How do you neatly wrap up a series that’s covered 60 years of history over six seasons?

The finale of The Crown does just that. The groundbreaking drama, which chronicles the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (played by Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, and Imelda Staunton over the years) and the lives of the royal family, comes to a close with Season 6’s touching Episode 10. 

“I’ve worked on the show every single day, including bank holidays and Christmases for ten years,” said series creator and writer Peter Morgan. “I’m proud of having got to the end and having done what I said I would do. The queen was both a very ordinary person, and a completely unique and remarkable person.” 

Season 1 of The Crown debuted in 2016, telling Elizabeth’s story from 1947 (just before she succeeded to the throne) onwards. Since then, the drama has carried us through roughly a decade per season, changing up its cast every two seasons as its timeline approaches the near-present.

With Season 6, Part 2 (available to stream now), we enter the new millennium and get to know a new breed of Windsors as Prince William (Ed McVey) and Prince Harry (Luther Ford) find themselves becoming poster boys for young royalty. Elsewhere, as the dust begins to settle on Diana’s (Elizabeth Debicki) heartbreaking passing, Charles (Dominic West) looks to the future with Camilla (Olivia Williams), while the queen experiences the loss of her mother (Marcia Warren) and her sister, Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville), in quick succession. By season’s end, Elizabeth is reckoning with her own life of service and contemplating whether the time has come to pass the crown to Charles. 

Justin Downing/Netflix

The series finale, “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep,” written by Morgan and directed by Stephen Daldry (who also directed the premiere episode) closes out the drama’s groundbreaking run with the marriage of Charles and Camilla and the queen’s internal abdication debate. Below, with input from the cast and creator, Tudum breaks down the details that went into the very last episode of The Crown, from creating thousands of funeral miniatures to getting all three queens together for one big emotional send-off.

How did they make all those miniature models for the queen’s funeral? 

In Episode 10, as the queen nears her 80th birthday, she’s advised to polish up plans for her funeral. As she begins to consider how Operation London Bridge (the code name for her funeral) should unfold, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) is part of the group who present Elizabeth with a vast scale model of the proposed procession down the Mall in London using hundreds of miniature figurines to represent military and VIP personnel. 

When Daldry, the episode’s director, presented the funeral-prepping idea to the set decorating team, they immediately started sourcing models of the 800 soldiers — all from different regiments and forces and requiring their own unique uniforms. Since the finale was filmed after the queen’s death in 2022, the team was able to use real footage from the queen’s funeral to build out their miniature mock.

When it came to filling out the mock procession, the team hit a snag — there simply weren’t enough miniature soldiers to be found. “We exhausted eBay, auction lots, Etsy — all those online channels,” set decoration coordinator Laurie Byrne tells Tudum. “We realized, ‘OK, we’ve got all we can for certain regiments, and for others, they just don’t exist.’ ” 

To create duplicate miniatures of the ones Byrne had been able to source, prop manufacturer BGI Supplies teamed up with the National Film and Television School in London to 3D print and paint the remaining squadrons. Over the course of two intensive weeks, John Lee, head of NFTS Model Making department, and 12 model- making students worked diligently to produce beautifully detailed and finely painted figurines. 

For the figurines Byrne’s team couldn’t source, they wound up enlisting crew members — from Byrne himself to a “work experience kid who was just there for a week” — to dress up in uniforms loaned by the costume department. With the help of Lifecast Studio, the models were photographed, and their images were then scanned, shrunk, and 3D printed into miniatures. 

The team also had outside help crafting funeral accessories including a gun carriage, a floral wreath, crown, and scepter, all of which were scanned at actual size before being printed. “Because they were so small, it took quite a number of attempts to  be able to 3D print something, especially the scepter, which ended up being like [a strand of] hair once you scale it down to the right size,” says Byrne. 

Did the queen die in The Crown finale?

No, the series ends in 2005, but introducing the storyline where they plan for the queen’s funeral gives the series — which opens with Foy’s Elizabeth preparing for her coronation in 1953 — a full-circle ending. The queen’s death in 2022 did, however, coincide with the filming of the final season of The Crown, and so series creator and writer Morgan and his team reevaluated the finale in the wake of her passing. “Elements of the final episode were always in my mind, but then events overtook us,” Morgan tells Tudum. “The queen died and I had to somehow address that as well. Even though the events of the episode take place 18 years before her death, I had to do something that meant that the show could end.” Executive producer Suzanne Mackie, who’s worked on the series since its inception, agrees the episode “took on something else when the queen died.” She adds, “We couldn’t help but reflect that in the emotional landscape of the episode. It was influenced and altered, and I’m very glad we did because it feels like a proper end to our show.”

Did “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep” end up being played at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral?

Yes. In Episode 10, while staying at Balmoral, the queen calls on the Piper to the Sovereign to seek his recommendations for her own funeral music. The piper points to the piece “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep,” playing the lament on his bagpipes for Her Majesty to demonstrate its emotional weight. At Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022, the queen’s piper, Pipe Major Paul Burns of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, did in fact close her committal ceremony with “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep.” 

Justin Downing/Netflix

Why did the queen contemplate abdicating the throne to Charles in the final episode?

In the wake of Diana’s death, political wunderkind Tony Blair’s (Bertie Carvel) popularity soars, and the new millennium turns the tides on royal public approval. Faced with a modernizing Britain and a milestone birthday, Elizabeth wrestles with whether to relinquish her crown to Charles. 

Morgan drew from the public knowledge that “the queen was completely wrong-footed by the temperature in the country and around the world in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death” to craft the finale’s storyline of inner turmoil. “I think that leads to a prolonged period of self-doubt and self-examination, which is not something that I think she did often.”

Did Prince Harry really wear a Nazi uniform to a costume party?

Unfortunately, yes. The post-Diana years for William and Harry are a tabloid frenzy, and as William cozies up with Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy) in St. Andrews, Harry finds himself in hot water, fast becoming the monarchy’s problem child. In the finale, one of the prince’s most infamous scandals unfolds, when he attends a “native and colonial” themed costume party dressed in an Afrika Korps uniform with a swastika armband. Of course, photos of the evening end up plastered across the papers’ front pages. Though William, Kate, and Harry’s night ends in shame, McVey, who plays Will, says filming those scenes was the highlight of his finale experience. “We did a shoot in a costume shop and that was lots of fun — we got to try on loads of costumes, and we got to play a lot,” he tells Tudum.

Justin Downing/Netflix

Did Charles and Camilla get married in The Crown Season 6?

The issue of Charles and Camilla making their relationship official plagued the royal family for decades. Since they were together before, during, and after Charles’ marriage to Diana, there was no question that the couple were in it for the long haul. But with Elizabeth the head of the Church of England and Charles set to inherit that role, it was difficult for the royals to endorse a marriage after divorce. In Season 6, Charles finally asks his mother if he can marry his longtime love. After settling that they can first marry in a civil service before getting a church blessing, Elizabeth seeks the approval of a less-than-happy William and Harry before finally giving her blessing to Charles. 

So, how did The Crown re-create Charles and Camilla’s wedding?

The finale nears its close with Charles and Camilla’s big day. First there’s a civil ceremony in Windsor, then there’s a church dedication in St. George’s Chapel, and capturing those famous locations caused its own challenges for The Crown’s production team. “Obviously, they’re not going to let you use St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, so the closest thing we could find was York Minster, which is a couple hundred miles up the road,” head production designer Martin Childs tells Tudum of re-creating this royal wedding. “It’s perfect in every way apart from the fact that the altar screen looks absolutely nothing like St. George’s Chapel. [So] we built an altar screen in imitation of something that took 250 years to build. It had to fit into the architecture and look as if it’d been there all along.”

What was the very last day of filming on The Crown?

For many of the show’s actors, the final day on set was filming Charles and Camilla’s nuptials, so celebration was the name of the game all around. “I had the most wonderful wedding to my real husband in real life above a Bella [Italia] pasta on Shaftesbury Avenue, and then 20 years later I got to marry Dominic West at York Minster. I’m the luckiest girl alive,” Williams tells Tudum. West also feels blessed to have part of the moment. “We were walking down the nave of York Minster with a full choir, a full orchestra, and 400 extras and about four dozen ornamental cherry trees bowing to us as we went,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘It’ll never be as good as this again.’ ” 

He adds that he did manage to walk home with one commemorative wedding prop. “I tried to get the cuff links, I tried to get the signet ring — didn’t work. I stole a tea towel. That’s all I got from the whole thing!”

Justin Downing/Netflix

How did The Crown get Claire Foy, Elizabeth Colman, and Imelda Staunton together for the finale?

There quite simply wouldn’t be The Crown without its queens, played over the course of the series by Foy, Colman, Staunton, as well as Viola Prettejohn as a teenage iteration in Season 6. In the series’ final scenes, we see Staunton’s Elizabeth looking back on the highs and lows of her reign, as she grapples with the idea of handing the crown over to Charles. Almost like an angel and devil on each shoulder, her younger selves appear to her as a sort of manifestation of her agitation. Colman’s queen, from Seasons 3 and 4, encourages her to abdicate, recognizing her tiredness and the sacrifices of a life of service. Then there’s Foy’s queen, from the first two seasons, telling her that her monarchy is a duty that cannot be abandoned. “I wrote the final episode being an internal conversation that the queen was having about whether she should carry on or hand over to Charles,” said Morgan. “I thought one could dramatize the internal dialogue with her in conversation with her younger self.”

Thrilling though it was to see all three actors together on set, for director Daldry, it wasn’t without its challenges. “[It was] incredibly hard to keep the queens from gossiping and get on with the task at hand, because they were having such a good time being in the same room together,” Daldry told Netflix. “There were some moments during that shoot that will stay with me for the rest of my life — watching those three interact and lark about, and then pay homage to each other, the show, and the woman who they were depicting, of course, Her Majesty the queen.”

The scene was equally monumental for Morgan, who says “standing on set at the end with Daldry and the three queens and realizing how far we’ve all come” was his overall highlight from the entire series. 

For the cast, seeing the different generations of queens was an emotional affair. “I think we all owe everything to Claire Foy, who started it all and set the bar impossibly high,” says Staunton. “And then for Olivia to have to follow that, and she just carried it on, I think it was fitting that they were there at the end — it was really special.”

West also experienced what, to many, would be a bucket list dream: pub grub with the queens. “I was in York with the queens, and we had steak and chips,” he tells Tudum. “It was great.”

When and why did Peter Morgan decide to end The Crown?

Morgan was committed to not brining the show up to present times. “If the show is a train, the train has moved at a speed of a decade a season,” he said. “So over the six seasons, we’ve explored around 60 years, and it was always my feeling that I didn't want to come right out to the present. I always wanted to remain a careful distance from where we are now.” 

“I think we all thought six seasons was perfect, two seasons for each queen,” he continued. “People have said to me, ‘When are you ending it?’ and I’d say, ‘In 2005,’ and they go, ‘What happened?’ and you say, ‘Well, Charles married Camilla.’ So we had to construct narratively an episode in which you were genuinely satisfied that you had reached the end, even though you were almost 20 years from the end [of the queen’s life and reign].” 

As for how he’s feeling now he’s put the series to bed? “Obviously, satisfied at a sense of accomplishment, sad that you know the certainty of it will be gone, relief because I think it is time to stop and I think we’re stopping just at the right time, and gratitude because it’s changed all of our lives — those of us that have worked [on it],” he said. “It’s also really satisfying to look at it as a whole and realizing how far we have all come. I loved it. I gave everything to it, I don't think I left anything on the table.” 

So, after all this time, how did The Crown end?

Hurrah! In the end, the queen doesn’t give up the monarchy, remaining on the throne until her death. In The Crown’s final scenes, Elizabeth and Prince Philip reflect on her legacy and the season of change that will inevitably descend upon the royal family. It’s a tender moment between the couple who’ve been at the heart of the series since the start, as they discuss being buried together in their old age. “I personally thought this is a great way to end, with these two characters who people have lived with for all this time and what will be left when they’re gone,” Pryce tells Tudum. “I had a lump in my throat saying my last words to [Staunton], and I could feel tears in my eyes as I was walking out of the scene.”

For Staunton, bidding goodbye to The Crown occurred at the same time the series said its own farewell. “What was extraordinary is that the last shot of the last episode was my last shot and its last shot — that was pretty special.”

Watch The Crown Season 6, Part 2 now.