Fourth season of ‘The Crown’: Truth verses fiction

The fourth season of "The Crown" is the most hyped in the series as it showcased the stories of the turbulent marriage between Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor) and Princess Diana (Emma Corrin) and Margaret Thatcher's (Gillian Anderson) tenure as the UK's Prime Minister.

The latest season of the series showcases ten new episodes focusing on the years 1979-1990. The time period featuring the entire premiership of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the introduction of Princess Diana, reports the Screenrant.

The Crown season 4 also depicts key historical events such as the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten (Charles Dance), the Falkland War between Great Britain and Argentina, the infamous break-in of Buckingham Palace by Michael Fagan, and the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

However, the show runners took some liberty with it and not all the incidents shown in the fourth season are historically accurate.

The assassination of Lord Mountbatten

Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma was a distinguished British naval officer and uncle (and also a father figure) to Princes Philip and Charles.

Lord Mountbatten was assassinated during his August Bank holiday in 1979.

The Crown draws reference on Mountbatten's assassination and his funeral which lead Charles to Diana, who told him she watched him give the eulogy for Dickie when they met again in 1980.

Charles and Diana's relationship

In the episode "Gold Stick" Prince Charles didn't encounter Diana dressed as Puck from "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

Charles first met Diana at a grouse hunt at Althorp, the Spencer family's home, in November 1977.

After Mountbatten's death, The Crown sets their second meeting outside Princess Anne's (Erin Doherty) horseback riding competition in 1980 when, in real life, Charles and Diana met again when they were both invited to stay at Philip de Pass's house in Sussex in November 1980.

Charles proposed to Diana in February 1981 at Windsor Castle and the future Princess of Wales did move from her flat to Clarence House where she began "princess training".

Princess Diana indeed struggled with bulimia while being married to Prince Charles.

Charles also did say "whatever love means" when he and Diana were asked if they were in love during an interview after they announced their engagement.

The tense lunch between Diana and Camilla in The Crown episode 3, "Fairytale", is fictionalised but, as the show depicts, Diana did find the bracelet Charles had made for Camilla, and Charles did wear cufflinks with "C & C" Camilla gave him on his honeymoon with Diana after their gala 29 July, 1981 wedding.

Episode 9, "Avalanche" begins in 1985 with Diana surprising Charles by performing Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" for him at the London Opera House, which really did happen and Charles really did hate it.

Margaret Thatcher and the Queen

The show's fourth season covers the rule of Margaret Thatcher from start to finish, through the lens of her relationship with the Queen (Olivia Colman).

The Crown had plenty of material to work with when it came to dramatising the relationship between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II.

Episode 2, "The Balmoral Test", showed, Margaret and Denis did travel to Balmoral Castle.

Although in real life, Denis had a better time and hit it off with the Queen Mother (Marion Bailey), Margaret hated her annual trips to Balmoral.

The Crown uses "The Balmoral Test" to draw the distinction between The Iron Lady's values, coming from a working background, with the upper class that the Windsors hail from.

Margaret was fond of her son Mark (Freddie Fox) who did go missing for six days in the Sahara Desert after the 1982 Paris-Dakar rally, as seen in episode 3, "Favourites".

In 1986, the Queen did become frustrated over Thatcher's refusal to join the Commonwealth of Nations in issuing sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa.

As in season 4's finale, "War", the Conservative Party Margaret Thatcher led turned on her after 11 years, partly because of the unpopularity of her poll tax and how it alienated the UK from the rest of Europe.

In "The Crown," the conversation between Thatcher and the Queen, positioning to dissolve parliament was indeed an imagined exchange.

Michael Fagan breaking into Buckingham Palace

Episode 5, "Fagan" dramatizes the true story of the worst security breach in Buckingham Palace history.

In real life, unemployed painter and set decorator Michael Fagan did break into the palace by shimmying up a drainpipe and climbing through a window, giving himself a tour of the interiors and "following the paintings" until he ended up at Queen Elizabeth's bedroom.

The break-in on 9 July, 1982, was Fagan's second; he broke in a month before as well, when he sat on the royal throne and drank a bottle of wine. The Crown also depicts him breaking a vase which was a present to the Queen.

Fagan's anti-Thatcher rant is an invention of The Crown but Michael Fagan did spend six months in a psychiatric hospital after his arrest.

The institutionalized royal cousins

In episode 7, "The Hereditary Principle", Princess Margaret discovers that five of her and Queen Elizabeth's cousins were secretly placed in a mental hospital in 1941 and publicly declared dead.

However, Margaret's storyline in The Crown deviates from the true story.

Queen Elizabeth's first cousins, Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, were secretly placed in the Royal Earlswood mental hospital in 1941. Katherine was 15 and Nerissa was 22 during that time.

After the story broke in UK tabloid The Sun, Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the matter and called it an issue for the Bowes-Lyon family.

The royal family never publicly acknowledged their existence.