FOREWORD BY

PETER MORGAN

What is real? And what is imagined? What is truth, and what is fiction? What happened? What did not? It’s become clear that many viewers, while watching The Crown, did so while scrolling through the pages of Wikipedia, searching for answers to these questions.

It was an extraordinary pleasure to write The Crown, to anatomise the many vivid characters and events that make up the story in the years 1947–1955. But it was sheer agony to condense ten dramatic event-filled years of history into just ten hours of television. So I was delighted by the suggestion that the royal historian Robert Lacey should take up the challenge to clear things up and separate fact from fiction — while telling us a great deal more. So, let me hand you over to Robert to take you back to 1947, when the King realizes he is gravely ill and his eldest daughter, the shy, 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth, is about to marry a handsome but fractious young foreigner of whom nobody seems comfortably sure…