What Years The Crown Season 4 Is Set In
The Crown season 4 brings the Royal House of Windsor into the 1980s. Here’s exactly when the drama with Charles, Diana, and Margaret Thatcher is set.
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Warning: SPOILERS for The Crown Season 4
The Crown season 4 takes the story of the Royal House of Windsor into the 1980s, a turbulent time for Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) as she deals with her new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), and the relentless drama caused by the ill-fated marriage of Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Diana, Princess of Wales (Emma Corrin). The Crown season 4 is set between the years 1979-1990, although Netflix’s award-winning historical series plays a bit with the timeline of events, especially in the first, seventh, and last episodes.
The Crown ambitiously depicts the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, which has dominated the 20th century of the United Kingdom and she still reigns today. Claire Foy played Queen Elizabeth, with Matt Smith as her husband Prince Philip, in The Crown seasons 1 and 2, which spanned 1947-1964. Olivia Colman as the Queen and Tobias Menzies as Philip stepped in for The Crown season 3, which were set from 1964-1977, and introduced Prince Charles and Princess Anne (Erin Doherty), Elizabeth and Philip’s two oldest adult children. But as mesmerizing as those seasons were, fans of The Crown hotly anticipated season 4 because it finally introduces Princess Diana since her disastrous marriage with Prince Charles is still fresh in the public’s minds even though it happened 30 years ago.
The Crown season 4’s first episode, “Gold Stick”, is primarily set in 1979 and revolves around two major historical events: Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister in May of 1979 and the assassination of Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten (Charles Dance) by the Irish Republican Army in August of 1979. However, “Gold Stick” melds events that happened years earlier and opens with Charles’ first meeting with 16-year-old Diana. As The Crown depicts, Charles met Diana while he was dating her older sister Sarah Spencer (Isobel Eadie) but their first meeting actually happened in 1977. “Gold Stick” also shows Diana and Charles’ second meeting after Mountbatten’s funeral, which happened in 1980.
The Crown season 4’s second episode, “The Balmoral Test”, takes place in 1980, with Diana’s “triumphant” audition for the Royal Family at Balmoral Castle in Scotland while Thatcher’s own first visit was a disaster. Episode 3, “Fairytale”, shows Charles and Diana’s engagement, Diana moving into Buckingham Palace for “princess training”, and ends right as their world-famous wedding is about to begin; these events happen in 1981, and Charles and Diana’s nuptials take place on July 29, 1981.
The next two episodes of The Crown season 4 take place in 1982: Episode 4, “Favourites”, depicts how Thatcher’s “favorite” son Mark went missing in the Sahara desert and also shows the beginnings of the United Kingdom’s conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. This leads into episode 5, “Fagan”, which dramatizes the infamous occasion when Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke) broke into Buckingham Palace and sneaked into Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom. The Crown episode 6, “Terra Nullius”, returns the focus to Charles and Diana, whose marriage is already fractured as they go on their famous 1983 tour of Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand.
The Crown season 4, episode 7, “The Hereditary Principle”, is the biggest outlier in the timeline as Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham-Carter) discovering her institutionalized royal cousins was changed somewhat. The real story about them actually broke in British tabloid newspapers in 1987. However, episode 8, “48:1”, is set in 1986, which details Queen Elizabeth facing off against Margaret Thatcher over the PM’s refusal to join the Commonwealth in issuing sanctions to South Africa’s apartheid government. Episode 9, “Avalanche” is named after Prince Charles surviving an avalanche in Switzerland in 1988, and it swings the focus back on Charles and Diana, but it opens with Charles being horrified with Diana publicly performing Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” on stage for him on his birthday, which happened in 1985. “Avalanche” then shows their marriage disintegrating into 1988.
Finally, The Crown season 4’s finale, “War”, is set in 1989 and 1990, although the episode again makes all of the events seem like it happened in the same year. “War” shows Princess Diana’s solo tour of New York City in 1989 but it concurrently summarizes the events that led to Margaret Thatcher stepping down as Prime Minister in November 1990, with references to the War in the Persian Gulf (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) in late 1990. The Crown season 4 ends at the Windsors’ 1990 family Christmas party and ominously focuses on Princess Diana, who won’t live through the 1990s, as The Crown season 5 will depict.
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