Princess Diana’s Marriage Was Much CRUELER Than You Thought

Princess Diana’s Marriage Was Much CRUELER Than You Thought

750 million people watched them kiss on that balcony. It was the first kiss performed there and it was requested for the cameras. Days earlier, the bride had found a gold bracelet in an aide’s office engraved with two initials that were not hers. It was delivered anyway. 13 years later, her husband told a television audience he had gone back to the woman it was made for. She was 20. She had no money of her own, no staff, no exit, and she would end up controlling the story completely. It began at Althorp, November 1977.

He had come up to shoot. She was 16, home from school, and she was not the Spencer he was there to see. Charles was 29 and involved on and off with her older sister Sarah. Diana was the youngest daughter, the one nobody was assessing. She met the future king in a plowed field, and by his own later account, he found her cheerful, funny, and unexpectedly interesting for her age. Sarah handled the rest of it herself. She talked to reporters about him. She said she wouldn’t marry him whether he was the dustman or the king of England. And that was the end of Sarah. Diana watched her sister lose a prince by giving a quote. Remember that. It matters later more than almost anything else in this story. To understand why a 19-year-old walked into a marriage that half the people arranging it privately doubted, you have to understand what she had already learned about families like hers. Because she had learned it early, and she had learned it in a house owned by the queen. Diana Francis Spencer was born on the 1st of July 1961 at Park House on the Sandringham estate. Her father leased it from the monarch. Her grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a close companion and lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. The Spencers were not outsiders being elevated. They were courtiers living on royal land and Diana grew up knowing exactly which family sat above her own. She was also from birth a disappointment in one specific respect. Her parents needed a son to inherit the earldom. The year before Diana was born, they had a boy who lived only briefly. Diana arrived and she was another girl and the christening was smaller than it might have been. Her brother Charles came 3 years later. Then the marriage collapsed publicly and viciously. Her mother Francis left in 1967. The divorce came in 1969 and with it a custody fight that Diana’s father won. Here is the part that shapes everything. Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence supporting her son-in-law against her own daughter.

A mother testified against her child in favor of the family’s standing. Diana was eight. What she took from it is not a matter of speculation because she described it repeatedly for the rest of her life. Women who left these families lost. They lost their children, their friends, their position, and their reputation, and the machinery closed around them with perfect politeness. She was not academic. She failed her O levels twice and never pretended otherwise. What she had instead was an unusual sensitivity to atmosphere, a habit of watching adults closely, and a talent for making herself pleasant and slightly invisible in rooms where something unpleasant was happening. Those are survival skills. 12 years later, they became professional skills. By 1979, she was living in London in a flat at Coleherne Court with three friends, working as a nanny and then as a kindergarten assistant in Pimlico. The flat was hers. It had been bought with money that came down to her from an American fortune through her great-great-grandmother, Frances Work, daughter of a New York financier. It is a small thing, but note it. The only financial independence Diana Spencer ever had before her divorce came from American money and disappeared into royal life the moment she married. The courtship, when it finally happened, took about a year and involved roughly a dozen meetings. Summer 1980, a house party in Sussex, a polo match, and a conversation on a hay bale. Mountbatten, Charles’s great-uncle and closest mentor, had been murdered by the IRA the previous August. Diana talked to him about the funeral, about how alone he had looked. Both of them later described that conversation as the turning point. She had found the one subject on which the most emotionally guarded man in Britain was raw. She was invited to Balmoral that September and then the press found her and the press decided very quickly that she was the answer. There was a photograph from that autumn taken outside the Pimlico kindergarten, the one where the sun came through her skirt. She was mortified. The country was charmed. It was her first lesson in something she would spend the next 17 years mastering. The camera would give her enormous power and take absolutely no instruction from her about when to look away. Behind the enthusiasm, the man himself was not enthusiastic. Jonathan Dimbleby, who was given access to Charles’s private papers for the authorized 1994 biography, quotes letters from this period in which Charles writes about the decision as something agonizing, weighed against duty rather than driven by feeling. His father wrote to him in late 1980 urging him to resolve the situation because a girl’s reputation was being damaged by continued speculation. Charles read that letter as an ultimatum. Dimbleby’s account presents it as blunter than Philip intended. Historians remain divided on which reading is correct, and it hardly matters. The prince believed he had been told to decide, and he decided. He proposed at Windsor Castle in early February 1981 in the nursery. By her own account, she laughed and said yes immediately and he told her to think it over carefully. Then she left for Australia with her mother for 3 weeks. The engagement was announced on the 24th of February. That afternoon they gave a short television interview and a reporter asked whether they were in love. She said, “Of course,” he said, “Whatever in love means.”

That clip has been replayed so many times it has become a joke. It should not be. It is the most honest public statement made by anyone in the entire courtship and it was broadcast to the nation five months before the wedding and nobody stopped anything. Camilla Parker Bowles had been in his life since 1971 or 1972. She had married Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973, an army officer and a Catholic, and Charles became godfather to their son Tom in 1974. She was not a secret. She was a fixture of the same social world at the same house parties on the same guest lists. And during the engagement, she took Diana to lunch. Multiple accounts describe Camilla asking whether Diana intended to hunt, which is either small talk or reconnaissance, depending on how generous you are feeling. The point is not the question. The point is that the arrangement was orderly enough for the wife to be interviewed by the mistress. Diana moved into Buckingham Palace and then Clarence House to wait for the wedding. She had no household of her own, no private secretary, no allowance, and no role. She was a 19-year-old kindergarten assistant living in a palace being fitted for a dress while the man she was marrying traveled. Then she went into the office of Michael Colborne, Charles’s aide, and found a parcel. Inside was a gold chain bracelet with a small enamelled disc engraved with two letters, the initials of the private nicknames Charles and Camilla used for each other. Diana’s account recorded on tape in 1991 is that she confronted him about it and he refused to discuss it. What is not disputed is that he delivered it. Days before his wedding, the Prince of Wales drove out to give a farewell gift to the woman he had been unable to marry and his fiancée knew. She told her sister she wanted to call it off. What they said back to her has come down through her own later recollection. So treat it as her memory rather than a transcript. That it was too late. Her face was already on the tea towels. They were right about the tea towels. That was the entire problem. The wedding on the 29th of July, 1981 was not a family occasion. It was a national event with a budget, a security operation, a broadcast plan, and three and a half thousand guests at St. Paul’s, chosen almost entirely by other people. The cathedral was picked over Westminster Abbey, partly because it held more. She wore a dress by David and Elizabeth Emanuel with a 25-foot train that had to be pulled out and arranged in the glass coach, and it emerged creased, and that detail made the papers. She got his names in the wrong order at the altar. He pledged his goods rather than all his worldly goods. The country found both endearing. Camilla Parker Bowles was in the congregation, invited. Afterwards, the crowd outside Buckingham Palace kept chanting for a kiss, which had never been done on that balcony. By several accounts, it was Prince Andrew who pushed the idea, and Charles, who checked with his mother first, so the most romantic image in modern British history was a piece of crowd management approved through the chain of command. Two months later, from Balmoral, the new Princess of Wales sat down and wrote a letter to a school friend describing her honeymoon. That letter did not surface publicly until this year, and it says something that contradicts almost everything she would say about the same weeks a decade later. It is three pages long, dated the 27th of September, 1981, and it was sold at auction in Sussex earlier this month. In it, she describes a blissful honeymoon, endless sun, calm seas. She writes that it’s wonderful being married and that she thinks it’s safe to say that after 2 months. She says she adores being outside all day and hates London. And she describes life inside the royal family with a line that is either delighted or wary depending on how you read it. It’s a case of playing with grown-ups. Now set that against the version she gave in 1991, recorded on tape in her sitting room at Kensington Palace and smuggled out to a journalist. In that version, the honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia is where photographs of Camilla fell out of her husband’s diary, where he wore cufflinks engraved with two entwined Cs, where the bulimia she’d developed during the engagement had already taken hold, and where she understood she had married into an arrangement that included a third person. Both accounts are hers.

That’s the problem, and it’s also the answer. A 20-year-old writing to a school friend two months after the largest wedding in television history was not going to write that she was in trouble. She had been raised by a family that testified against its own to protect its position. She knew what letters were for. The 1991 tapes are the opposite document made deliberately for release by a woman who had decided to go to war and needed her side on the record. Neither is a lie. One is a performance of contentment and one is a weapon. And the fact that she was capable of producing both 10 years apart tells you more about Diana than either statement does on its own. The marriage she actually entered was not primarily a relationship. It was a residence. Charles had bought Highgrove in Gloucestershire in 1980 before the engagement and it stayed his house. Diana had no say in the purchase, disliked it, and found herself living about 15 miles from Bolehyde Manor where Camilla lived with her husband. She had no household of her own at first, no private secretary answering to her, no independent income. Her husband had a staff that had been assembled around him for a decade, run by a private secretary, Edward Adeane, whose family had served the monarchy for generations. Adeane resigned in 1985, reportedly worn down by the disorder in the household. The calendar was not negotiable either. Christmas at Windsor or Sandringham, August and September at Balmoral, shooting, stalking, dinners in the same rooms with the same people, and a wife who did not shoot, did not stalk, and could not fake enthusiasm for either. She began leaving early. She began going back to London alone. Those departures were read inside the family as instability, and they were read by her as escape. Nobody had trained her. There was no course, no assigned mentor, no explanation of what a Princess of Wales was actually supposed to do. She was 20, bulimic, pregnant within months, and being sent out to represent an institution that had given her a title and no instructions. She has said she threw herself down a staircase at Sandringham in January 1982 while pregnant after telling her husband she felt desperate and being told he was going riding. That account exists only in her own testimony. It is not corroborated by any independent witness and some biographers treat it cautiously. But nobody disputes the underlying condition and Charles himself later acknowledged to Dimbleby how frightened he was by her state in those years and how completely unequipped he was to deal with it. William was born in June 1982, Harry in September 1984. She has said the marriage went cold not long after Harry arrived and that her husband’s disappointment that the second child was another boy stayed with her. That’s her account of a private remark, and it should be labeled as such. What isn’t in dispute is what happened next in public because it was photographed constantly. The 1983 tour of Australia and New Zealand was the moment the balance of the marriage broke in a way that could never be repaired, and it broke over something neither of them controlled. She took the baby with her, which was itself a break with royal practice. And the crowds came for her. They lined up on her side of the street. When Charles worked one side of a rope line, people audibly groaned. He wrote about it privately, and Dimbleby quotes those letters. The bewilderment, the sense of having become a supporting act at his own event. Here is the honest complication. She had not asked for it. She was 21 and terrified of the crowds. But she learned tour by tour what she could do with them. She learned to crouch to a child’s height. She learned that the picture editors wanted her alone. And every year that skill grew, the man beside her lost a little more standing in his own life’s work. A marriage can survive infidelity.

It struggles to survive one partner becoming vastly more popular than the other, while the institution they both serve keeps score. By his own account, given on national television in 1994 and repeated in the authorized biography, Charles resumed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles in 1986 after the marriage had, in his words, irretrievably broken down. Note the sequence he is asserting. The marriage died first. Diana’s supporters have always said it was never dead so much as never alive and that Camilla’s presence was continuous rather than resumed. The documentary record supports something in between. Whatever the truth of the gap, from 1986, there were two parallel relationships running inside one marriage because Diana began her own affair with James Hewitt, a cavalry officer she met that summer. Then something happened that briefly made them look like a functioning couple and it deserves to be told properly because it complicates the villain. In March 1988, on a skiing holiday at Klosters, an avalanche struck a party that included Charles. His close friend, Major Hugh Lindsay, was killed. Patty Palmer-Tomkinson was very badly injured. Diana was not on the slope. She was at the chalet. And in the hours afterward, she took charge of the practical things nobody else could face. The arrangements, the return home, sitting with Lindsay’s widow, insisting the group fly back with the body rather than continue the holiday. People who were there, including Charles’s own circle, credited her without qualification. She was 26 and she was briefly indispensable. For a while afterward, they were reported to be closer. Then the pattern resumed in a new form, and the new form was recorded. In December 1989, within a two-week window, both halves of this marriage were caught on tape by amateur radio enthusiasts scanning mobile phone frequencies. The tapes were private, and suddenly they were not. On the 18th, a long intimate late night call between Charles and Camilla. On New Year’s Eve, a long intimate call between Diana and James Gilbey, a car dealer and old friend, in which he calls her Squidgy dozens of times, and she talks about her misery inside the family. Two separate recordings, two separate lovers, two separate people who had no idea that the most private conversations of their lives were sitting on cassettes in strangers’ houses. Cassettes. Nothing happened for over 2 years. The tapes just waited. In June 1992, a book appeared called Diana: Her True Story, written by Andrew Morton. It described the bulimia, the despair, the suicide attempts, the presence of Camilla from the first week. It read as though it came from inside the marriage, and Buckingham Palace treated it as an outrage assembled from disloyal friends. The book felt explosive. It came from Diana. She had answered written questions on tape, six sessions, passed back and forth by her friend, Dr. James Colthurst, who cycled to Kensington Palace with the questions and out again with the answers. Morton and Diana never met for the book. That was deliberate. It gave her deniability and she used it. She denied involvement for the rest of her life. The tapes were revealed in 1997 after she died. And the 1992 denial became one more piece of evidence about how carefully she worked. Deniability mattered. 2 months after the book, The Sun printed the Squidgygate transcript and set up a phone line so readers could dial in and listen to her voice for 36 pence a minute. She had gone first and she had been answered. Her voice was exposed. In November, the couple toured South Korea. The photographs from that tour are extraordinary.

Two people standing side by side, entirely alone. The press called them the Glums. That same month, Windsor Castle caught fire, and days later, the queen gave a speech at Guildhall describing the year in a phrase supplied by a private secretary as an annus horribilis. The word stuck. On the 9th of December 1992, the prime minister stood up in the House of Commons and announced that the Prince and Princess of Wales had separated. He added that there were no plans for divorce and no constitutional implications. Both statements would prove wrong. In January, the Camilla tape was published. Whatever advantage Diana had won in June evaporated because now the country had heard both of them and both of them looked small. She withdrew from public life in a speech in December 1993 blaming the press and she meant it and it also freed her from an official diary controlled by the palace. In June 1994, Charles gave Jonathan Dimbleby a 2 and a half hour television interview and admitted the adultery. That evening, Diana was photographed arriving at a party at the Serpentine Gallery in a short black off-the-shoulder dress by Christina Stambolian that she had owned for three years and never worn. And she took every front page in the country from him. She had won the picture. She still hadn’t spoken. And in August 1995, a 32-year-old BBC reporter drove up to Althorp to see her brother. He was called Martin Bashir. He worked for Panorama. And he had a problem. Everyone in British television wanted this interview and nobody could get near her, so he manufactured a way in. Bashir had a graphic designer at the BBC mock up bank statements. They were fake. They purported to show payments into the accounts of people close to the Spencer family and to the royal household. The implication being that Diana’s own staff and her brother’s former employee were being paid to inform on her. He showed them to Earl Spencer at Althorp on the 31st of August, 1995. Spencer, convinced, had introduced him to his sister the following month. She recorded the interview at Kensington Palace on the 5th of November and it aired on the 20th. 23 million people in Britain watched it. She said there were three of them in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded. She admitted the affair with Hewitt and said she had adored him. She questioned whether her husband could adapt to being king. She said she’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts. It was by any measure the most effective use of a television camera by a member of the British royal family in the 20th century. It also detonated the marriage permanently. Within weeks, the queen wrote to both of them actual letters, not briefings, saying that an early divorce was in the best interest of the country. Diana received hers in December. She had spent 14 years being managed by an institution that never wrote anything down. Now it had. And then 26 years later, the interview was taken apart. Earl Spencer had never let it go. In 2020, he obtained material that showed how far the BBC had gone and how much it had known and buried.

The corporation appointed Lord Dyson, a retired senior judge, to investigate. His report was published on the 20th of May, 2021. It found that Bashir had acted deceitfully, had commissioned the fake statements himself, had used them to deceive and induce Earl Spencer into arranging the meeting, and that by gaining access this way, he had been able to persuade the princess to give the interview. It found that the BBC’s own 1996 inquiry, which cleared Bashir, was flawed and woefully ineffective, and that the corporation had covered up what it knew. The BBC apologized unconditionally, returned the awards the program had won, and said it would never broadcast the interview again. There is a complication in this, and it should be stated plainly rather than smoothed over. In December 1995, Diana wrote a note saying she had not been shown any documents by Bashir and had received no information she did not already have. The BBC used that note for a quarter of a century as its defense. Her brother’s position is that she would never have agreed to meet a journalist she didn’t know without the trust the forgeries created and that she was in the end being handled by someone she believed was on her side. Both things are true. She wanted to speak. She was also worked on. What Dyson establishes is not that her testimony was false. It was hers and she stood by it. But that the machine which finally let her tell it had been built out of forged paper. The woman who spent her life being used by the press was used one last time by the press in the moment she believed she had finally taken control of it. The divorce came through on the 28th of August 1996. The settlement was reported at around 17 million plus a few hundred thousand a year to run her office. She kept the Kensington Palace Apartments. She kept her jewelry. She kept her title as Princess of Wales. She lost the letters HRH. That decision has been argued about ever since. The Queen’s private position, reported by several biographers, was that Diana could have kept it. Charles is said to have argued that she should. What is documented as the outcome, the mother of a future king was formerly required to curtsy to family members she had outranked the week before, and her sons were reportedly furious about it. William is said to have told her he would give it back to her when he was king. That’s a later recollection from an interested source, and I would treat it as family memory rather than record. Here’s what she did with the 12 months she had left, because this is the part that gets flattened into saintliness and shouldn’t be. She cut her patronages from more than 100 down to six, keeping the ones with no glamour attached. Homelessness, leprosy, hospices, a children’s hospital, ballet, and the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital. She had learned in 1987 at Middlesex Hospital what one photograph could do when she shook the hand of a man with AIDS without gloves. She had learned it again visiting hospices. She now used it deliberately. In January 1997, she walked through a partially cleared minefield in Angola for the Halo Trust in a visor and body armor in front of cameras she had arranged to be there. A junior British defense minister called her a loose cannon. She kept going. She went to Bosnia in August.

The Ottawa treaty banning anti-personnel mines was signed that December, 4 months after her death, and campaigners have credited her intervention ever since with pushing it into public consciousness. She was not a diplomat. She was a photograph that governments could not ignore. And by then, she knew exactly what she owned. And in June 1997 at Christie’s in New York, she sold her clothes, 79 dresses. The idea came from William, who was 14. They went for around 3 and a quarter million dollars split between AIDS and cancer charities. Among them was the ink blue velvet she had worn dancing at the White House in 1985. Think about what that auction actually was. Every one of those garments had been made for a role assigned to her by other people. Worn on a schedule she didn’t set, photographed to sell an image she didn’t design. She converted the entire wardrobe into cash for the two diseases the establishment was least comfortable discussing. And she did it in America outside the reach of anyone in London who might have preferred she didn’t. She stayed. Then she left. And when she left, she took the machinery with her. She died in Paris in the early hours of the 31st of August 1997, 5 weeks after the auction, in a car crash that has generated more conspiracy literature than almost any event of the century, and that a British inquest concluded in 2008 was caused by the driver’s speed and intoxication and by the pursuing vehicles. What happened in the 6 days afterward was the closest thing to a national revolt against the monarchy in modern memory. The family stayed at Balmoral. No flag flew at half-mast over Buckingham Palace because protocol said no flag flew there at all except when the sovereign was in residence. The papers, the same papers that had chased her, demanded the queen come to London. She came and she spoke live on television and the flag came down. At the funeral in Westminster Abbey, her brother stood up and said in front of her sons and her former husband and the entire family that she needed no royal title to generate her particular brand of magic and that the Spencers would ensure the boys’ souls were not simply immersed in duty and tradition. The applause started outside in the streets and moved into the building.

It was the most direct public attack on the Windsors delivered inside a church by an aristocrat in living memory. The Spencers took her home. She is buried on an island in an ornamental lake at Althorp on private family land, unreachable and unphotographable with a visitor exhibition and controlled access. Whatever the intention, the practical effect was that her grave could never become a royal shrine and no institution but her own family could decide who came near it. Then the fight for the story began. And it has never really stopped. Paul Burrell, her butler, was charged with theft in 2001. The trial collapsed in 2002 after the queen recalled a conversation in which Burrell had told her he was keeping items safe. He then published a memoir and sold her private letters and belongings to the papers, which is roughly the opposite of the loyalty he’d been credited with. Her voice coach, Peter Settelen, had recorded video sessions with her in 1992 and 1993. Tapes seized in the Burrell investigation were returned to him and broadcast in America in 2004 and in Britain in 2017. The Morton tapes were released in full. Her letters keep coming to market. 24 sold at auction in 2024. A set to the actor Terence Stamp sold this June discussing her mental health and her workload. The honeymoon letter this month. She wrote constantly to everyone in that looping hand. She could not have known that the habit would outlive every official archive and that no palace, no foundation, and no family would ever be able to close it. Meanwhile, the other side ran the longest and most successful public relations campaign in the family’s history. Charles hired Mark Bolland as deputy private secretary in 1996, and Boland’s project, informally known in the press as Operation PB, was the rehabilitation of Camilla Parker Bowles.

It was executed patiently, a stray photograph outside the Ritz in 1999, a first joint public event, a slow normalization across years, so that by the time they married in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall in April 2005, the country had been prepared for a decade. In her accession day message in 2022, the queen stated her wish that Camilla be known as Queen Consort. She was crowned in 2023. So, who won? Charles got the throne, the wife, the legitimacy, and the reign. The institution absorbed the worst crisis of its modern existence and continued. Diana got the myth, and the myth is now so large that the family has spent 30 years navigating around it, that both her sons have built public identities in relation to it, and that the single interview she gave about her marriage was so consequential, the BBC eventually had to destroy its own reputation to account for how it was obtained. Look at the balcony again. The 29th of July, 1981. Him in uniform, her in the crumpled Emanuel dress, the kiss the crowd asked for, and the family approved. She was 20 years old, and she had already found the bracelet. She knew. She had told her sister she wanted out and been told her face was on the tea towels, and she had understood the arithmetic immediately. The image was worth more than the marriage, and there was no version of her life in which she got to be a private person again. What she did with the next 16 years was take the only asset the arrangement had given her and make it entirely her own. Not the title which they removed. Not the money which they negotiated. The picture, the thing they put her on the balcony to produce. That kiss was staged to sell a marriage that was already compromised. And it worked. 750 million people bought it. She spent the rest of her life proving she could stage one better.