Widow 'Horrified' by The Crown Featuring Her Husband's Death in Avalanche

Sarah Horsley has criticized The Crown for dramatizing the events surrounding her husband's death.

The penultimate episode of the Netflix drama's fourth season depicts the March 1988 avalanche that killed Major Hugh Lindsay, an equerry of the royal family and friend to Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, during a ski trip in Klosters, Switzerland. According to the BBC, Major Lindsay joined Prince Charles, Patti Palmer-Tomkinson and a guide for a day on the slopes when the tragedy struck.

At the time, Horsley was working in the Buckingham Palace press office — and six months pregnant with their daughter.

"I was horrified when I was told [the episode] was happening and was very concerned about the impact on my daughter," Horsley told the Sunday Telegraph. "I'm very upset by it, and I'm dreading people seeing it."

Horsley said she wrote to the show's producers to request that the storyline be omitted.

"I wrote to them asking them not to do it, not to use the accident," she said. "I suppose members of the royal family have to grin and bear it, but for me it’s a very private tragedy."

Horsley said producers responded with "a very kind letter" explaining “that they understood my concerns but they hope I will feel that they deal with difficult subject matters with integrity and great sensitivity."

She added, "I think it’s very unkind to many members of the family [to dramatize the accident]."

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According to the BBC, Prince Charles was able to ski to safety when the avalanche hit, but Major Lindsay and Palmer-Tomkinson were buried by snow. "As soon as the danger had passed, Prince Charles, the guide and a Swiss police officer, who was skiing with the party, raced back to help the victims, digging with their bare hands in the snow to reach them," the outlet reported at the time.

The following day, Prince Charles and Princess Diana flew back to London with Major Lindsay's body.

Princess Diana, who stayed behind at the chalet rather than skiing on the day of the incident, remembered Major Lindsay in Andrew Morton's 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story—In Her Own Words.

"What a nice person he was," she said. "Out of all the people who went, it should never have been him."

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