The Crown's portrayal of Countess Mountbatten is 'deliberately cruel', say critics

Anger over the new series of The Crown intensified on Monday after the depiction of Countess Mountbatten of Burma, a lifelong friend of the late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, was branded “deliberately cruel”.

The fifth and penultimate series of the royal drama shows a number of invented scenes between the Duke and Lady Mountbatten at her estate in Hampshire.

The programme uses the death of her daughter from cancer at the age of five as a jumping off point to show the Duke comforting her while grieving. It juxtaposes those scenes with the late Queen and her husband engaged in frosty conversations and sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Supporters of Lady Mountbatten have been left angered and upset that her close relationship with the Queen and her husband has been turned into fiction.

Their distress has been exacerbated by the choice of the actress Natascha McElhone to play her. Ms McElhone’s stepfather is Roy Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror, Guardian columnist and professor of journalism, who outed himself last year as an IRA sympathiser who had written regularly under a pseudonym for An Phoblacht, Sinn Fein’s weekly newspaper.

Lady Mountbatten married the grandson of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who along with his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull and his grandmother Baroness Brabourne were murdered when the IRA detonated a bomb planted on board a fishing boat in County Sligo in August 1979. Nicholas Knatchbull was Lady Mountbatten’s husband’s younger brother.

The scenes between Lady Mountbatten and the Duke, played by Jonathan Pryce, are set in 1991 immediately after the death of her daughter Leonora.

'Ill-judged, unfortunate decision'

Lady Mountbatten has declined to comment but an acquaintance familiar with the family said of her portrayal and the choice of actress to play her: “This is indeed an ill-judged, unnecessarily unsympathetic and unfortunate decision.

“I imagine it is however carefully considered and very deliberate in that it has done what was probably intended in garnering media attention and therefore publicity for this continued work of republican fiction.”

The acquaintance said it would be correct to describe the portrayal as “inordinately insensitive”, adding:  “It is one thing for a script to be drivel, another to be so deliberately cruel. I think maybe they have shot themselves in the foot rather with this but for the majority, it will simply pass them by.”

The source had not seen the series, which goes on air on Netflix on November 9, but review episodes have now been made widely available. The source said: “As ever, those with any intelligence and true knowledge of the individuals, will see it as fanciful imaginings.”

Born Penelope Eastwood, the daughter of a self-made millionaire, Lady Mountbatten married Norton Knatchbull, the grandson of Earl Mountbatten, in October 1979, two months after the bombing. Their first child, born two years after the IRA attack was named Nicholas after the current Earl’s brother, who was killed in the atrocity.

In the Netflix series, Lady Mountbatten and the Duke become close friends over, according to early reviewers, a “shared love of carriage driving”. At the time, Lady Mountbatten was 26 and the Duke 32 years her senior. Last Mountbatten, now aged 69, was the only non-royal to attend the Duke’s funeral service at Windsor Castle which was scaled back because of Covid restrictions.

According to The Crown’s version of events, the Duke tells Lady Mountbatten that he and the Queen have "grown in separate directions". While out carriage driving together their hands touch, the camera zooms in and he gives her his private phone number.

At the end of the episode,  the Queen asks her husband if he thinks husbands and wives should keep secrets from one another in a marriage.

In another episode of the ten-part series, the Duke explains he is seeking companionship and the carriage-driving "gang" provides that. The Queen points out that Lady Mountbatten is the wife of his godson and half his age. The Duke replies: "It's friendship, Lilibet. It's not that sort of companionship. That would just make me even more lonely."

According to reviewers, the Queen later summons Lady Mountbatten to Windsor castle, welcoming her into the family. The Queen explains: “Should people happen to see the Duke of Edinburgh out and about with a beautiful younger companion it would be an irritation if they felt at liberty to jump to any wrong conclusions. So why don't you come in the car with me to church this Christmas at Sandringham? Nip all that in the bud.”

New series also covers Prince Charles's bitter divorce

The new season of The Crown threatens to be its most controversial, not least because it covers the recent historical period of 1991 to 1996 that includes the divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Sir John Major, the former prime minister, and Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, have already dismissed the programme’s claims made from conversations they had with members of the Royal family at the time.

A Netflix spokesman said: “The Crown has always been presented as a drama based on historical events. Series 5 is a fictional dramatisation, imagining what could have happened behind closed doors during a significant decade for the royal family - one that has already been scrutinised and well-documented by journalists, biographers and historians.”

Critics of the choice of actress have accepted that she can bear no responsibility for the views of her stepfather. But they have suggested an alternative choice might have been wiser.

Mr Greenslade told this newspaper last year: “I have nothing to say, not a single word, to say about a nonsensical story.”