The Crown, season 4, episode 1, “Gold Stick,” shows Prince Charles meet Lady Diana Spencer at her home. Charles, who is picking up Diana’s older sister, Sarah, for a date, spots the 16-year-old Diana tip-toeing across the foyer of her home, pretending to be stealthy, though it seems Diana wanted to meet Charles and intentionally did a poor job of remaining inconspicuous. The future husband and wife peer at each other from behind a floral arrangement, reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, possibly foreshadowing a similar star-crossed fate for the royal couple. The Shakespearean theme is more overt in the whimsical tree costume Diana wears for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school.

The Crown depicts the greeting very theatrically – and it's chock full of symbolism. Diana wears green to represent her youth and vitality. Her mask likely reflects the way that very few people saw the real Diana when they first met her and usually underestimated her. The eerie music foreshadows something intriguing yet dark in the couple’s future. And the play that Charles and Diana bond over, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, contains many love triangles and love spells that blind the characters to their true desires for the better part of the play, foreshadowing Charles becoming torn between Camilla and Diana. The scene of Charles and Diana’s meeting in The Crown is incredibly dramatic and captivating, but, perhaps to the dismay of some royal fans, it’s almost completely made up.

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Charles and Diana's first meeting did occur at Diana’s childhood home, Althorp House, and they indeed met through Diana’s sister, Sarah, who was dating Charles at the time in 1977, but their real-life introduction was a little less cinematic. Charles and Diana met "in a sort of plowed field,” as Diana recalled in their engagement interview. She was 16 and he was 29. Charles was quite taken with Diana and she was a bit starstruck by the Prince of Wales, but they didn’t begin any sort of romantic relationship until several years later.

Even after he began a relationship with Diana, Charles proposed to two other women before Diana, though The Crown makes it appear that Camilla and Diana were the only two women in Charles' life. The fact is that Charles was becoming old and needed to find a bride and produce an heir quickly, so Charles dated many women during his late '20s and early '30s before proposing to Diana somewhat hastily after two other women rejected him.

In the summer of 1980, Charles and Diana were staying at the home of a mutual friend when Charles kissed Diana after she expressed her sympathy at the death of his friend and uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Charles and Diana went on several dates that year and, in November 1980, they visited Balmoral castle, where Diana met the royal family, most of whom liked her almost immediately. Charles proposed in February 1981 and the couple was married on July 29, 1981. After their divorce, Diana said in an interview, which was included in the documentary film Diana: In Her Own Words (available on Netflix), “We met 13 times and we got married.”

Charles and Diana had a lot of relationship problems from the beginning, but the bittersweet reality was not at all what the public saw. The truth is that the couple barely knew each other and had very little in common. From the beginning of their courtship, the couple’s highly-publicized relationship was described as a “fairytale,” especially their wedding, which was dubbed “the wedding of the century.”  The Crown attempts to peel back the façade of perfection, but even though it’s not a particularly sugar-coated interpretation, The Crown is still heavily dramatized and – at times – entirely fictional.

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