The first episode of The Crown Season 5 follows Dominic West’s Prince Charles and Elizabeth Debicki’s Princess Diana as they depart on what the press calls their “second honeymoon” to Italy. The use of quotes here is very much intentional. The mood on this trip is far, far from romantic. To start, Charles and Diana want to do completely opposite things: “Some people may like to go shopping,” she remarks when her husband reels off a heavily historical sightseeing itinerary. Then there’s the fact that several other people on the boat are essentially acting as buffers so that the couple can avoid each other much of the time. (“I’m off to read the classics,” Diana jokes to William and Harry as she goes off to thumb through an issue of Vogue.) When Prince Charles decides to cut the trip short and return to the UK, they get into a screaming fight on deck.
It’s a dysfunctional scenario that makes for great television—but how much of it is based on the real Charles and Diana themselves?
In August 1991, Charles and Diana indeed boarded a yacht and set sail along the Italian coast. At the time, the press mostly used lovey-dovey language to describe the sojourn. The Evening Standard coined its description of a “second honeymoon” and described the trip’s romantic intentions at length. “Somewhere off the Italian coast, close to the isle of Capri, a beautiful and luxurious yacht lay at anchor waiting to welcome its royal guests on what is being seen as a ‘love cruise’ to put the sparkle back in their marriage,” the outlet wrote on August 7. (The aforementioned yacht, by the way, clocked in at over 343 feet and belonged to billionaire Yiannis Latsis.)
As The Crown depicts, Charles and Diana were just two of many people on board. Joining them were King Constantine and Queen Anne-Marie of Greece, as well as Prince Charles’s cousin, Lord Romsey, and his wife, Lady Penelope. Each couple also brought their children.
One point where the show differs from real life? Whereas Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana bemoans the fact a wider group has joined them on what was supposed to be a couple’s getaway, reports suggest Diana very much wanted it to be a family affair. “While the Prince may have preferred a more peaceful break, Diana was determined their children, William, nine, and Harry, six, should have playmates,” the Evening Standard found.
Yet what was presented by the press as a joyful vacation (A Happy Family Holiday for the Prince and Princess of Wales!” read the August 17, 1991 cover of Hello!) was likely anything but. A year later, Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially announced their separation. Around the same time as the trip, Diana began sending secret tapes detailing her unhappy marriage to journalist Andrew Morton. In June 1992—10 months after the couple set sail around the Mediterranean—he published his bombshell book Diana: Her True Story. Although it’s impossible to know exactly what happened on the trip, given its private nature (Buckingham Palace told the Evening Standard at the time it was the couple’s goal to “disappear”), the conflict between the Waleses was rapidly escalating into a full-on implosion. The conversations between them depicted on The Crown are, of course, fabricated—yet the tension between the couple was already mounting at that point.
Adding salt to the wound? In May 1991, right before this yacht trip, Prince Charles went on a weeklong painting holiday to Tuscany. He claimed it was a solo vacation, but the press soon figured out that Camilla Parker Bowles flew out to the Italian countryside at the same time. She stayed at a villa a mere 30 minutes away from Charles—which was perhaps the true honeymoon after all.
