How Much of “The Crown” Season 5 Actually Happened?

A constant theme of the season’s premiere episode, “Queen Victoria Syndrome,” is the conflicting views of sovereign leadership between Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles. In the episode, Prince Charles gets a stroke of confidence after a Sunday Times poll reveals that a majority of citizens view the Queen as out of touch with the modern world and archaic in values, thus putting pressure on her to abdicate the throne. The Prince, always strong in his opinions about modernizing the monarchy, is shown to welcome the idea of the Queen’s abdication, so much so that he has a conversation with Prime Minister John Major to discuss the public’s swaying opinions, but did this really happen?

Not exactly. Patrick Jephson, Princess Diana’s former press secretary, wrote in The Telegraph that the Prince did have a conversation, but not with Major. “We later see Charles discussing the poll and possible regency with the prime minister. This is not strictly accurate: the discussion was actually held with a previous prime minister,” Jephson explained.

Meanwhile, one-half of the alleged conversation, former PM John Major, called the depiction “a barrel-load of nonsense” and, in a statement issued to CNN, said, “There was never any discussion between Sir John and the then Prince of Wales about any possible abdication of the late Queen Elizabeth II – nor was such an improbable and improper subject ever raised by the then Prince of Wales (or Sir John).”

Throughout season five, Prince Phillip is often seen with Penny Knatchbull, the wife of his godson and nephew, Norton Knatchbull, but how much of their onscreen relationship is real? Turns out, just about all of it. While “The Crown” at points suggests there may have been some kind of spark between the two, there was no such thing in real life. Prince Philip and Penny were simply very close friends over the years.

When Penny’s daughter Lenora died of kidney cancer in 1991, Prince Philip was “a tremendous support during a time of unimaginable grief,” according to one source via The Sun. Immediately after the death of Lenora, the Prince showed Penny how to drive carriages, which even led to her competing in a number of driving competitions with him. Outside of bonding over the sport, Penny and Prince Philip worked together on The Leonora Children’s Cancer Fund, which the Knatchbulls established in 1994, as reported by Harper’s Bazaar.

Their friendship lasted nearly 30 years until the Prince’s death in 2021. Penny was one of the select 30 guests in attendance at his funeral service.

In episode four, titled, “Annus Horribilis,” the Queen and Prince Andrew have a candid conversation surrounding his marriage to Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and a rather risqué set of photos including her and American financial adviser John Bryan. This event did actually happen, and it was a pivotal moment in Queen Elizabeth’s “Annus Horribilis” year of 1992.

According to The Washington Post, Ferguson, who was separated from Prince Andrew at the time, was vacationing with Bryan in Saint Tropez in August 1992, when The Daily Mirror‘s photographers photographed the Duchess topless as she was being intimate with Bryan. Some photographs showed Bryan kissing her toes and foot, leading to a frenzy in the media and even more criticism of the already vulnerable monarchy.

Episode six of the season, “The Way Ahead,” depicts a scandal involving Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles that rocked the royal family: Tampongate. While it seems as if something that cringe-worthy had to be made up for TV, it actually did happen.

In January 1993, a transcript of Charles and Camilla’s phone calls was released to the public, which consisted of the two having an intimate conversation in 1989 while Parker Bowles was at home and the Prince was at a friend’s house in the country, as reported by The LA Times. During the call, the secret lovers trade sweet nothings, but things eventually take a crude turn when Prince Charles says (via Entertainment Tonight), “I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!” Parker Bowles responds, “Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers,” to which Charles exclaims, “Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck!”

Besides causing scandal in royal circles (both Charles and Camilla were married to other people at the time), the leaked phone call led to Camilla’s divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles, as reported by The Mirror.

The love story between Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend dominated season two of “The Crown,” but came to an abrupt end when the two were forbidden to marry. Eventually, the former lovers started families of their own, and their once passionate love became something of the past, until the “Annus Horribilis” episode. When a 60-something Princess Margaret does a radio show, Townsend writes to her in hopes of reuniting after over 30 years apart, but were they ever able to reunite in real life?

According to Vanity Fair, the Princess and Townsend had lunch together at Kensington Palace in the summer of 1992. The two allegedly kept to themselves while others at the lunch gathering socialized together, and when it came time for Townsend to leave, a tearful Princess Margaret waved him goodbye. Lady Glenconner, a friend of the Princess, later recalled her interaction with Princess Margaret in the 2018 Channel 5 documentary, titled, “Elizabeth: Our Queen,” saying (via The Independent), “She said ‘charming, he hadn’t changed at all.’ I looked out the window and saw him getting out of the car, he was an old man. Yet, in her eyes, he hadn’t changed. I thought that was very touching.”

Outside of the domestic scandals that rocked the royals during the 1990s, “The Crown” also highlights a number of important events like the Queen and Prince Philip’s trip to Russia in 1994, as well as the history of the Romanovs’ relationship with the royal family. The episode “Ipatiev House” gives viewers a brief backstory of how King George V, a cousin of Czar Nicholas II, did not grant either him or the entire Romanov family asylum after he was overthrown during the Russian Revolution in 1917, per Vogue. The family was brutally executed in Ipatiev House on July 17, 1918, and their remains were burned, leaving little behind.

By 1991, several unidentified bodies were discovered in Ekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were murdered. At the time, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had the bodies exhumed, and Prince Philip did, in fact, provide a DNA sample to help identify some of the Romanov family members, as he shared ancestry with the Romanovs through Queen Victoria. “Prince Philip contributed a blood sample, and his DNA was compared to that of the remains and of other family members. This allowed researchers to confirm virtually beyond a doubt that the bodies were indeed those of the murdered Romanovs,” My Heritage notes.

Episode three, “Mou Mou,” dives into the rise of businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, known for owning The Ritz Hotel and Harrods, and for restoring the Windsor Villa in the 1980s. But another important storyline parallels Fayed’s journey. Sydney Johnson, a treasured royal staff member who worked for the Duke of Windsor for over 30 years, is seen in the episode working as a waiter at the Ritz when Al-Fayed lets him go, only to have him work alongside him to teach him everything about British etiquette and culture.

In real life, Al-Fayed did hire Johnson as his personal butler, but the two grew closer when the businessman took over the duke’s Bois de Boulogne mansion after the duchess, Wallis Simpson, died in 1984, per People. Al-Fayed, obsessed with Britain, pledged to restore the dilapidated mansion to its original state, and Johnson, who had decades of firsthand experiences in the home, was right beside him for the job. When Johnson died in 1991, Al-Fayed told the Associated Press that he “was truly a gentlemen’s gentleman. We shall miss him very much.″

“The Crown” depicts multiple occasions in which Princess Diana talks about the treatment she endured in the royal family. “The System” shows how The Princess secretly corresponded with author Andrew Morton to publish an unfiltered account of her experiences throughout her marriage to Prince Charles. “No Woman’s Land” and “Gunpowder” highlight the inner workings of the late Princess’s bombshell interview with the BBC in 1995, in which she revealed her struggle with an eating disorder and self-harm, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles’s affair, and the lack of support from the royal family. It was a shocking revelation that only painted the royals in a worse light than they already were at the time, but was the journey to the interview deceitful?

The journalist interviewing Princess Diana, Martin Bashir, presented fake bank documents to her brother, Earl Spencer, which he claimed “showed two senior courtiers were being paid by the security services for information on his sister,” according to The Sun. In addition, the fake statements also alluded to the other royal family members doing tell-all newspaper stories, which was not the case. Persuaded by the documents and Bashir himself, Spencer approached his sister about the interview, and she went forward with it.

Despite an investigation that concluded Bashir was “deceitful” in obtaining the interview, Princess Diana herself said that she agreed to it all on her own, writing on a note in 1995 (via The BBC), “Martin Bashir did not show me any documents, nor give me any information that I was not previously aware of. I consented to the interview on Panorama without any undue pressure and have no regrets concerning the matter.”

In “No Woman’s Land,” Princess Diana meets heart surgeon Hasnat Khan while visiting Royal Brompton Hospital to be with her friend, Oonagh Toffolo. After a few chance meetings, the two agree to see “Apollo 13” in theaters, and Princess Diana wears a dark wig and trench coat to avoid being recognized in public.

In real life, the Princess did wear different disguises at points, with Vogue UK writing, “Diana did, in fact, wear dark wigs and sunglasses when venturing out with Khan in his Chelsea neighborhood or queuing with him outside jazz clubs.” Princess Diana and Khan had a two-year relationship, from 1995 to 1997, until she started dating Dodi Fayed in the summer of 1997.