The Crown season six, part one, ends with scenes featuring the show’s actors intercut with archival footage. Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth addresses the nation after the death of Prince Diana, as video plays of the actual downtrodden Prince William and Prince Harry marching behind their mother’s casket down London’s Mall. It’s a somber combination of clips and also one darkly familiar to the audience: As an adult, the real-life Prince Harry has spoken out about how much trauma that public display of grieving caused him. “My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television. I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances,” he told Newsweek in 2017. He reiterated these feelings in his memoir, Spare. “I remember feeling numb. I remember clutching my fists. I remember keeping a fraction of Willy always in the corner of my vision and drawing loads of strength from that.”
Yet, by stopping the final half of the series at that point, The Crown also misses the chance to include a poignant real-life moment that not only puts Diana’s life into perspective but also explains the butterfly effect her death became: her brother Charles, Earl of Spencer’s eulogy.
On September 6, 1997, Spencer delivered the official oration at Westminster Abbey during his sister’s funeral. In the crowd that day? The royal family and every living prime minister of the United Kingdom, as well as an audience of 2.5 billion watching from their televisions at home.
He began with a touching reflection on his sister’s legacy. “Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty,” he said. “All over the world, a standard-bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.”
He then moved into discussing the more tragic aspects of her life. Diana, he said, was under constant siege from the paparazzi. She felt trapped in England and dreamed of leaving it. She felt “sneered at by the media.” “It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this—a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age,” he said, the anger in his voice palpable. “She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry, from a similar fate, and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.”
The Crown does its best to depict the punishing level of fame Diana had achieved. It shows her hiding inside a jewelry store in Monte Carlo, panicked by the crowds swarming the windows. It shows her cowering in fear inside her car in Paris, as photographers shove their lenses into the window and block traffic to prevent her from getting through. And in the previous season, it portrayed the duplicitous, unethical way the BBC’s Martin Bashir tricked her into an interview about the breakdown of her marriage with Prince Charles. At multiple points, The Crown has shown us exactly what Spencer meant.
Which is why the omission of Spencer’s speech feels like a missed opportunity in her—admittedly fictionalized—story. The media frenzy around Diana is deeply intertwined with her fate: In 2008, a jury ruled that she and Dodi Fayed were unlawfully killed through the reckless actions of their driver and paparazzi in 1997.
Even more than that, the trauma of her death continues to haunt the royal family of today. Prince Harry recalled the profound effect his uncle’s speech had on him as a child sitting in the pews of Westminster Abbey: “Towards the end of the service came Uncle Charles, who used his allotted time to blast everyone—family, nation, press—for stalking Mummy to her death. You could feel the abbey, the nation outside, recoil from the blow. Truth hurts,” he wrote.
Knowing that context, Prince Harry’s decision in January 2020 to step back from his duties as a senior member of the royal family makes so much more sense. After the Duchess of Sussex told Prince Harry she was having suicidal thoughts driven by her treatment in the press, painful memories of Diana resurfaced. “I knew that I had to do everything I could to protect my family, especially after what happened to my mom. I didn’t want history to repeat itself,” Prince Harry said in his Netflix series last year. It seems that Spencer’s words came true—Harry, no doubt, felt he and his wife suffered that anguish.
To be fair, The Crown is more often criticized for what it does include rather than what it leaves out: This season it faced scrutiny for depicting Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s ghosts, as well as for showing the couple’s car driving into a tunnel. There’s a fine line between dramatizing Diana’s death and sensationalizing it—her sons, after all, are still very much alive, and the public’s memory of her is still fresh. A critically acclaimed show doesn’t need to be cruel.
Yet if The Crown’s aim was to tell the definitive story of the reign of Elizabeth II, perhaps the final foreshadowing of Spencer could have provided the necessary context to explain the family’s eventual future. As William Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
