ask Camilla to leave her husband, as is shown in The Crown?

Within weeks of the interview, the Queen suggested the couple should divorce – and quickly. Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles was dissolved in August 1996, after four years of separation.

On 31 August 1997, Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris. She was 36 years old when she died.

In January 1999, Charles and Camilla made their first public appearance together as a couple. Their engagement was announced on 10 February 2005 and they married just a couple of months later on 9 April at a civil wedding at Windsor Guildhall, followed by a Service of Blessing at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. 

Princess Diana in The Crown

Princess Diana first appeared in season 4 of Peter Morgan’s royal drama The Crown, where she was played by Emma Corrin, with Elizabeth Debicki taking on the role in seasons 5 and 6. “As in real life, the collapse of both Anne’s and Andrew’s marriages proved to be a mere sideshow compared to the far more sensational and high-profile split between the Queen’s eldest son and his first wife,” writes historian Tracy Borman of the how the breakdown in Charles and Diana’s marriage is portrayed in season 5. Read on to explore more of the real history of The Crown and events seen on screen:

• Diana and Charles’s wedding: everything you need to know
• Prince Charles and Camilla: a history of their romance
• The Queen’s “rebel sister”: 8 facts about Princess Margaret
• Buckingham Palace intruder Michael Fagan: what happened and why did he break in?
• Was the Queen opposed to the Falklands War?
• The Crown: the real history
• Why was Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great-uncle, assassinated?
• Everything you need to know about King Charles III, formerly Prince Charles
• Who is Queen Camilla, formerly the Duchess of Cornwall?
• Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip: 8 milestones in their marriage
• Who is Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II?

This article was written following an interview in November 2020 with royal biographer Penny Junor, who is the author of 10 books on members of the royal family including Charles and Diana: portrait of a marriage (Headline, 1991) 

]]> Rosie Harte <![CDATA[Five outrageous moments in royal fashion history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/outrageous-royal-fashion-history/ 2025-02-12T13:12:49.000Z 2023-10-24T07:55:47.000Z In their prim coat dresses and pristine uniforms, the royal family are the picture of conservative style – or at least they are today. With funds and resources aplenty, British royalty has for centuries been the hub of sartorial splendour, with many of its members flaunting some very bizarre trends.

Henry VIII’s codpiece causes whispers at court

The Tudors are not remembered for their moderation; an immense sense of grandeur encourages people to ponder at their portraits, and undoubtedly Tudor fashion contributes to this appeal.

King Henry VIII was considered to be one of the best-dressed rulers of his day. He kept his wardrobe stocked with the newest and finest of trends. Yet if one item of clothing was to characterise his style, no doubt it would be the codpiece.

The codpiece’s origin is easy to trace, as it started out life as a protective garment. In the 1400s, as men’s tunics became increasingly shorter, they began to wear a triangular gusset of fabric to preserve their modesty.

By the middle of the following century (and during the rule of Henry VIII) that gusset had developed into an erect pouch, made with eye-catching fabric and embellished with ribbons and precious stones.

That rapid development prompts us to ask the question: what was the role of the codpiece? And what did it mean to those who wore or saw it?

View Green Video on the source website

Nineteenth-century scholars attempted to dismiss the oddity of the codpiece by ascribing it a practical purpose. Some theorised that it was used as protection and was akin to a suit of armour, while others deduced that it was used like a pocket to hold coins or other trinkets. All of them sheepishly tiptoed around the obvious and refused to acknowledge the sexual connotations.

Our current understanding of the codpiece is that it reinforced an important element of 16th-century masculine identity, drawing attention to the reproductive organs in order to stress dynastic power through male virility.

Anne of Denmark’s daring necklines

In 1981, Princess Diana battled admonishment from the press after donning a black frilly gown for one of her first official post-engagement functions.

What had the dress done wrong? According to the press, the sweetheart neckline was far too low for any respectable member of the royal family.

Yet try telling that to Anne of Denmark, the 17th-century Queen Consort of King James VI & I. Guests at the post-Elizabethan court were shocked to discover that the Queen’s preferred style of dress featured necklines that swooped so low they exposed her breasts “bare down to the pit of her stomach” (Calendar of State Papers Venetian XV).

Anne was particularly proud of her breasts, and emphasised their display further by using makeup to tint her nipples to a more prominent shade. While her portraits don’t often show the extent of her plunging necklines, her funeral effigy at Westminster Abbey certainly does. Once dressed in her own clothes, this lifesize wooden statue of the Anne is painted only in the areas not concealed by her gown and shows a neckline that cuts across below the line of her nipples.

Charles II’s shocking pubic hair wig

Well known as ‘The Merry Monarch’, King Charles II had a passion for theatre, a love of sports, and (according to one 18th-century drinking club) a wig made out of his mistresses’ pubic hairs.

The story goes something like this: after each of his many romantic escapades, Charles took a clipping of his partner’s pubic hair and, when he had collected enough, had them made into a long and curly periwig. Later he gifted it to a friend, the Earl of Moray, who took it to Scotland and passed it down through his family as a revered heirloom.

In the following century, one of the earl’s descendants took the wig and created a cult-like drinking club in its honour, with new members being forced to kiss the wig and vow to add to it with clippings from their own romantic ventures.

Surely, this sounds too absurd to be true? Well, that might be the case. We know for certain that the wig existed, but it’s possible that the pubic hair mythology was created by the 18th-century club in order to fulfil a purpose in their gatherings and validate their place amongst the many sex-focused drinking clubs of the day.

After it disbanded, the wig passed hands multiple times and was last seen in a lawyer’s office in Scotland in the 1930s.

George IV’s eye-watering corset

There are many things – both good and bad – that King George IV is remembered for, but he’d hope that one of them would be his sense of style. It could take as long as three hours for the king to get dressed each morning, and he was often entrusted with the role of curating the wardrobes of his brothers and sisters. George certainly erred on the side of vanity.

But George had another great love: food, and, by the time of his coronation in 1821 he found that he was no longer quite as trim as he wanted to be. What was the solution? Corsetry, of course.

• Read more | Victorian corsets: dangerous or misunderstood?

It wasn’t entirely uncommon to see men wearing corsets, particularly in the 19th century. As the original function of structured undergarments was to provide posture support, they were adopted by men in the army and in certain sports (such as boxing) in order to provide core stability.

For George, the purpose was certainly not sporting – and when fully laced his whalebone girdles could reduce his stomach from 55 to 50 inches.

Queen Alexandra’s limp

Alexandra of Denmark, wife of Edward VII and the longest serving Princess of Wales, was a style icon for her time. Anything she wore or did became trendy – and I mean anything – even her disabilities.

In 1867 Alexandra experienced a particularly difficult pregnancy which left her vulnerable to several debilitating illnesses. One consequence of this period was a spell of arthritis and severe inflammation in one of her knees which would never fully recover.
Terrified of how the public would respond to her new limp, she did everything in her power to disguise it but rather than the horror she anticipated, the public reacted with admiration.

Soon the ‘Alexandra limp’ was being copied by women throughout high society, and in some extreme cases reported on by the press, women were cutting the heels of their shoes at different heights in order to achieve it.

]]> Spencer Mizen <![CDATA[Britain in the 1990s: everything you wanted to know]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/britain-in-the-1990s-everything-you-wanted-to-know-podcast-alwyn-turner/ 2024-10-28T14:12:32.000Z 2023-05-14T05:25:06.000Z It was the decade that saw the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of Tony Blair and the landmark Good Friday Agreement. But what was behind the landslide victory of New Labour? How did the death of Princess Diana change the monarchy? And was ‘Cool Britannia’ really that cool? Speaking to Spencer Mizen, Alwyn Turner answers listener questions on Britain in the 1990s.

]]> Tracy Borman <![CDATA[Princess Charlotte of Wales: the original people's princess]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/princess-charlotte-wales-death-life/ 2023-11-22T14:32:07.000Z 2023-05-04T08:00:13.000Z Listen to this article:

When news broke that the beautiful, charismatic and wildly popular princess had tragically died, it sparked an out- pouring of public anguish on a scale never seen before in Britain. The nation was plunged into mourning as people tried to come to terms with the shock of losing a princess who had captured their hearts from the moment she had appeared on the royal scene. But grief soon turned to retribution, and the monarchy’s public image plummeted. Suddenly, this centuries-old institution looked as if it was at risk of losing all support from its subjects.

Sound familiar? To anyone born in the 1980s or earlier, it will be. But the princess in question wasn’t Diana, the late, estranged wife of Prince Charles, who died in a car accident in Paris in 1997. She was Charlotte of Wales, the only child of the debauched prince regent, later George IV, and she died in 1817 at the age of just 21. Although her passing shook the nation and brought the crown to its knees, during the intervening two centuries Charlotte has largely been forgotten. Yet her death would prove a pivotal moment in the history of the British monarchy.

Playboy prince

Charlotte Augusta was born at Carlton House, her father Prince George’s lavish London home, on 7 January 1796. George was the eldest of King George III’s 15 children, and his daughter Charlotte was his only child, which made her second in line to the throne. The young princess soon came to be seen as a bright hope for the future, in stark contrast to her profligate and licentious father.

“Prinny”, as he was known to his friends, was the ultimate playboy prince. Described by one contemporary as “a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace”, he himself admitted to being “rather too fond of wine and women”. King George III complained bitterly about the “unruly passions” of his eldest son and grimly predicted that “every absurdity and impropriety may be expected”.

He was right. By 1795, Prince George’s debts had spiralled to a staggering £630,000 (equivalent to perhaps £48m). At a time when Britain was fighting a cripplingly expensive war with Napoleonic France, the prospect of a government bailout was slim. Instead, in a deliberate side-swipe at the profligate prince, the government introduced a new tax on hair powder, knowing it would hit George and his foppish friends where it hurt.

• Read now | Was the Regency era a good time to be a woman? The truth not seen in Bridgerton

To resolve the gathering crisis, the Prince of Wales reluctantly admitted that there was nothing else for it but to break with his secret wife, Maria Fitzherbert (whom the king had barred him from marrying because she was a Roman Catholic, so their “marriage” was never legal) and marry a wealthy princess.

The unfortunate candidate was his cousin, a German princess named Caroline of Brunswick. They hated each other on sight but were married in April 1795 and conceived a child on their wedding night – possibly their only conjugal encounter.

When Charlotte was only a day old her father vowed to separate her from her mother forever. Just four months later, her parents split and their ongoing animosity would dominate her childhood. The tiny princess was established in a household of her own, although she visited her parents every week at their respective homes. She also spent time with her grandparents, King George and Queen Charlotte, and the latter praised her young namesake as being “blessed with an uncommon share of good sense”.

Hanoverian hostility

Charlotte grew into a warm-hearted and affectionate girl, capable of forming strong attachments to those who treated her kindly. Pretty, fair-haired and high-spirited, she captured hearts wherever she went – although her own father’s wasn’t one of them. Perhaps she reminded Prince George too much of his estranged wife, or perhaps he was upholding the Hanoverian tradition of hostility between a future monarch and their heir.

As a result, Charlotte grew much closer to her mother, who showered her daughter with the affection that she craved. Caroline was hardly a perfect maternal figure, however. There were rumours that she had taken various lovers and had even had a child by one of them. “My mother was wicked,” Charlotte later reflected, “but she would not have turned so wicked had not my father been much more wicked still.”

Increasingly concerned for his only legitimate grandchild, with whom he had formed a close bond, from 1804 George III began to play a greater role in his granddaughter’s upbringing. He appointed Lady De Clifford as Charlotte’s governess, and she introduced an extensive curriculum that included Latin, history, drawing and music. The princess was not always a model pupil. “We had a few sour grapes between us,” Charlotte admitted after one quarrel, “but before we had finished our contest, I made her swallow them all.” She did, though, excel in the subjects she enjoyed, becoming an accomplished pianist and horsewoman.

• Quiz | Could you make it through a London season in the Regency era?

As she entered her teenage years, the princess’s rebellious streak grew more pronounced. Lady De Clifford complained about her charge’s tendency to let her ankle-length underdrawers show under her dresses, and one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting observed that Charlotte rarely chose to “put on dignity”. It was said that she identified with Marianne, the headstrong and wayward heroine of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Yet the princess enjoyed immense popularity with the public – a lively, personable and apparently virtuous young woman, providing a welcome contrast to her “mad” grandfather, George III, and her profligate father, the prince regent – and was met with cheering crowds wherever she went.

This stoked her father’s jealousy, and when he was appointed prince regent in 1811 upon his father’s final descent into “madness”, he used his new powers to impose harsh restrictions on his daughter’s lifestyle. This included a paltry clothing allowance and obliging her to spend most of her time with maiden aunts at Windsor.

The prince also limited Charlotte’s contact with his estranged wife. Caroline’s behaviour had grown ever more shocking since their separation. In one particularly infamous episode in 1813, she locked their 16-year-old daughter in a bedroom with a suitor and told the pair to amuse themselves.

Inappropriate infatuations

Charlotte needed little encouragement: her head was filled with romance, and she became infatuated with a number of inappropriate suitors, including the illegitimate sons of two of her uncles. Although he was hardly a shining example of morality himself, the prince regent appreciated the need to find a suitable husband for his daughter. He was also motivated by a desire to secure Britain an ally in the war against Napoleon.

His first choice was Prince William of Orange. But the Dutch suitor made a poor first impression when introduced to his prospective bride in August 1813 by getting drunk. Charlotte hated the idea of living in Holland after the marriage and argued that a future British queen should not marry a foreigner – something that chimed with the views of her father’s subjects. To the prince regent’s fury, she eventually broke off the engagement. “No arguments, no threats, shall ever bend me to marry this detested Dutchman,” she declared.

Prince George retaliated by dismissing all of his daughter’s servants and confining her to a life of isolation at Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Forest. Her mother was forbidden from visiting and, to Charlotte’s deep distress, she left the country soon afterwards, never to see her daughter again.

But Caroline’s absence eased relations between the princess and her father, and in August 1814 he allowed her a visit to Weymouth. By now, public sympathy with the persecuted princess had reached fever pitch. Wherever her coach stopped along the way, huge crowds turned out to cheer her. Upon her arrival in Weymouth, she was greeted with spectacular illuminations with a centrepiece declaring: “Hail Princess Charlotte, Europe’s Hope and Britain’s Glory.”

In early 1815, Charlotte turned her thoughts to a new suitor. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (“the Leo”, as she called him) was five years her senior and, as a dashing soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, fulfilled her romantic ideals perfectly. With the help of intermediaries, she made contact with Leopold and found him amenable. Her father was a good deal less keen, however, and it took months of earnest persuasions before he agreed to invite the prince to Britain.

In February 1816, the prince regent hosted a dinner for Leopold and his daughter at Brighton, after which a rapturous Charlotte enthused: “I find him [Leopold] charming, and go to bed happier than I have ever done yet in my life... I am certainly a very fortunate creature, & have to bless God. A Princess never, I believe, set out in life (or married) with such prospects of happiness, real domes- tic ones like other people.” The prince regent was no less impressed and told his daughter that her suitor “had every qualification to make a woman happy”.

The couple’s engagement was announced to great rejoicing in the House of Commons on 14 March 1816. Enormous crowds gathered to celebrate their wedding at Carlton House on 2 May that year. They were dazzled by the sight of Princess Charlotte’s sumptuous wedding dress, made from cloth of silver and costing £10,000 (the gown still survives today and is part of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Hampton Court Palace). The only mishap during the ceremony occurred when Charlotte was heard to giggle at her impoverished groom’s promise to endow her with all his worldly goods.

Princess Charlotte was delighted with her new husband, whom she declared to be “the perfection of a lover”. Leopold was equally besotted. “Except when I went out to shoot, we were together always,” he recalled, “and we could be together, we did not tire.” The prince proved a steadying influence on his young wife, and when she became too excited he would quietly urge: “Doucement, chérie” (“Gently, my love”). The Coburgs, as they were known, became a popular fixture on the London social scene. Their public appearances prompted wild applause and the singing of ‘God Save the King’.

Public interest in the couple reached fever pitch when Charlotte’s pregnancy was announced in April 1817. Although she had suffered an earlier miscarriage, Leopold told his father-in-law that this time there was every hope that she would carry the baby to full term. Economists predicted that the birth of a princess would raise the stock market by 2.5 per cent and a prince by 6 per cent.

Calamitous labour

The baby was due on 19 October, but it was not until 3 November that Charlotte’s labour pains began. Sir Richard Croft superintended the birth. He encouraged her to exercise but would not let her eat. Two days later, the princess had still not given birth and fears were expressed that she would not be able to do so naturally. An obstetrician was sent for, but Croft refused to allow him entry; neither did he consent to the use of forceps – both of which had tragic repercussions.

Finally, at nine o’clock on the evening of 5 November, 50 hours after her labour had begun, Charlotte gave birth to a large stillborn boy. Efforts to resuscitate him were in vain. The exhausted princess received the news calmly, stating that it was the will of God. Her distraught husband, who had been in attendance throughout, took an opiate and collapsed into bed.

But soon after midnight, Charlotte began complaining of pains in her abdomen and vomited violently. By the time Croft arrived, he found his patient bleeding heavily and cold to the touch, her breathing laboured. Before her husband Leopold could be roused from his sleep, the princess was dead.

• Read more | A brief history of royal mothers and childbirth

“Two generations gone... in a moment!” lamented Charlotte’s grief-stricken widower. “My Charlotte is gone from the country – it has lost her.” His devastation was mirrored by people at all levels of society. Never before in the history of the British monarchy had there been such heartfelt and widespread mourning for the death of one of its members. “It really was as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child,” reflected the statesman Henry Brougham.

The entire kingdom went into deep mourning for several weeks. Linen drapers ran out of black cloth, and even the homeless went about wearing black armbands. Eventually, the makers of ribbons and other fancy goods (which could not be worn during the period of mourning) petitioned the government to shorten the period, fearing they would go out of business. It was as if normal life had suddenly ground to a halt. Every shop in Britain closed its doors for two weeks, as did the Royal Exchange, the Law Courts and the docks. Even the gambling dens were closed on the day of Charlotte’s funeral. The prince regent was so prostrate with grief that he was unable to attend.

While the public continued to mourn their beloved princess, Charlotte’s death sparked a competition among George III’s younger sons to produce an heir. Thus far, none of them had shown much inclination to marry, preferring the company of their mistresses. Quickest off the mark was the king’s fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent, who wed a German princess, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, in May 1818, when he was 50 years old. A year later, she gave birth to a princess at Kensington Palace: the future Queen Victoria. As she grew to maturity, Princess Victoria enjoyed as much popularity as Charlotte had in her heyday, and by the time she became queen in 1837, memories of her tragic cousin had all but faded from public memory. It seems that in the story of the Hanoverian monarchy, there was only room for one heroine.

This content first appeared in the December 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Lauren Good <![CDATA[The Crown S5 E10 real history: the HMY Britannia's final voyage, and a political landslide]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-crown-s5-episode-ten-real-history-britannia-john-major-tony-blair/ 2022-11-11T10:55:11.000Z 2022-11-11T10:55:11.000Z The sound of birds chirping swells as episode ten begins, and we find ourselves with Dodi Al-Fayed (played by Khalid Abdalla) in Malibu, attempting to convince his father, businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Dau), to provide a deposit for a new house.

Soon, we cut to Diana sitting in her living room (Elizabeth Debicki), as she repeatedly votes ‘no’ to a television programme questioning whether the monarchy should continue.

• Previous episode | The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana

The theme of this episode of The Crown seems to be change – both current and on the horizon. But how much truth is behind this narrative on our screens?

John Major’s landslide defeat

“My party has suffered its worst defeat in memory,” John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) says to Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) in The Crown.

In reality, the Labour party, led by Tony Blair, had roughly four million more votes than the Conservatives, in the 1997 general election.

This was largely due to the schisms and scandals within government at the time. Richard Toye told HistoryExtra that in the “chaos of 16 September 1992 – ‘Black Wednesday’ – Major’s government was compelled to announce that it was withdrawing from the system. The economy recovered; the Conservative’s reputation for economic competence did not.”

“Equally damaging for the Tories,” Toye continues, “was their division over the issue of Europe. At the time, the Maastricht Treaty, the foundational document of the European Union, signed in February 1992, looked like a negotiating triumph, as Britain secured important opt-outs on monetary and social policy. Still, a group of Conservative backbenchers, known as the Maastricht Rebels, could not be reconciled to any form of further European integration. They fought a bitter battle in the House of Commons against Major’s government, in which can be seen many of the origins of Brexit.”

These issues became so prevailing that, two years before the election, in 1995, the Conservative party was so divided that Major felt compelled to resign as prime minister to face a leadership challenge. Despite him being re-elected as prime minister, these rifts remained deep, and seemed to foreshadow the loss the party would experience in 1997, after 18 years of governing.

What was the nature of the relationship between Tony Blair and the royal family?

The real relationship Blair had with the royal family seems to have been rockier than the one they had with Major. It got off to a bad start when, during his formal visit in May 1997 to form a new government at Buckingham Palace, the Queen reminded Blair that “Winston Churchill was the first prime minister she dealt with, and that was before I was born. So I got a sense of my relative seniority, or lack of it.” The queen apparently declined his invitation to call him ‘Tony’.

And their relationship continued to be unsteady, with the Blairs’ dismissal of royal traditions. The prime minister’s wife, Cherie, refused to curtsey, and the couple also disliked visiting Balmoral – the Queen’s favourite holiday destination.

• Read more | Elizabeth II and her prime ministers

The Telegraph noted in 2007 that whilst the Queen loved “the countryside, country sports, horses and dogs”, while the prime minister opted for “city life, holidays in Barbados, tennis and football”.

Did Diana take Princes William and Harry on holiday with Mohammed Al-Fayed and his wife?

The Crown depicts Mohamed Al-Fayed inviting Diana on a holiday. This holiday did happen, in July 1997. Diana stayed on the Al-Fayeds’ new luxury yacht, the Jonkial, in Saint Tropez. She also stayed in the family’s 30-bedroom estate Castle St Therese, with her sons William and Harry.

Photographers camped along the French Riviera for days in a bid to catch photos of Diana and Dodi together, following rumours of their romance.

A timeline of Charles and Camilla’s relationship in the ’90s

Elsewhere on screen, Charles and Camilla begin to test their new freedom following Charles’s divorce in this episode, but what happened between them at this time? November 1992: An intimate transcript of a 1989 phone call between the two is released to the public, inducing the scandal of “Camillagate” December 1992: Charles and Diana formally separate, raising questions about Charles’s future relationships June 1994: Charles publicly admits to having an affair with Camilla during his marriage to Diana, in an interview with Jonathan Dimblebey January 1995: Camilla files for divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles August 1996: Charles and Diana finalise their divorce July 1997: Charles throws a lavish 50th birthday party for Camilla at Highgrove August 1997: Diana dies in a tragic car crash January 1999: Camilla and Charles are publicly photographed together as a couple, for the first time

Who was Dodi Al-Fayed’s girlfriend, Kelly Fisher, and were they engaged before he met Diana?

Kelly Fisher (played by Erin Richards in The Crown) was an American model, and she was engaged to Dodi Fayed.

The two had bought a house in Malibu, as covered in the series, where they planned to live after their marriage. The two were in Paris on 14 July 1997, when Dodi was summoned by his father to join himself, his wife, Diana, and Princes William and Harry, on a holiday in Saint Tropez.

It was there, on a luxury yacht, where Dodi and Diana’s romance began. This was to be cut tragically short on 31 August 1997, when both sustained fatal injuries in a car crash in Paris.

Was the HMY Britannia decommissioned under Tony Blair’s government?

Throughout this most recent series of The Crown, we watch as the Queen battles for government funding to refurbish the HMY Britannia and resultantly continue its use.

And it is not difficult to see why – the Britannia travelled over one million nautical miles with Her Majesty and, as said in our history of royal yachts, was the only royal home in which the Queen felt able to “truly relax”.

However, Tony Blair did decide to decommission the royal yacht, as “the costs were too great” to refurbish her. 1994 saw the announcement that the Britannia would be retired. The Crown depicts a conversation between Blair and the Queen, as he offers the use of a privately-owned yacht for the family to use instead. Whilst it cannot be confirmed whether this offer was made, there were plans discussed for a replacement which were eventually abandoned.

The Britannia’s final foreign voyage was to Hong Kong in July 1997, and it served as a base for Prince Charles once he arrived there. He was, as portrayed in the series, visiting to represent the Queen in the week before the territory of Hong Kong was handed back to China.

• Read more | Royal historian Tracy Borman on the real events behind The Crown season 5

Also, in The Crown, we see Charles’s dismay at being seated in business class, whilst politicians and other attendants are in first. This was the case in reality, with his diary entry from the time reading: "It took me some time to realise that this was not first class(!) although it puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable." According to the BBC, he then discovered dignitaries, including Edward Heath, Douglas Hurd, "the new Foreign Secretary Robin Cook", and Paddy Ashdown, were all "in First Class immediately below us. Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.”

In this episode of The Crown, Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) shares his regret with Charles (Dominic West) at his decommissioning of the Britannia, once stepping inside and seeing its beauty up close, which mirrors his feelings in reality. A report, written by royal correspondent Robert Harman, said: “What the royal family may find particularly intriguing – and infuriating – 14 years later, is that Tony Blair now deeply regrets his part in it.”

So, as series five comes to a close, we watch the Queen say goodbye to the Britannia. It was in 1997 that she said this farewell, photographed as she “walked off her deck for the last time, shedding a tear at the yacht’s fate.”

And there is a feeling in the final moments of The Crown series five, of an underlying metaphor – the forced movement of the monarchy into modernity – for which the events of the ’90s seem to have been the ultimate catalyst.

]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[The Crown S5 E8 real history: Diana’s Panorama interview causes fireworks]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-crown-s5-e8-real-history-diana-panorama-interview-what-happened/ 2022-11-10T18:01:41.000Z 2022-11-10T17:57:37.000Z “The Crown’s carefully precise recreation of the notorious Panorama interview with Princess Diana (a startlingly convincing performance from Elizabeth Debicki) has to be seen in view of Prince William’s expressed hope it would never again be watched,” writes Sarah Gristwood for HistoryExtra.

Nevertheless, recreate it The Crown does, and it is the main focus of episode eight. In episode seven we saw how, through various means that have since been proven fraudulent, journalist Martin Bashir had convinced Diana to tell her side of the story.

We open this episode in a room full of men in grey suits, a BBC board of governors meeting, a low hush burbling around the room. That is, before ‘Duke’ Hussey (played by Richard Cordery) strides in to accost the current Director General of the Beeb, John Birt (Nicholas Gleaves).  He was a veteran of WW2, turned newspaper manager, and as shown in the drama, his wife was a senior lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. Birt, a Liverpudlian raised in post-war Britain, was Director General of the BBC from 1992–2000, and had been tasked with pushing ‘Auntie’ into the digital era.

• Previous episode | The Crown S5 E7 real history: the introduction of Martin Bashir, and a royal education

As we’ve seen over the course of the first seven episodes, the 1990s saw the Crown as an institution considering its role and relevance in Britain – and it seems that the era had a similar effect on the BBC. The Crown tells this story by juxta-positioning Hussey, and his regard for the BBC’s Reithian principles of education, against John Birt’s zeal for modernity.

The issue that brings them into direct confrontation in this episode is the Beeb’s representation of the royal family. The Queen, who is portrayed as regarding the BBC as fondly as Hussey regards the royals, suggests that upgrading her television to receive satellite channels would be “like me becoming a catholic.” On the set plays an episode of David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, which had been a jewel in the BBC’s crown for more than a decade. At that time she has (as Hussey informs us in the episode) granted the BBC a new royal charter, a formal grant issued by the monarch that sets out the arrangements for the governance of the corporation.

Meanwhile, in another scene, we learn from on-screen Martin Bashir that Diana has agreed to be interviewed, and has chosen 5 November 1995 as the date they will record. The significance of her choice, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, is not lost on anyone. Many parallels are made in this episode between Diana’s ‘explosive’ act, and the traitors who plotted to blow up king and government in 1605. At one point, a password given at a Brighton hotel is ‘Catesby’, a reference to the lead plotter; while Bashir draws on the plotters’ hesitation to calm some last-minute nerves shown by Diana. “They were unsuccessful,” the Princess replies. “They were hung, drawn and quartered.”

Elsewhere, Prince William and Princess Diana’s relationship continues to be tested as Diana suggests their phone calls may be bugged. In 2021, in response to an independent inquiry into the Panorama interview, William shared a brief insight into his memories of the situation, saying that the deceit had “contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.”

What preparation was made for Diana’s Panorama interview?

“Do you think she’ll be critical of the monarchy?” John Birt asks in the episode, weighing up the ethics of allowing Diana such a platform. “Critical of Charles at least,” replies Steve Hewlett, who was the editor of Panorama. “She’s doing it with us because she feels safe, understood and protected,” Bashir adds, another ironic nod from the show towards Bashir’s methods. (In 2021, the real Birt called Bashir “a serial liar on an industrial scale”.) Ultimately Birt decides to quietly approve the interview; former BBC governor Sir Richard Eyre has since cited Birt’s desire to get the BBC’s news department “ on the front foot” as a contributing factor.

The cloak-and-dagger operation to get Bashir and crew into Kensington Palace was real; the 2021 independent inquiry revealed how they were disguised as tradesmen to gain access to Diana’s apartments.

• Read more | Free-spirited drama or fake news? How The Crown morphed from ‘safe’ territory to controversy

Did Diana and the Queen have a meeting before the interview was aired?

The palace didn’t know about the transmission of the interview until six days before it happened. When the news broke, recalled Dickie Arbiter, then an assistant palace press secretary, “everybody looked at each other and said: ‘Martin who?’”

As for how much Elizabeth II was aware, before anyone else: “I'm not aware of any conversation like they posit between the Queen and Princess Diana,” says historian Sarah Gristwood. “I don't know what level of knowledge the queen or indeed the palace had of what was coming.”

“Certainly, I think what is true is that there was a very strong reaction against the Panorama interview and effectively against Diana, afterwards. There was a sense that a line had been crossed. I believe that view came strongly from Princess Margaret and Prince Philip; the Queen, as ever, was less vocal.

“We know that Prince Philip had in many ways been in the early stages sympathetic and supportive to Princess Diana,” says Gristwood. “But I think the royal establishment could only have felt that way about the interview – especially the moment where Diana said she wasn’t sure if Charles was the man for the top job – that this was utterly beyond the pale. That this was seeming (which actually Princess Diana didn't do) to be menacing the monarchy itself.”

The Crown’s supposition of what might have happened behind closed royal doors has the Queen telling Diana: “The enemy you think I am, the hostility you imagine we all feel, is a figment of your imagination.” At this moment, regret seems to flicker in Diana’s face.

Did Diana regret giving the interview? Journalist and biographer Tina Brown heard otherwise from Gulu Lalvani, an entrepreneur who briefly dated Diana in 1997. “I am told by Lalvani,” writes Brown, “that Diana said she had no regrets about the interview and made clear that she had said exactly what she wanted to say on camera.”

The Princess realised, says Brown, that it had served her purpose “to frame herself to the British public as a betrayed woman before the increasingly inevitable divorce from Charles.”

What did Diana say in her Panorama interview?

On 20 November 1995 (not, as the episode depicts, on Charles’s birthday, which is on 14 November – but it did clash with the recording of the 1995 Royal Variety Show, at which the Queen was present for Carol Kenyon’s rendition of 'One Night Only'), Bashir's exclusive, 54-minute-long interview with Diana was broadcast. During the interview, she admitted to an adulterous affair and spoke about Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, now Duchess of Cornwall – uttering the famous phrase: "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She also talked frankly about her difficulties with post-natal depression and bulimia.

As portrayed in the drama, the most controversial element for the royals was Diana’s response to the question of whether Charles would be king, to which she replied: “Being Prince of Wales produces more freedom now, and being king would be a little bit more suffocating. And because I know the character, I would think that the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don't know whether he could adapt to that.”

And change opinion it did. “Public opinion drew pretty strongly behind the princess, as I remember it,” explains Gristwood. “After Prince Charles’s [1994] interview with Jonathan Dimbleby there were mixed opinions. The public by and large did seem to feel somewhat supportive of him, despite the admission of infidelity. I think with Diana’s interview, there was a very strong feeling – rightly or wrongly – that Diana was the victim of this marriage, that she had gone into it expecting a marriage of love. And, possibly unfairly, there was a feeling that Charles was much older, more experienced, and should have known what he was doing. I do feel that at the time, the Panorama interview did the job the princess wanted it to.”

The explosive interview was watched by nearly 23 million people in the UK, and as the montage towards the end of the episode shows, made headlines around the world.

“The interview was a genuine bombshell moment,” Dr Ed Owens told HistoryExtra. “Of course, the infidelity that had defined the Waleses’ unhappy marriage was public knowledge by this point (it had been since 1992). The princess’s accusation were all the more powerful because this was the first time she spoke publicly and, of course, she did so very movingly.”

“There was a great sense of public support for Diana following the interview, with more than 80% of respondents to a special phone-in poll reporting that they took Diana’s side in the ‘war’,” adds Owens. “It was in this moment that public discussion around whether the succession after Elizabeth II might skip a generation really got going. However, it is interesting that while Prince Charles’s poll ratings slumped, those of the queen herself remained resilient – perhaps because she continued to embody the family values of an older generation at a time when younger royals were seen misbehaving so spectacularly.”

What happened in the BBC after the Panorama interview?

The resignation that Lord Hussey offered the Queen in this episode is also real. ‘Duke’ retired as chairman 1996, a contributing factor reportedly that Birt failed to inform him of the contents of the Panorama interview.

Martin Bashir went on to win a Bafta TV award and the Royal Television Society's title of journalist of the year, with later career milestones including an interview with pop star Michael Jackson. He stepped down from his position as the BBC’s religion editor in May 2021, citing ongoing health issues as the reason for his departure. His resignation from the BBC coincided with an investigation into his Panorama interview with Diana.

The BBC has since made an "unconditional apology" over the way it obtained the interview, with John Birt calling Bashir’s deceit “one of the biggest crimes in the history of broadcasting”.

• Read next | The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana

]]> Rhiannon Davies <![CDATA[The Crown S5 E5 real history: ‘Camillagate’ tapes and a “war council” for the monarchy’s survival]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-crown-s5-episode-five-real-history-camillagate-tapes-way-ahead-group/ 2023-11-09T11:24:39.000Z 2022-11-10T13:52:30.000Z This episode opens with a dejected Charles (played by Dominic West) reflecting on his position as the Prince of Wales, declaring: “I’m just a useless ornament stuck in a waiting room, gathering dust.”

The theme of his growing dissatisfaction with his long stint as heir runs throughout the episode, as he repeatedly maligns what he perceives to be the monarchy’s paltry attempts to modernise itself. As the on-screen Charles tells Camilla that “allowing the public into the royal box at Albert Hall from time to time” isn’t going to cut it.

• Previous episode | The Crown S5 E4 real history: the Queen’s “annus horribilis” and Princess Margaret’s relationship with Peter Townsend

What was the Way Ahead Group?

In this episode, The Crown shows this idea being mooted at a meeting of the newly formed Way Ahead Group. Described by the Lord Chamberlain as an “informal council of war”, this group of senior royals and officials that was formed in the 1990s aimed to chart a new path for the monarchy, so it can survive “in a rapidly changing world”.

But in the drama, Charles is unimpressed by the suggestions put on the table, railing against his fellow attendees – including his mother, the Queen (Imelda Staunton) – as he thunders: “We should be thinking of something much more radical… I say why not abolish the Civil List [a yearly sum paid by Parliament, to cover the royal family’s working expenses] altogether? Have the monarchy fund itself?”

• Read more | Royal historian Tracy Borman on the real events behind The Crown season 5

In reality, the Way Ahead Group did agree to some more radical reforms. According to the Financial Times, the Civil List was slashed so it only provided for the Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother – the Queen agreed to fund the other royals’ working expenses herself. The royal family also chose to cover the costs of restoring the fire-damaged Windsor Castle themselves (as covered in our guide for episode four) rather than asking taxpayers to step in.

Charles’ rival court?

Later in the episode, Charles goes as far as to set up a “rival court”, having cited it as a tradition dating back to the 18th-century. Afterwards, Princess Anne relays this to a shocked group including the Queen: “Charles has been slowly but surely setting up his own court at St James’s,” she says, “his own Camelot.”  Historian and royal commentator Dr Ed Owens told HistoryExtra: “The court set up by Charles at St James’s palace was not so much designed to rival that at Buckingham Palace but instead to give the Prince of Wales greater freedom in terms of running his everyday activities.”  He continued: “Charles had carved out a new, independent role for himself as Prince of Wales and this was essentially his way of assembling a team of trusted advisors who could help him carry out his work, free from the oversight of Buckingham Palace.”

Likewise, The Crown’s portrayal of a Charles who was chafing at the bit to become king doesn’t reflect the nuances of the situation. Although in 2004 Charles himself apparently revealed “nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales”, he also said, according to this 2018 BBC article, that: “It’s vital to remember there’s only room for one sovereign at a time, not two.”

Royal biographer Penny Junor has also weighed in on his feelings surrounding the ascension. When discussing Charles’ attitude to ascending the throne at the start of 2022, she said: “This is a moment that he has been dreading all his life really, because his achieving the top job – the job he’s been training for and preparing for all these years – does inevitably mean the death of his mother, and he loves his mother very dearly.”

As part of his earlier preparation for becoming king, Charles threw himself into charity efforts, supporting more than 400 organisations. The Crown focuses particularly on his work with The Prince’s Trust, as we see him deliver a rousing speech to an audience of young people, telling them that “I want to reach those that are being overlooked, rejected; to make sure that you’re being given a chance.” The prince seems to relish his involvement, even good-naturedly being pulled in to a breakdance circle at the end of the episode.

According to The Prince’s Trust website, Charles set up the charity in 1976 (following on the heels of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award which Prince Philip had launched in 1956), to help young people overcome their disadvantages. Over the decades, the trust has continued to grow, forming high-profile partnerships with groups like the Premier League, and by 2020 it had helped one million young people.

What happened in the Camillagate tapes?

Aside from Charles’ gripes over his position as heir, his relationships also dominate the episode. Although still married to Diana, their relationship has broken down, and Charles is embroiled in a relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles (who is married to Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles).

The episode chooses to depict how one late-night phone conversation between the pair is recorded by an amateur radio enthusiast, who stumbles across their call by chance. The conversation quickly turns from one of Charles’ upcoming speeches to more intimate topics, with the prince admitting: “God, I wish I could just live inside your trousers or something”. When Camilla asks, “What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?” Charles replies: “Or, God forbid, a Tampax – just my luck.”

• Read more | Charles and Camilla: a history of their romance

The steamy conversation is sold to The Daily Mirror. In The Crown’s portrayal the editor refuses to run it immediately, due to the fear of “being responsible for breaking up a royal marriage”, so the tapes are put on ice. That is, however, until Diana and Charles announce their formal separation three years later, when the papers view the tapes as fair game.

We then see the royal family’s horrified reaction to the scandal play out on screen, with Philip coming down particularly hard on Charles – in the episode, he berates him in front of his family, telling his son how “ashamed” he is.

While the content of the tapes might seem like The Crown’s creators have taken some artistic license, the audio is lifted almost word-for-word from the real-life transcript (although we see a shortened version of the conversation play out on our screens). When the tapes were published in People in 1993, they did cause widespread uproar.

Ed Owens told HistoryExtra: “A large section of the British population seem to have been interested in what was simply the latest instalment of ‘royal sleaze’ (there were several such royal sex scandals in the early 1990s). Thousands more readers than usual purchased the Sunday newspaper The People in order to get their hands on a copy of the full transcript of the conversation.”

In terms of how the Queen and Philip felt about the tapes, Owens says: “Little is known about how Elizabeth II and Prince Philip reacted to the Camillagate tapes. But one can speculate that the Queen would have been horrified that such a lewd, private conversation had been made public.”

Was Charles interviewed by Jonathan Dimbleby?

The Crown depicts Charles, still reeling from the fallout of the tapes, being persuaded by some of his advisors to reveal a different side of himself to the nation. They suggest he takes part in a TV special, where he would be interviewed by Jonathan Dimbleby. “There is an element of risk,” Charles’ private secretary Richard Aylard tells him, “as the interview was bound to touch on his marriage, but there’s a far greater prospect of reward.”

As The Crown shows, Charles was indeed interviewed by Dimbleby in a TV special, Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role, which aired in June 1994. As Sarah Gristwood told HistoryExtra, during the two-and-a-half hour special Charles “admitted infidelity and revealed both a lack of sympathy for Diana… and a worrying distance from his family”.

• Read more | Free-spirited drama or fake news? How The Crown morphed from 'safe' territory to controversy

In the interview he also positioned himself as defender of ‘faith’ in a more abstract sense, rather than solely as the defender of the Church of England. At the time, this latter comment was criticised by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

When did Diana wear her revenge dress?

In the episode, it’s implied that Diana steps out in her iconic ‘revenge dress’ after watching Charles’ interview. In reality, Diana wore the dress on the same night that the interview aired, 29 June 1994. She was attending an event at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and the revealing asymmetrical black dress soon made its way into the headlines.

Owens told HistoryExtra: “Some voices in the British press celebrated Diana’s ‘revenge dress’ as an act of defiance on her part, challenging her husband’s admission of infidelity through a powerful statement of female sexuality. Of course, by wearing the dress she was also challenging Charles for space on the front pages of the newspapers the morning after his famous interview with Jonathan Dimbleby was aired.” The so-called ‘War of the Waleses’ had truly begun.

• Next episode | The Crown S5 E6 real history: the Romanovs’ murder, and Philip’s “spiritual companionship”

]]> Lauren Good <![CDATA[The Crown S5 E9 real history: the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-crown-s5-episode-nine-real-history-the-divorce-settlement-between-charles-and-diana/ 2022-11-10T09:21:14.000Z 2022-11-10T09:20:32.000Z “A termination of your marriage is not only inevitable, but preferable,” Queen Elizabeth’s letters advise Charles and Diana in this episode of The Crown. Following the much-publicised dispute between the couple, the only conceivable route left is their separation.

We follow the rocky journey towards their securing of a divorce settlement, with John Major (played by Jonny Lee Miller) extending his ministerial role to royal mediator. But what truly happened in these final moments of the couple’s separation?

Did the Queen write letters to Charles and Diana, instructing that they must divorce?

Queen Elizabeth did write a letter to her daughter-in-law. “I have consulted with the Archbishop of Canterbury and with the prime minister,” she wrote, as said in The Royal Observer. “And, of course, with Charles, and we have decided that the best course for you is divorce.”

The Queen was given approval for this request by both prime minister John Major and George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“There comes a time, sad and painful as it is, that a marriage has to be recognised as dead, and after the shenanigans and tantrums of the past few weeks, it has been very publicly obvious that it does seem to have died,” the Archdeacon of York, George Austin, told BBC television at the time.

It was just days after the Queen’s letters were sent, on 21 December 1995, that Buckingham Palace announced the separation: “After considering the present situation,” it said, “the Queen wrote to both the prince and princess earlier this week and gave them their view, supported by the Duke of Edinburgh, that an early divorce is desirable.”

What did the divorce settlement between Charles and Diana entail?

The agreement specified that the couple would share custody of Prince William and Prince Harry. Due to Diana not being an official member of the royal family, she was made to relinquish her title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ but was allowed to keep the title ‘Princess of Wales’.

A timeline of Charles’s and Diana’s Divorce

1986: Charles and Diana both have extramarital affairs – Charles with Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana with Captain James Hewitt 1987–92: The couple suffer rumours of marital trouble. In 1987, Diana’s decision to not join the family’s annual trip to Balmoral leads to headlines suggesting a “royal break” between the couple. May 1992: Andrew Morton publishes Diana: Her True Story, which shares details of the couple’s collapsed marriage. The story behind the two’s communication features in episode two of The Crown. December 1992: John Major announces Charles’s and Diana’s separation to the House of Commons. November 1995: Diana sits down for an interview with BBC journalist Martin Bashir, on Panorama, which 23 million people tune in to watch. This is covered in episode eight of The Crown. August 1996: Charles and Diana officially divorce.

Diana would also retain full access to the royal family’s private jets and her apartments at Kensington Palace. She was also able to use the state apartments at St James’s Palace for entertaining, and keep the jewellery she had gained during her marriage to Charles.

The financial settlement between the couple has never been confirmed, but Diana is believed to have been given a lump sum of £17m and an annual stipend of £400,000.

Did John Major play a mediatory role in the divorce proceedings?

Richard Toye told HistoryExtra that John Major “met separately with the Queen, Charles, and Diana, to discuss the issue before the couple’s divorce in 1996. Major’s biographer, Anthony Sheldon, later revealed that Diana sent the prime minister several appreciative letters.”

Apart from this, there is little information regarding John Major’s role in the divorce proceedings between Charles and Diana. He remains unrevealing over the conversations that did take place between him and the monarchy at the time; on 15 October 2022, his spokesperson said that “discussions between the monarch and prime minster are entirely private and – for Sir John – will always remain so.”

Was John Major close with the Queen?

“You are the rarest of things,” the Queen tells John Major in The Crown, “someone that is easy to like and trust.”

Whilst these words are a fictional supposition, it is said that the two did share a close relationship due to Major supporting the Queen through her ‘annus horribilis’ in 1992, along with the other scandals she faced during the 1990s.

• Read more | Philip Murphy on The Crown: “If scholars can’t write accurate histories of the Queen’s reign, drama is what we’ll continue to rely on”

Another sign of his closeness to the royal family was the appointing of Major as William and Harry’s special guardian following the death of their mother, Diana. He was also the only ex-prime minister invited to Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in 2018.

Was Mark Bolland hired by Camilla and Charles to repair their image?

Mark Bolland, a British public relations executive, served as Deputy Private Secretary to Charles between 1997 and 2002. He is seen as a key figure in the rehabilitation of Charles’s relationship with Camilla, following Charles’s divorce with Diana and other scandals – including their intercepted call that included a conversation depicted in episode five. Bolland has sometimes been labelled by publications, including The Telegraph, as the royal family’s first ‘spin doctor’, which is the title Camilla (Olivia Williams) uses for him in The Crown.

• Read more | Royal historian Tracy Borman on the real events behind The Crown season 5

Bolland was the brains behind much of Charles’s and Camilla’s press coverage as the royals approached the new millennium. In 2000, the Queen met Camilla at Highgrove during a 60th birthday party for Constantine II of Greece. Bolland ensured this was as high-profile as it could have been. Journalist and biographer Tina Brown wrote in her 2022 book, The Palace Papers, that Bolland was a “strong ally of Camilla”.

However, his techniques to secure the couple public favour were not short of controversy. Bolland was later accused by former palace press officer Dicky Arbiter spinning against other members of the royal family, to make Camilla look good in comparison. He left the post in February 2002 and set up his own agency.

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