Warning: Contains spoilers for season three of The Crown.
The Crown season three features plenty of explosive plotlines, from Princess Margaret’s divorce to the introduction of Camilla Parker Bowles (then known as Camilla Shand). One of the show’s most ripped-from-the-headlines aspects, though, is a real-life spy scandal that rocked the royal family. This story line is based on the exposure of Anthony Blunt, the queen’s art adviser, as a Soviet spy, and the show portrays the queen as feeling betrayed by the revelation. Just how accurate is The Crown’s representation of the story though? Find out below.
Who was Anthony Blunt?
In 1964 Sir Anthony Blunt, a leading art historian and art surveyor who frequently advised Queen Elizabeth II on art matters, was revealed as a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of Soviet spies working in the U.K. over a span of several decades. Prior to being publicly exposed as a spy by Margaret Thatcher and stripped of his knighthood in 1979, Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and surveyor of the queen’s pictures. In the first episode of season three of The Crown, he is briefly portrayed by Samuel West.
Who were the Cambridge Five?
In addition to Blunt the other four spies—Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and John Cairncross—were recruited by Soviet operatives while studying at Cambridge in the 1930s to gather intelligence in the United Kingdom. “I found that Cambridge had been hit by Marxism and that most of my friends among my junior contemporaries—including Guy Burgess—had either joined the Communist Party or were at least very close to it politically,” Blunt wrote in his last testimony. Documents from the Mitrohkin Archive that were made public for the first time in 2014 depict the Cambridge Five as hopeless drunks who struggled with sobriety even while dealing with highly sensitive information.
How did England react to the revelation?
MI5 and MI6 “engaged in a massive effort to cover up the activities of the notorious Cambridge spy ring and avoid hugely embarrassing prosecutions,” the Guardian reported in 2015. Just as depicted on The Crown season three, the queen was informed discreetly about the spy in Buckingham Palace, which is more than can be said for Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, who—along with most of England—did not find out until Margaret Thatcher exposed Blunt in the House of Commons in November 1979.
What happened to Anthony Blunt?
Blunt was offered a secret immunity deal in 1964 in exchange for his confession. Blunt never revealed the full details of his involvement with the Soviet Union, and in his last testimony, which was held in the British Library and released to the public 25 years after his death, Blunt called his involvement in the spy ring the “biggest mistake of my life.” Blunt died in 1983 at the age of 75.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
