dominic west as prince charles and elizabeth debicki as diana in a still from season five of the crown; red, white and blue circles with question marks surround them; black background

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

Test Your Knowledge About the Netflix Hit ‘The Crown’

Buckle up for Season 5 by guessing which events are factual

Sara Schwartz and Jayme Deerwester

Members Only Access

Published November 04, 2022

10 Questions

Royal watchers rejoice: The Emmy-winning series The Crown returns to Netflix on Nov. 9 with the first new episodes in two years. Recently, the streaming platform relented to criticism and noted in the Season 5 trailer description that the series is a “fictional dramatization.” Are you able to tell which plots are rooted in history and which were creative license? Take our quiz and test your royal trivia knowledge.

Test Your Knowledge About the Netflix Hit ‘The Crown’

[ {
 "question" : "Which actor in “The Crown” has said they’d leave a party if they ran into a real-life royal?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "Claire Foy, who played Queen Elizabeth II in Seasons 1 and 2",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "Helena Bonham Carter, who played Princess Margaret in Seasons 3 and 4",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "Emma Corrin, who played Diana in Season 4",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 }, {
 "answer" : "Josh O'Connor, who played Prince Charles in Seasons 3 and 4",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "In Season 4, Corrin makes her debut as the Princess of Wales. The actress has acknowledged how awkward it might be for any of the royal family to see themselves depicted on the series, and in a 2020 interview with “GQ” magazine she said, “If I ever saw them at a party, I’d probably leave!”\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "In the second season, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy are shown visiting Buckingham Palace in 1961. And although Jackie and Queen Elizabeth share some special moments, Jackie later called the queen “incurious, unintelligent and unremarkable.” Is it true or false that this really happened?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "True",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "False",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "According to the British publication “The Telegraph,” photographer Cecil Beaton claimed that Jacqueline Kennedy “was unimpressed by the palace furnishings and by the queen’s dress and hairstyle.” But if the first lady said anything more specifically savage, there have been no reports of those getting back to Elizabeth.\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "True or false: Season 3 depicts a coup attempt in 1968 to remove Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Labour Party from power and replace him with Lord Mountbatten. Did this really happen?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "True",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "False",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "It was less a coup than hypothetical conversations between publishers Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, who thought the country needed to look beyond Parliament for its next leader and floated the idea of Mountbatten. In 1981, King denied the plot in a letter to cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong, “As you must have noticed, I have recently been accused in some newspapers of planning a coup — perhaps military, perhaps not — to overthrow this government in 1968. … Unlike most newspaper stories, this one had no foundation in fact.”\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "True or false: As depicted in Season 3, the royal family really did commission a BBC documentary to be made about them.\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "True",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 }, {
 "answer" : "False",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "The monarchs were recorded for 75 days in more than 170 locations, showing them in informal settings — meals together and light family banter — to the very formal, including the queen meeting world leaders. It was viewed by some 40 million people worldwide in 1969.\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "True or false: Shown in Season 4, Charles and Camilla are revealed to have secret nicknames for each other. Was this true in real life?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "True",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 }, {
 "answer" : "False",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "Charles and Camilla, or Fred and Gladys, were inspired by characters from “The Goon Show,” a British radio comedy, and Charles really did give Camilla a bracelet with an F and G intertwined, which Diana discovered days before marrying Charles.\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "How did Queen Elizabeth’s recent death affect total U.K. viewership for “The Crown”?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "It decreased by 10 percent",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "It rose by 15 percent",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "It rose by 100 percent",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "It rose by more than 800 percent",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "After the queen died Sept. 8, the Netflix series saw an 800 percent increase in viewers between Sept. 9 and 11, according to TV Time, a TV and tracking app owned by Whip Media.\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "Which celebrity is quoted as saying that certain scenes depicted in “The Crown” are “Damaging and malicious fiction … a barrel-load of nonsense peddled for no other reason than to provide maximum — and entirely false — dramatic impact”?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "Actress Judi Dench",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "Royal biographer Christopher Wilson",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "The Archbishop of Canterbury",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "Ex-Prime Minister John Major",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "Many have objected to fictional elements in the series, but the former prime minister told “The Telegraph” in the fall of 2022 that conversations depicted to have occurred between him and the late queen were “fiction, pure and simple.”\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "True or false: According to actor Matt Smith, who portrayed Prince Philip in Seasons 1 and 2 of “The Crown,” Prince Harry once addressed him as “Granddad.”\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "True",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 }, {
 "answer" : "False",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "In a September 2022 interview on the “Today” show, Smith revealed that when he met Harry at a polo match: “He walked up to me and went, ‘Granddad.’ ”\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "Season 5 will cover 1992. Queen Elizabeth famously declared: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘annus horribilis.’ ” What did not happen that year?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "Separation of Prince Charles and Princess Diana",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "Death of the Queen Mother",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 }, {
 "answer" : "Separation of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "Windsor Castle fire",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "The year 1992 dealt the queen several blows: Charles and Diana separated, Andrew and Sarah separated, and the Windsor Castle fire caused millions of dollars in damages.\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
 "question" : "Just days before her death, Queen Elizabeth II met then-prime minister Liz Truss. How many female prime ministers did she see during her reign?\n",
 "answers" : [ {
 "answer" : "1",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "2",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 }, {
 "answer" : "3",
 "correctAnswer" : true
 }, {
 "answer" : "4",
 "correctAnswer" : false
 } ],
 "multiSelect" : false,
 "explanation" : "Of the 15 prime ministers who served under the queen, three were women, and all were from the Conservative Party: Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Truss, who resigned weeks later. On Season 4 of “The Crown,” Thatcher was played by Gillian Anderson.\n",
 "hint" : "",
 "hintLink" : "",
 "questionImgCaption" : "",
 "questionImgCredit" : ""
} ]

Quiz Progress

0 Correct

0 Incorrect