The Crown first landed on Netflix in 2016, promising viewers a look behind the walls of Buckingham Palace between 1947 and 2005, covering almost six decades of the late Queen Elizabeth's reign. Created by Peter Morgan, the drama featured a star-studded cast including Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, Imelda Staunton, Matt Smith, Tobias Menzies, Dominic West, Charles Edwards, and Jonathan Pryce.
The series highlighted key royal events such as Queen Elizabeth's wedding to Prince Philip, her accession to the throne, Winston Churchill's premiership, Margaret Thatcher becoming the first female Prime Minister, King Charles' divorce from Diana, and the Princess of Wales' tragic 1997 death. Despite widespread praise and award season dominance, The Crown also contained a number of inaccuracies.
Venetia Scott and the Great Smog
In season one, viewers met Winston Churchill's new secretary, Venetia Scott, who was killed in the Great Smog. While her death pushed Churchill to address the crisis in the show, creator Peter Morgan invented the character to add emotional weight to the Great Smog of 1952.
Prince Philip's sister and the funeral scene
Prince Philip was said to be "very upset" by "shockingly malicious" scenes from The Crown, which depicted the tragic death of his sister, Princess Cecilie. The episode suggested that Philip was supposed to go to Germany in 1937 to visit his sister but was forbidden after getting into trouble at school. His sister decided to fly to the UK to see him, but her plane crashed, killing her, her husband, their two sons, an unborn baby boy, and her mother-in-law.
The season two instalment saw Philip's father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, confronting his son at the funeral and telling him: "You are the reason we are all here, burying my favourite child." After the episode aired, with no evidence that Philip had been blamed, royal biographer Hugo Vickers said the late Prince Philip had been "very upset" about the show. Vickers told MailOnline: "How disgraceful it was to turn Prince Philip into a caricature person, never doing any work in the series. The depiction was cruel and deeply unfair. The least Netflix could do was to alert viewers with a disclaimer."
The Bowes-Lyon cousins and Jackie Kennedy feud
In the season four episode The Hereditary Principle, Princess Margaret is shown discovering that her disabled cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, were locked away in a mental institution by the family. In reality, the Royal Family's concealment of the cousins was exposed earlier by a press investigation, and there is no record of Margaret visiting them. After the news broke, a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth was aware of Katherine and Nerissa but that "we have no comment about it at all. It is a matter for the Bowes-Lyon family".
The Crown also depicted a feud between Queen Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy, claiming the monarch's trip to Ghana in 1961, where she danced with President Kwame Nkrumah, was a response to an insult from Kennedy. In actuality, the trip was planned long before she met Jackie Kennedy, with her primary motivation being strategic and political. She wanted to prevent Ghana from leaving the Commonwealth and aligning with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Princess Alice's fictional interview
The Crown depicted Prince Philip's mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, speaking to The Guardian for an interview that never took place. In season three, she gives a sympathetic interview to a journalist to save the family's public image after a disastrous BBC documentary. In reality, Princess Alice was an extremely private person who never gave press or newspaper interviews during her life.
