The recently-released fourth season of Netflix’s The Crown seems to have broken the internet. Spanning the ’80s, it gives us our first look at Diana, the future Princess of Wales, but also of Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles’s “one who got away.”
Far from being an impartial presentation of fact, The Crown chooses sides, placing itself firmly in Diana’s corner while painting Charles as something of a villain. This made us wonder – the show makes no claim to be a documentary, but how much of what it shows us is fact and how much is fiction? Well, we’ve got the answers.
[post_page_title]Fact check: Diana was her older sister’s cleaning lady[/post_page_title]
The season’s first episode reveals Diana used to serve as her older sister’s cleaning lady. It might seem like a ploy to make her more approachable and down-to-earth, but it’s completely factual. Despite coming from an aristocratic family with strong ties to the Royal Family, Diana worked a series of odd jobs before meeting Prince Charles.
She was a youth dance instructor, a pre-school assistant, and yes – did cleaning work for her sister Sarah as well as several other friends, where she washed, vacuumed, dusted, and ironed. Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton claimed she found “quiet satisfaction” in the work.
