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It has been one of the most anticipated television shows of the year.
Season 4 of Netflix’s The Crown shows the relationship between Charles and Diana from the moment they first saw each other, when she was just 16, to the point where their marriage was in tatters after a series of adventures and public scandals.
The decline in the relationship is heartbreaking to watch, but most shocking is that stark reminder of the young woman who was eaten by the royal family machine and then spat on years later.
The current controversy over her Panorama interview with Martin Bashir only highlights once again how much she was manipulated and by so many.
Charles proposed to Diana because she was a suitable wife for the heir to the throne and not because he loved her.
As he told journalist Andrew Morton in 1992: “Charles had found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.”
And so the naive and hopeful Diana married a stranger more than a decade older than her.
Before the wedding, they had only been on a handful of dates, as he later said, “We met 13 times and got married.”
Diana took on the high-profile role of the Princess of Wales, as a young girl who needed kindness, compassion, and reassurance, but got none of this.
Instead, she was pushed to the limit by the infamous three people in her marriage, the coldness of her new family, and a husband increasingly jealous of her popularity.
Diana was already fragile and the royal family would break her.
Diana’s childlike innocence was obvious to all who knew her.
The queen mother’s page, William Tallon, remembered 19-year-old Diana wandering around Clarence House the night before her wedding in search of company and ending up riding a spare bicycle going round and round, ringing the bell and singing : ‘I am going to marry’. the Prince of Wales tomorrow. Ring ring. ‘Tomorrow I will marry the Prince of Wales!’
“She was just a girl, you know, just a girl,” Tallon said.
Never mind prince charming, impressionable and inexperienced Diana thought Charles was her knight in shining armor.
“I remember being so in love with my husband that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“I just thought she was the luckiest girl in the world.
“He was going to take care of me,” Diana told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words.
“Well, I was wrong on that assumption.”
Many of Diana’s problems stemmed from the difficult childhood she had endured.
When she was just seven years old, her happy family unit was destroyed when her mother, Frances, left her father, John, for another man.
According to her brother, Charles Spencer, Diana felt abandoned by her mother.
As he packed his things to leave, he promised Diana that he would see her again. Diana used to wait for her at the door, but she never came, ”she said.
Feeling rejected by her mother would fill Diana with a sense of worthlessness that she would struggle with for the rest of her life.
It also made her hungry for love and was one of the top candidates to take advantage of.
The Windsors are reserved, aloof, and aloof, but Diana couldn’t have been more different: warm, open, and loving.
When Charles and Diana’s marriage ended, she was thrown to the wolves.
His reputation tarnished, his mental health maligned, and his job denigrated.
Diana had provided her with the heir and a spare, and the royal family set her aside like an old toy that has outgrown her.
All these years later, the horrible injustice of it all still hurts.
Diana never had the happy ending she craved and deserved.
Instead, the fairy tale he was promised turned out to be a horror story.
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