In the summer of 1981, roughly 750 million people watched a twenty-year-old bride walk up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral. By her own account, she was searching the congregation for one face. She found it, pale gray, under a pillbox hat.
It belonged to Camilla Parker Bowles. A few days later, on the honeymoon, two photographs of the same woman fell from her husband’s diary, and a pair of cufflinks appeared on his wrists, two letters intertwined. He called them a present from a friend. She later said her hope was gone by day two.
Fifteen years on, the marriage ended with a clause forbidding her to speak of it. The story of what happened inside that marriage comes almost entirely from one voice. Diana, Princess of Wales, described it three times over four years: once on tape in 1991, once before a voice coach’s camera in 1992 and 1993, and once on national television in November 1995. These were her accounts, given in pain, sometimes in secret, never cross-examined.
The man she married left his own record, but the intimate history of the marriage was hers to tell. She had laughed when he proposed. On February 6, 1981, at Windsor Castle, the Prince of Wales asked a nineteen-year-old kindergarten assistant to marry him, and she laughed, thinking it was a joke. Even then, she recalled thinking clearly: you won’t be queen, but you’ll have a tough role.
Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, at Park House on the Sandringham estate. Her father had served as equerry to two monarchs, and she had played as a child with the queen’s younger sons. Before the engagement, she was living in a shared London flat and working as a nursery assistant. The prince was thirty-two, a decade older, with a settled adult life and a circle of old friends.
They had met barely a dozen times before the question at Windsor. The engagement was announced eighteen days later. She chose her own ring, a large sapphire surrounded by diamonds, one of the few decisions in the coming months that was entirely hers. At the engagement interview, asked whether they were in love, she said, “Of course.
” Beside her, the prince added four words that followed him ever since: “Whatever in love means. ” She later said the remark traumatized her. Within a week of the engagement, she said, he placed a hand on her waist and remarked that she was a bit chubby there. She dated the start of her bulimia to that moment.
She hid the illness through the busiest, most watched months of her life. Already, too, there was the presence of Camilla Parker Bowles, close to the prince since the early 1970s. Diana overheard him on the telephone in his bath, saying, “Whatever happens, I’ll always love you. ” She found a bracelet he had had made for the other woman.
She went to her sisters and told them she could not go through with it. They replied, “Bad luck, Duch. Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out. ” It was the first door she knocked on that would not open.
On July 29, 1981, the glass coach carried her to St. Paul’s. About 3,500 guests sat inside the cathedral; roughly 600,000 people lined the streets; some 750 million watched on television. She remembered the day not for the dress, which cost £9,000 with a twenty-five-foot train, but for a feeling and a face.
“I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter,” she said. As she walked up the aisle, she was looking for Camilla. She spotted her in pale gray and a pillbox hat. The service went on, the vows were spoken, and the world saw a fairy tale.
The honeymoon began aboard the royal yacht Britannia. As the couple compared diaries, two photographs of Camilla fell out of his. Then a new pair of cufflinks appeared on his wrists, two letters entwined. She asked if Camilla had given them.
By her account, he said yes, they were a present from a friend, and they had a row. The bulimia, she said, was appalling, four times a day on the yacht. At night she dreamt of Camilla. Her hope, she said, was slashed by day two.
The prince’s own letters from the voyage described a different scene: he wrote that marriage was very jolly while his young wife chatted with sailors and cooks. Two people lived the same days and felt entirely different things. At Balmoral, she stopped sleeping and eating. She returned to London for treatment, and the doctors offered her pills.
She decided that time, patience, and adapting were all that was needed. She had been thrown into the deep end, she said, and nobody ever helped her at all. Meanwhile, the public was falling in love with her. Every day she was on the front pages.
She was baffled by it; she had done nothing specific, she said, nothing like climbing Mount Everest. In January 1982, a few months pregnant, she threw herself down a staircase at Sandringham. The queen, she said, was absolutely horrified, shaking. Her husband, by her account, went out riding, and when he returned, dismissed it.
She said he told her she was crying wolf, that she was always doing this to him, and that he was not going to listen. The baby, Prince William, was born healthy on June 21, 1982. After his birth, she said, she suffered from postnatal depression, which no one ever discussed. The depression, in her telling, gave everybody a label: Diana’s unstable, Diana’s mentally unbalanced.
The bulimia, she said, was like a secret disease, a comfort that gave her the feeling of a pair of arms around her, but only temporarily. In the summer of 1984, she said, the couple were closer than they had ever been, for six weeks before Harry was born. She knew the baby was a boy and did not tell her husband. When Prince Harry arrived on September 15, 1984, she remembered his father saying, “Oh god, it’s a boy,” and adding that the child had red hair.
It just went bang, she said. Our marriage went down the drain. Something inside me closed off. The boys became the center of her life.
She insisted on a warmer, less rigid upbringing, taking them to funfairs and McDonald’s and hugging them publicly at a time royal parents did not. By 1986, the marriage was, in effect, two households under one roof. The couple kept separate rooms, staffs, and diaries. In that year, by his own account, the prince resumed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles after the marriage had, in his words, irretrievably broken down.
That same year, Diana began a relationship with James Hewitt, her riding instructor. She described it years later in tender words: “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him, but I was very let down. ” In 1987, the death of her protection officer, Barry Mannakee, in a motorcycle accident she called the biggest blow of her life.
By her account, she went to the queen, sobbing, and asked what she should do. The answer, as she remembered it, was: “I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless. ” And that was it.
She never asked the queen for help again. In 1989, at a birthday party, she confronted Camilla directly. She said she knew what was going on, apologized for being in the way, and told her, “I want my husband. ” Camilla replied, by Diana’s account, that Diana had everything she ever wanted, all the men in the world in love with her and two beautiful children.
It changed nothing. On New Year’s Eve 1989, at Sandringham, she spoke on the telephone to a friend, James Gilbey. The call was intercepted by radio enthusiasts and recorded. “Squidgygate,” the papers called it.
She described sitting at lunch with her husband’s family, feeling so sad and empty she nearly started crying. After all she had done for this family. The tape reached the front pages in August 1992, and the public could pay to listen to a princess’s loneliness. By then, the war of the Waleses was open.
In February 1992, she was photographed alone on a bench before the Taj Mahal, an image that said everything without a word. On June 7, 1992, the Sunday Times began serializing Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story, built on hours of tapes Diana had recorded in secret. The book told of the bulimia, the staircase, the honeymoon, the confrontation with Camilla. She denied involvement, and the denial held for five years.
The prince wrote to Nancy Reagan that it was a kind of Greek tragedy. His father, Prince Philip, exchanged a series of letters with Diana that were, by the evidence later read in court, kind. On December 9, 1992, Prime Minister John Major announced the couple had decided to separate. On June 29, 1994, the prince told a television interviewer he had been faithful until the marriage had irretrievably broken down.
That autumn, James Hewitt cooperated with a book about their affair. Diana answered on November 20, 1995, in the Panorama interview, recorded in secret at Kensington Palace. Nearly twenty-three million people in Britain watched. Asked about Camilla, she said: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.
” She spoke of the postnatal depression, the bulimia, the label, and her self-harm. She said she would like to be a queen of people’s hearts. That night, the prince’s oldest friend, Nicholas Soames, told the BBC her accusations stemmed from mental illness, that she was showing the advanced stages of paranoia. She had predicted it in the interview itself, describing how people on his side had indicated she was unstable and should be put in a home.
She had said it plainly: “There’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it. ”
In December 1995, at a Christmas gathering, she said four words to her sons’ nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke: “So sorry about the baby. ” The words referred to a wholly false rumor. A lawyer demanded an apology.
The rumor had been planted in her by a BBC journalist, Martin Bashir, who had gained her trust with forged bank statements. On December 20, 1995, Buckingham Palace announced the queen had written to both of them urging a divorce. The divorce was undefended. The decree nisi was granted on July 15, 1996, and the decree absolute on August 28.
The court fee was £20. She received a reported lump sum of about £17 million and kept her apartments at Kensington Palace. Custody of the boys was shared. She lost the style of Her Royal Highness, and the settlement contained a confidentiality clause forbidding discussion of the divorce and their married life.
The one part of her life she had been able to tell in her own words was now the one part she could not speak of. On the day the divorce became final, two hours later, she went to a charity lunch, still wearing the sapphire ring she had chosen herself. She died in Paris on August 31, 1997, a year and three days after the divorce, at the age of thirty-six. The inquest returned a verdict of unlawful killing.
In October 1997, Morton confirmed she had been the source of his book. In 2004, the tapes themselves were broadcast. In 2021, the Dyson inquiry found that Bashir had obtained the Panorama interview by deceit, and the BBC apologized and withdrew it. Camilla married Charles in 2005 and was crowned queen beside him in May 2023.
The woman the bride had searched for in the congregation now wears the crown. The most watched marriage of the century was the one least seen. The court built to protect an institution had no room for a young woman who was ill, and its answer was first silence, then a label, and finally a clause. She recorded it all herself before the clause was signed.
The account is mostly hers, in her own voice. What it tells us, in the end, is what she said on the night she told the country: there is no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.