- Lord Mountbatten (better known as Uncle Dickie) is a major force in season 4 of The Crown, persuading Prince Charles to get married.
- The royal with 10 names, two daughters, and an open marriage, is related to both Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II.
- Here's how Lord Mountbatten affected Charles's love life—and what The Crown doesn't show.
The fourth season of The Crown depicts the lingering effects that Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance) had on the House of Windsor. The royal, whose full name was Prince Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas of Battenberg, had a tremendous influence on both Prince Charles and his father, Prince Philip. According to Charles's 1994 biography, Charles called him "Honorary Grandfather," per The Independent.
Lord Mountbatten's assassination in 1979, therefore, has major reverberations on the show's characters and decisions. In fact, it may be what brought Prince Charles and his wife, Princess Diana, together. Per Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles, a year after the funeral, Diana Spencer told Charles: “You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Mountbatten’s funeral. It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, ‘You’re so lonely—you should be with somebody to look after you.'" Diana later said in an audiotape, used in the documentary Diana in Her Own Words that Charles "leapt on [her]" after she said that.
Their meeting is ironic, considering how much effort Louis put into introducing Charles to a suitable match—including his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull. The Crown shows Louis's extensive efforts to make Charles think seriously about marriage, after first encouraging him to "sow his oats" (direct quote, per The Telegraph).
Perhaps Louis's meddling was earned: He introduced Elizabeth and Philip, and made their marriage possible despite the future queen's hesitant father, per Andrew Morton's biography Diana: Her True Story, in Her Own Words.
Given his close relationship to the Windsors, Lord Mountbatten was always a prominent part of The Crown. In seasons 1 and 2, the lord was portrayed by English actor Greg Wise. In the later two seasons, Game of Thrones alum Charles Dance (who played Tywin Lannister) took over. Here's what you need to know about the well-connected royal, whose life was far more eventful than The Crown shows—trust us.
He was murdered in 1979 by the Irish Republican Army.
Season 4 of The Crown depicts this harrowing incident. On holiday while boating in Donegal Bay off the coast of County Sligo, Ireland, Lord Mountbatten was attacked by IRA terrorists. He and three others, including his 14-year-old grandson, were killed when a 50-pound bomb tucked under his fishing boat detonated.
“My own memory,” Patricia Knatchbull, Louis's daughter injured in the bombing, told The Daily Telegraph in 2008, “is of a vision of a ball exploding upwards and then of ‘coming to’ in the sea and wondering if I would be able to reach the surface before I passed out. I have very vague memories, now and again, of floating among the wood and debris, being pulled into a small rubber dinghy before totally losing consciousness for days.”
Lord Mountbatten’s formal name is super long, as in 10 words in full.
Called "Uncle Dickie" by the royal family and throughout The Crown, Lord Mountbatten was originally referred to as—wait for it!—Nickie. “Queen Victoria held him in her arms as he was christened Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas. The Battenbergs called their baby son Nickie,” Time wrote.
However, because “Nickie” carried a Russian connotation at the time, the family tweaked his nickname to Dickie. Similarly, the family name Battenberg was later Anglicized to Mountbatten. Ultimately, Lord Mountbatten's full name was the impresssive Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
He was related to both Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II.
Louis was the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, making him a second cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II and an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Just to shed a little more light on that branch of the family-tree connection: Princess Alice of Battenberg, Philip’s mother, is Lord Mountbatten’s sister.
Episode 4 of The Crown season 3, titled “Bubbikins,” introduces Princess Alice, and shows the estranged relationship Alice has with her son, Philip. We learn of her tragic past, having gone through electroshock therapy and institutionalization for hysteria and schizophrenia. During her time in an institution and in the years after, Philip lived with the Mountbattens, leading to an influential relationship we explore later in this story.
Lord Mountbatten and Lady Edwina Ashley Mountbatten had an open marriage.
In season 2, Lord Mountbatten says to the queen, “You married a wild spirit—we both did. Trying to tame them is no use.” The wild spirit he is referring to is Lady Edwina Ashley. The two said their “I do’s” on July 18, 1922, and though their combined good looks catapulted them to glam-couple status during the 1920s, their union was riddled with scandal.
It’s been reported that Louis adored his Edwina, but she had a wandering eye. In the biography The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, British historian Andrew Lownie wrote that the couple’s younger daughter, Lady Pamela Hicks, said, “When my father first heard that she had taken a lover, he was devastated.”
By 1931, Louis and Edwina agreed to an open marriage to avoid the shame of divorce. “They would stay together with separate beds and, to some extent, separate lives. But they would remain loving, mutually supportive chums. Above all, they would be discreet,” The Washington Post reported. Lownie wrote that Louis once said, “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”
Lord Mountbatten was father to two daughters.
Lord Mountbatten and Lady Edwina had two children together: Patricia Knatchbull, who was wounded in the 1979 attack and died in 2017, and Lady Pamela Hicks. Pamela, now 90 years old, hosts a podcast with her daughter India Hicks—it’s appropriately called The India Hicks Podcast.
A close friend of the queen (she was a bridesmaid in the queen’s wedding) and cousin of Prince Philip, Pamela has used the airwaves on occasion to get candid about her parents’ unorthodox royal marriage. In the first episode of her daughter’s podcast, Pamela even goes so far as to say that both her parents each had “one real lover” and that she and her sister genuinely loved those two people.
Lord Mountbatten was Prince Charles’s mentor, and wrote him letters about his love life.
Lord Mountbatten had a profound influence on the royal family, in particular his great-nephew, Prince Charles. Per The Telegraph, Lord Mountbatten even gave the prince a little coaching when it came to the ladies. “I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for,” the publication reported Louis wrote to Charles. He encouraged Charles to marry someone without "a past," a euphemism for past boyfriends.
By the time Charles began courting Diana Spencer in 1980, his mentor was not there to guide him. However, unlike his love Camilla, who had long been involved with Andrew Parker Bowles when she met Charles, Diana seemed to check all of Louis's boxes: At 19, she didn't have prominent boyfriends in her past, and came from a "suitable" aristocratic family.
During a memorial service held to remember the late Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles gave an emotional speech about the man he says had “a constantly active brain which was never allowed a moment’s rest.” He continued, “Although he could certainly be ruthless with people when the occasion demanded, his infectious enthusiasm, his sheer capacity for hard work, his wit made him an irresistible leader among men.”
He not-so-secretly wanted Prince Charles to marry his granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull.
In The Crown's alternate history, Prince Charles doesn't end up with Diana Spencer, but with Amanda Knatchbull. After much encouraging from his "honorary grandfather," Prince Charles proposed to Louis's actual granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, whom he'd been seeing on and off between 1974 and 1979.
Knatchbull was ten years Charles's junior, but appeared to enjoy spending time with the prince. “She was equally impressed with his energy, enthusiasm, sense of fun, kindness and modest self-deprecation. She was indeed a very sensible and loving girl, who genuinely did share all the same interests as the heir to the throne," Howard Hodgson wrote in Charles: The Man Who Would Be King.
There was just one problem: Knatchbull didn't want to be a princess. According to Sarah Bradford's Diana, Knatchbull was "unwilling to step on to the royal treadmill," and thus turned Charles's proposal down.
Biographer Andrew Morton suggests, in Diana: Her True Story, in Her Own Words, that if Mountbatten had not been killed in a bombing orchestrated by IRA terrorists in 1979, "royal history might have been very different." Knatchbull also lost her brother in the explosion, and both of her parents were gravely injured. In the aftermath, Charles and Knatchbull—who had already rejected his proposal—"huddled together to console each other," as Lady Colin Campbell wrote in The Real Diana.
Both went on to marry other people. Charles married Diana Spencer in 1981, of course. In 1987, Knatchbull married Charles Vincent Ellingworth, and had three sons with him.
He was a highly decorated military official.
He attended the Royal Naval College, and later joined the Royal Navy and served in both World Wars. Later, as we mentioned above, the family changed their name from Battenberg to Mountbatten. The reasoning, as the Times put it, was they were forced to anglicize their name. In WWII, Lord Mountbatten served as captain of the H.M.S. Kelly and was later appointed to Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia.
“If you want to be a leader of a large number of men,” Lord Mountbatten once observed, “you can’t go around like a shrinking violet hiding yourself: you’ve got to put on a bit of an act. It must be sincere, it’s no good having a bogus act. You’ve got to play up any qualities you have and blow them up larger than life,” Time quoted the lord as saying.
Lord Mountbatten ended British rule in India.
Lord Mountbatten was appointed the last viceroy of India. He was tasked with overseeing the withdrawal of British rule and made quick of that assignment. After arriving in New Delhi in March 1947, India reached its independence five months later in August. Later named the first Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten held the position until his return to Great Britain the following year. Later in 1953, Mountbatten returned to the Royal Navy, climbing the ranks to eventually become chief of the defense staff before he retired in 1965.
Prince Louis was reportedly named after Lord Mountbatten.
The Independent broke down the importance and legacy rooted in several of the royals’ official names. One is Prince Louis. Born Louis Arthur Charles, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s third child gets his first name from Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Further, Prince William and his first baby, Prince George, have “Louis” in their monikers also. You have William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor for Dad, and George Alexander Louis for his little one.
“The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are delighted to announce that they have named their son Louis Arthur Charles,” Kensington Palace announced via Twitter in April last year. “The baby will be known as His Royal Highness Prince Louis of Cambridge.”
And with that, the legacy of Lord Louis Mountbatten carries on.
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DeAnna Janes is a freelance writer and editor for a number of sites, including Harper’s BAZAAR, Tasting Table, Fast Company and Brit + Co, and is a passionate supporter of animal causes, copy savant, movie dork and reckless connoisseur of all holidays. A native Texan living in NYC since 2005, Janes has a degree in journalism from Texas A&M and got her start in media at US Weekly before moving on to O Magazine, and eventually becoming the entertainment editor of the once-loved, now-shuttered DailyCandy. She’s based on the Upper West Side.
