Four words that condemned the relationship of Princess Diana and Prince Charles

COMMENTARY

On the afternoon of February 24, 1981, the British press pack converged on the vast lawn of Buckingham Palace for a veritable moment in royal history: the introduction of the bride to the feverish media.

Standing on the palace steps, Lady Di, as she was known, in a hastily purchased blue suit, smiled coyly for the cameras, displaying her huge sapphire engagement ring as Charles stood behind her emitting a slightly puzzled fatherly air.

Hers would be the greatest, grandest, and most obsessively watched royal wedding, a mythical romance that will take on delicious life.

And the fairy tale would be broken for Diana in a few hours.

On the day they were in front of the press in London, after posing for some particularly awkward portraits, the duo walked in to be interviewed by Anthony Carthew, ITN’s royal correspondent, about their romance.

Standing in front of a huge gilded mirror somewhere in the palace, Carthew questioned them about their relationship, Charles tenderly stroking Diana’s hand as he spoke of their courtship with what I suppose passes for aristocratic enthusiasm.

The most infamous and deeply awkward moment comes towards the end when Carthew asks their feelings, “What about lovers?”

Diana, immediately out of the blocks, said flatly “of course”.

Charles, curiously pleased with himself, went on with “whatever ‘in love’ means.”

Interestingly, at the time, those now infamous words did not appear in print. Yet today, those words sound deeply arrogant, if not downright cruel.

(Veteran royal biographer Penny Junor has a more comprehensive read on the moment, writing: “The Prince of Wales is a thinker and a philosopher, a spiritual and religious man, and love for him has little to do with two-dimensional ‘love.’ discussed in the pages of romance novels and women’s magazines … He is too honest for his own good; he cannot give the simple answer that everyone expects, because for him the matter is not simple “).

No matter why he spoke those words, there is no way to change the fact that Charles and Diana seemed motivated to go down the hall for entirely different reasons.

To understand how Diana, blinking shyly behind her bangs, came to be standing on the steps of Buckingham Palace preparing to marry Charles, one has to go back to 1969.

In the late 1960s, the marriage between his parents, Johnnie Spencer, Viscount Althorp, and Frances, Viscountess Althorp, was in tatters. While there were many problems in their marriage, Frances’s affair with wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd was the nail in the coffin.

Spencer’s youngest daughter, Diana, was hiding behind the living room door, listening to “the harrowing sounds of a violent parenting fight,” according to one of her biographers.

Johnnie essentially kicked out Frances, leaving their four young children at home with their father.

In 1969, Johnnie was awarded custody of Spencer’s children after a two-year court case, his case aided considerably by a witness: Frances’s own mother, Lady Ruth Fermoy.

Lady Fermoy, who was also one of the Queen Mother’s bridesmaids, was a considerable factor in the decision to have Frances largely eliminated from the lives of her very young children.

The impact was profound.

In a recent interview with Diana’s brother Charles, Earl Spencer, he painted a bleak and heartbreaking picture of her “unhappy childhood” that he found “agonizing and horrible.”

On her mother’s departure, Spencer said: “As she packed her things to leave, she promised Diana [then aged 5] I would see her again. Diana used to wait for her at the door, but she never came. She could hear me crying down the hall, but she was too scared of the dark to come see me. “

Is it any wonder then that after finishing high school, being sent for rigorous stint at a Swiss school, and flinging himself into London in 1979, the Mills & Boon-loving teenager was gasping for the kind of devotion, deeply enriching? relationship?

Charles and Diana first met when he was dating his sister Lady Sarah. However, in the late 1970s, the palace was desperate to find Charles not just a suitable bride, but a woman who would actually say “yes.”

While he (supposedly) managed to enjoy a constant stream of steamy tangles, none of the women in his elegant ensemble seemed remotely interested in trading their lives for one of strict royal protocol and endless ribbon cutting.

(It probably didn’t help matters was this lewd curiosity offered by biographer (and Diana’s friend) Tina Brown in her book, The Diana Chronicles: “The rumor among exes was that the Prince was not a great lover – ‘not even a very good one, ‘said a model who lived with one of her occasional’ boyfriends’ in the 1970s “).

In 1978, her other sister, Lady Jane, married Robert Fellowes (who happened to be the Queen’s longtime private secretary). The Queen Mother attended the society meeting and it has been claimed that at this stage, the 78-year-old woman had drawn up a “watch list” of potential girlfriends for Charles that included the name of Lady Diana Spencer.

In retrospect, the Welsh union looks more and more like some kind of arranged marriage. As Brown has written. “By 1980, if Diana hadn’t existed, they would have to invent her.”

A series of carefully arranged invitations for the teenager followed and, after supposedly meeting (as adults) 12 or 13 times, The Question arrived in February 1981, followed in February by The Ring and The Interview. (To be followed closely after the wedding by The Misery, The War And The Divorce.)

For Charles, finally putting a real gem from the Garrard & Co jeweler on a silly girl’s finger was a relief from the pressure he was facing from his family, especially his father, to get in and get married.

In 1994, journalist Jonathan Dimbleby wrote an authorized biography of the Prince, revealing that Felipe had written to Carlos giving him an “ultimatum” about his relationship with Diana.

“The prince, in a state of emotional confusion, clung to these calculations. The pressures on him began to drag him toward his destiny,” Dimbleby wrote.

Tom Bower, in his book The Rebel Prince, states that Charles “saw his father as an emotional gangster.”

With those four simple words – “whatever ‘in love’ means” – Charles had broken Diana’s fragile mirage of what their future marriage would be like.

Years later, Princess Diana would reveal to her voice coach, Peter Settelen, that when the TV interviewer posed her ‘in love’ question, “I thought, ‘What a complicated question,’ so I said,” Yes, for Of course we are. ” Kind of a fat Sloane Ranger that he was and Charles turned around and said, ‘Well, whatever’ in love ‘means, and that completely baffled me.

Charles’s strange, cold response used to “traumatize” the princess, she told Settelen.

Even so, she persisted because, in that moment, she felt that he loved her and was deeply in love with him.

Days before the wedding, as Diana later told her biographer Andrew Morton: “In my immaturity, which was huge, I thought he was very much in love with me, which he was, but he always had a kind of loving look. , looking back, but he wasn’t the genuine type.

“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. Well, was I wrong in that assumption?”

At the heart of all this was the underlying fact that Diana was desperately seeking to fill the emotional void in her life and create her own happy family for herself. Meanwhile, a bullied and slightly lost Charles was looking to appease his family and basically recruit someone for a job for life.

It may be in direct contrast to all the kisses on the palace balcony, Cinderella-ese, but the wives of future sovereigns enter the fold through what is essentially some kind of hiring process. (Why do you think it took William nine years to decide that Kate Middleton was the girl he wanted to finally sit next to him on a throne one day?)

In essence, where Diana saw love, the royal establishment saw (what they thought would be) a very good hire. She came from a solid aristocratic bloodline, was a virgin, and more importantly, after several unsuccessful attempts with other women, she was the first future wife to say yes to Charles.

The tragedy is that in the months leading up to their wedding, Diana and Charles ironically felt the same way.

Years later, Diana would recall before her big day: “I went upstairs, had lunch with my sisters who were there, and said, ‘I can’t marry him. I can’t do this. This is absolutely amazing.’ And they were wonderful and They said, ‘Well, too bad, Duch. Your face is on the dish towel, so it’s too late to cower.’

Meanwhile, Charles told veteran royalty writer Robert Jobson, “I wanted desperately to get out of the 1981 wedding, when during the engagement I discovered how dire the prospects were, having had no chance of meeting Diana beforehand.”

(In the same book, the Prince is reported to point a finger at the press. Jobson reports that Charles had told a close friend: “Things were very different in those days … The power and influence of the media that propel matters towards an engagement and Weddings were unstoppable.

“To have retired, as you can no doubt imagine, would have been cataclysmic. Therefore, I was permanently between the devil and the deep blue sea.”)

As children we are taught that when it comes to princes and princesses, things always end well. Tragically, for Charles and Diana, there would be no happily ever after.