When The Crown’s third season picks up in 1964, Queen Elizabeth—now played by Olivia Colman—is older, wiser, and more world-weary. She has a dozen years as monarch under her belt, but even that experience—and the scandals weathered during it—do not prepare her for the ultimate betrayal: a spy inside Buckingham Palace.
In the Season-Three premiere, “Olding,” the queen learns that her trusted art curator Sir Anthony Blunt (Samuel West) has been working for the KGB throughout his two-decade royal tenure. Appointed by Queen Elizabeth’s father, George VI, in 1945, Blunt was trusted by the royal family to oversee its vast art collection—made up of over a million objects, including masterpieces by Monet, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Bruegel. British intelligence had been on the search for Blunt—looking to identify the “fourth man” in a ring of deeply-embedded spies recruited at Cambridge University by Russians in the 1930s. By 1964, Blunt had maintained his cover throughout 11 interviews with MI5. But in the spring of that year, intelligence officer Arthur Martin offered Blunt immunity in exchange for a full confession. After a minute of silence, Blunt poured himself a glass of gin and shared his secret.
Rather than publicize this humiliating intelligence breach—a mole inside Buckingham Palace—the queen kept Blunt under her employ for 15 years, allowing him to retain both his career and his reputation as one of the most respected figures in the art world. It wasn’t until Margaret Thatcher unmasked Blunt as a spy in 1979 that the palace renounced Blunt by stripping him of his knighthood.
But skeptics still questioned why Blunt—a known KGB spy—was allowed to continue working inside Buckingham Palace. One explanation, offered to the New York Times, was that Blunt’s position “carried with it no access to classified information.” (In a televised interview after his unmasking, Blunt claimed, “The information that I passed [the Russians] was almost exclusively about German intelligence services. That was largely information. . . that a lot of MI5 thought should have been given officially. I had in fact no information about British agents at all. . . I had no information about military defenses or military, or anything to do with the military side.”)
Peter Rawlinson, the government’s solicitor-general who arranged Blunt’s deal, alternatively told Queen Elizabeth biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “It was essential to keep him in his position at Buckingham Palace. . .Otherwise Russia would have realized that his cover had been blown.”
But another theory about Blunt has long circulated—one that The Crown creator Peter Morgan floats in “Olding:” that Blunt was the man who managed to disappear Prince Philip’s alleged portraits by Stephen Ward, the shady figure at the center of the Profumo Scandal. After Ward’s 1963 suicide, it was reported that several high-ranking members of the royal family sat for Ward—the society osteopath with Russian intelligence ties—and that the portraits would be sold at a London gallery. “Every drawing of them, including those of Prince Philip and Princess Margaret, was bought by a man who refused to give his name,” Newsweek wrote, recounting the rumor. “Some believe he was Anthony Blunt, curator of the royal art collection at Buckingham Palace.” (Robert Harbinson, a mutual friend of Ward and Blunt’s, said that he tipped Blunt off about the portraits.)
If true, it wouldn’t have been the first time that Blunt acted undercover in attempt to preserve the royal family’s reputation. In 1945, the year Blunt began working for the crown, George VI sent him on another sort of secret mission—to retrieve important paperwork from a part of Germany under American occupation. Per the New York Times: