Lord Mountbatten Did Get Asked to Lead a Coup, Just Like in 'The Crown'
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Catching up on previous seasons of The Crown before diving into season five? Here's our story from 2019 on Lord Mountbatten and the group plotting to overthrow Prime Minister Harold Wilson:
The Crown's showrunner Peter Morgan can always be counted upon to dig up stories that the royals would rather keep quiet, and with the show's third season came another round of bombshells. Perhaps the most surprising—even above the Queen's curator's work as a Soviet spy, or Prince Charles's correspondence with the Duke of Windsor—was Lord Mountbatten's storyline in episode five, aptly titled "Coup."
According to the show, shortly after Mountbatten's forced retirement, he was approached by a group plotting to unseat Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The Crown's Mountbatten warms quickly to the proposal—particularly to the idea of installing himself in 10 Downing Street.
The real story, however, is much less black-and-white. "Well, I think [Mountbatten] took it more seriously than he later claimed, and there was a bit of a cover-up, but I find it hard to think that he would have gone much further," Andrew Lownie, author of The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, told Town & Country. (The cover-up would come later, in 1975, when Hugh Cudlipp included a meeting with Mountbatten and others on the matter in his memoirs. Naturally, this caused a stir, and Mountbatten did his best to quell suspicions surrounding these revelations.)
Still, "he did suggest people who could be involved in this government of international unity," Lownie added. "I wouldn't say it was a coup, but he was concerned about the way the country was going and he put forward suggestions, so he was trying to be as helpful as possible."
The truth is likely somewhere between Mountbatten's complete innocence and The Crown's version of events. "Whether he would have eventually agreed to be head of it, I think is very unlikely, because his loyalties were to the Queen," Lownie explained. "But he certainly explored it more than I think people realized."
And that tense meeting between Mountbatten and the Queen in The Crown? Some claim that may very well have taken place. In Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, historian Alex von Tunzelmann cites a source from Buckingham Palace, who reportedly said, "It was not Solly Zuckerman who talked Mountbatten out of staging a coup and making himself president of Britain. It was the Queen herself."
In The Mountbattens, though, Lownie lets readers draw their own conclusions from the limited—and contradictory—evidence available. As with many events that inspired The Crown's historical fiction, the real story is hard to nail down.
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