Buckle up, this about to be an intense and dramatic season from Netflix’s The Crown. Set to premiere on Nov. 15—and season 4 promises to show the turbulence of the ’80s and ’90s. And it’s all about Princess Diana, née Lady Diana Spencer, the doe-eyed 19-year-old who swept into the people’s hearts.
Between Diana’s declining mental health, the infidelity and public indiscretions that plagued their royal marriage, and the ascent of domineering new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose radical approach puts her at odds with Queen Elizabeth II, even the monarch could not take any more chaos!
Prince Charles’ Campaign to Marry Camilla Parker Bowles
We know that they were once deeply in love (as they are again now today), but that they ultimately said “I do” to other partners and not much else about what came in between. While the circumstances of their breakup have always been murky—and as Crown creator Peter Morgan always reminds us, he’s not trying to re-enact history—it seems season 4 will shed more light on Charles’ attempts to marry Camilla instead of Diana, and paint a picture of the future monarch as a man who firmly knew his heart was set on Camilla from an early age.
“Charles’s campaign to make Camilla queen is as passionate and as committed and as ruthless, in many ways,” Morgan tells Esquire UK, “as was Henry VIII’s campaign to make Anne Boleyn his queen.”
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Charles & Diana’s Marriage—and Divorce
Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles, also spoke to Esquire about what he expected to be the royal’s most dramatic time on the show: “Seasons 3 and 4 will follow some of the most turbulent events in the Prince of Wales’s life and our national story and I’m excited to be bringing to life the man in the midst of it all.”
Diana and Charles’ marriage is a story of duty, loneliness, and intense claustrophobia under the microscope of the paparazzi and royal family at once. Each resenting the circumstances the other had brought them into, these royals lashed out at each other and themselves and sought comfort in the arms of lovers. For a moment when media attention had never been higher, the details of their marriage had also never been gorier.
Prince Charles’ Affair With Camilla
While there was infidelity on both sides of this marriage (Diana notably having an affair with former army captain James Hewitt) we can only confirm that this season will look at Charles’ affair with Camilla in detail. Per Robert Lacey’s royal biography Battle of Brothers, he recounts Charles wearing cufflinks given to him by Camilla on his wedding night, and Diana finding photos of her in his wallet on their honeymoon.
We won’t just see how things play out between Camilla and Charles, but between Camilla and Diana too, who was famously well aware of what she called the “three of us” in the marriage. In fact, a still from the show looks as though they include a specific moment Lacey also recounts between the two women shortly after Charles’ proposal when Camilla requests to see Diana’s ring — and Diana sees through her faux-friendliness rather quickly.
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Margaret Thatcher’s Stormy Relationship With the Queen
With Gillian Anderson taking on the role of Margaret Thatcher opposite Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth II, we’re planning on getting out the popcorn for any scene these two have together. But it doesn’t hurt that Thatcher’s relationship with the Queen was famously thornier than most of the monarch’s dealings with prime ministers.
Per HistoryExtra, Thatcher’s enormous respect for the royal family and the Queen’s unwillingness to make her feelings known beyond a stony silence kept their relationship at a simmer for the first seven years of Thatcher’s term. But in 1986, the Sunday Times ran an article claiming the Queen found Thatcher’s approach to be “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive,” per royal press secretary Michael Shea.
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