In the summer of 1981, roughly 750 million people watched a 20-year-old bride walk up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But the bride, by her own account, was searching the congregation for one face.
She found it: pale gray, a pillbox hat. It belonged to Camilla Parker Bowles.
A few days into the honeymoon, two photographs of the same woman fell out of her husband’s diary, and a pair of cufflinks appeared on his wrists. Two letters C entwined. He called them a present from a friend.
She later said her hope was slashed by day two. Fifteen years on, the marriage ended with a clause forbidding her to speak of it.
On February 6, 1981, at Windsor Castle, the Prince of Wales asked a 19-year-old kindergarten assistant to marry him, and she laughed. She told the story herself ten years later into a tape recorder in her own sitting room. “So he said, ‘Will you marry me?’
And I laughed. I remember thinking, ‘This is a joke.’”
She remembered what went through her mind too. “You won’t be queen,” she thought, “but you’ll have a tough role.” Almost everything that follows in this story belongs to her, because she was the one who described it.
She described it three times over four years: once to a tape recorder carried into Kensington Palace by a friend in 1991, once to a voice coach with a video camera in 1992 and 1993, and once to a television crew in November 1995 in front of the whole country.
Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, at Park House on the royal estate of Sandringham. She was the fourth of five children of Viscount Althorp, who would later become the eighth Earl Spencer. The Spencers were among the oldest families in England.
Her father had served as an equerry to two monarchs. As a child, she played with two of the queen’s younger sons.
Before the engagement, she was living in a shared flat in London and working as a nursery assistant at the Young England kindergarten in Pimlico. The newspapers gave her a name: Shy Di. Charles had been born on November 14, 1948, the eldest child of the woman who became queen.
By 1980, he was past 30, unmarried, and under steady pressure to find a wife and secure the succession.
By her own telling, he was the one doing the pursuing. “He chatted me up,” she said years later. “He was all over me like a bad rash.”
They did not know each other well. The figure that has come down from the biographers is that they met only about a dozen times before he proposed.
She was 19. He was 32. He asked her on February 6, and the world was told 18 days later.
She chose her own ring, a large sapphire surrounded by diamonds from the royal jeweler Garrard. Of all the decisions that would be made about her life in the months that followed, this was one of the few that she made entirely herself.
On the day the engagement was announced, the couple sat side by side for a television interview. The interviewer asked whether they were in love. “Of course,” she said.
Beside her, the prince added four words that have followed him ever since: “Whatever in love means.” She later said the remark traumatized her.
Within a week of the engagement, by her own account, something had already gone wrong. They were together, and he put his hand on her waist. “My husband put his hand on my waistline,” she said on the tapes, using the word husband for a man who was then only her fiancé, “and said, ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’”
What it triggered was an illness she would carry through most of her marriage: bulimia. She dated it precisely. “It started the week after we got engaged,” she said.
There was something else, too, and it had a name. She had heard about Camilla Parker Bowles. Camilla had been close to the prince since the early 1970s.
One day, Diana said, she overheard him on the telephone in his bath. He said, “Whatever happens, I’ll always love you.” She did not say she knew for certain who was on the other end of the line.
She did not need to.
Before the wedding, she came across a gift he had had made, and she understood it was meant for the other woman. “I opened it and there was the bracelet,” she remembered, “and I said, ‘I know where this is going.’ I was devastated.”
She went to her sisters and told them she could not go through with it. Their answer has become one of the most quoted lines in the whole story. “Well, bad luck, Duch,” they told her.
“Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out.”
The glass coach carried her to St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981. Inside sat about 3,500 guests.
Outside, about 600,000 people stood in the streets. On television sets across the planet, about 750 million people were watching. The dress alone had cost £9,000, and its train ran to 25 feet behind her.
What she remembered about the day was not the dress or the crowd or the music. It was a feeling and a single face. “I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter,” she said.
As she walked, she was looking. “As I was walking up the aisle, I was looking for her. I spotted Camilla, pale gray, pillbox hat.”
Camilla Parker Bowles was a guest at the wedding.
The vows were spoken. She called him Philip Charles instead of Charles Philip, a slip of the tongue. She also left out a word that brides had spoken for centuries: she did not promise to obey.
Then came the drive back through the crowds, the balcony, and the kiss.
Britannia sailed into the Mediterranean with the newlyweds aboard, a 12-day cruise on the Royal Yacht. The moment she remembered most clearly came when the two of them sat down to look at their diaries. “Out comes two pictures of Camilla,” she said.
Then there were the cufflinks. Two Cs entwined. She asked him outright.
“Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?” By her account, he did not deny it. He said, “Yes, so what’s wrong?
They’re a present from a friend.” And boy, did we have a row.
The bulimia was now out at sea running out of control. “It was appalling,” she said. “Absolutely appalling.
It was rife. It was four times a day on the yacht.” At night, she said, “I dreamt of Camilla the whole time.”
She had tremendous hope, but it was slashed by day two. “I remember crying my heart out on my honeymoon.”
The prince wrote from Britannia too. He described his young wife dashing about chatting up all the sailors and the cooks in the galley, while he remained hermit-like on the veranda deck. He wrote that marriage was very jolly.
Two people on the same ship, on the same days, in the same small space at sea. One was crying her heart out, making herself sick four times a day. The other was writing that marriage was very jolly.
The honeymoon went on in the Highlands at Balmoral. It was there, by her own account, that she began to come apart. “Couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Didn’t eat. The whole world was collapsing around me.” She came back to London to seek treatment.
What the doctors gave her, by her own account, was a prescription. “They were telling me pills.”
The Diana that was still very much there, she said, decided that it was just time, patience, and adapting. “I was thrown into the deep end,” she said. “Nobody ever helped me at all.”
Meanwhile, the public was falling in love with her. Within a few years, she would be the most photographed woman alive. “Day after day, the whole world were focusing on me,” she said.
“Every day I was in the front page of the papers.”
In January 1982, a few months pregnant with the child who would one day be heir to the throne, she was at Sandringham with the family. By her own account, she threw herself down a staircase. “I threw myself down the stairs,” she said, “bearing in mind I was carrying a child.”
The baby was unharmed. By her own account, it was the queen who found her. The queen, she said, was absolutely horrified, shaking.
Her husband’s reaction, as she described it, was very different. Charles went out riding, she said, and when he came back, it was just dismissal. Total dismissal.
She said he told her she was crying wolf. He used a sentence that has been quoted ever since: “I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me.”
Prince William arrived on June 21, 1982. Thirteen years later, sitting in her own sitting room at Kensington Palace in front of a television camera, she gave the illness its name. “I was unwell with postnatal depression,” she said, “which no one ever discusses.”
What she remembered most bitterly was the way her illness was understood around her. “The depression gave everybody a wonderful new label,” she said. “Diana’s unstable and Diana’s mentally unbalanced.”
She was candid about the bulimia too. “It’s like a secret disease,” she said. “You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb.”
Eating and then being sick again and again gave her a kind of comfort. “It’s like having a pair of arms around you,” she said. “But it’s temporary.”
In the summer of 1984, by her own account, the prince and princess of Wales were closer than they had ever been. She was pregnant again. “We were very, very close to each other,” she said, “the six weeks before Harry was born.”
She already knew something her husband did not. “I knew it was a boy,” she said, “and I didn’t tell him.”
Prince Harry was born on September 15, 1984. By her account, his father looked at the baby and said, “Oh god, it’s a boy.” And then he added, “And he even has red hair.”
She did not hear it as a joke. “It just went bang. Our marriage,” she said.
“The whole thing went down the drain. Something inside me closed off.”
By 1986, in her telling and in the record that followed, the household was running like two. The couple kept separate rooms, separate staffs, and separate diaries. In 1986, the prince resumed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
In the same year, the princess began a relationship of her own with a cavalry officer named James Hewitt. It would last about five years.
She summed up what these years did to her in a single image. “My husband made me feel so inadequate in every possible way,” she said. “Every time I tried to come up for air, he pushed me back down again.”
By 1987, the newspapers had a name for the couple: the Glums.
Of all the doors she knocked on in those years, by her own account, the heaviest belonged to her mother-in-law. She told the story to her voice coach, Peter Settelen. “So I went to the top lady,” she said.
“And I was sobbing and I said, ‘What do I do?’” The answer as she remembered it was ten words long. “And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do.
Charles is hopeless.’ And that was it.”
In 1989, at a birthday party, by her own account, the princess went downstairs where Camilla was. “I know what’s going on between you and Charles,” she said. Then she said something more extraordinary still, an apology.
“I’m sorry I’m in the way,” she said. “And it must be hell for both of you, but I do know what’s going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.”
And then she said the plainest thing she said in the whole confrontation: “I want my husband.”
Camilla’s reply, as the princess remembered it, was this: “You’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got all the men in the world fall in love with you, and you’ve got two beautiful children. What more do you want?”
At Sandringham on the last day of 1989, she spoke to a friend on the telephone. The call was intercepted by radio enthusiasts with scanners and recorded. The newspapers called the scandal Squidgygate.
But listen past the endearments, and the tape holds something more important. “I was very bad at lunch,” she told him. “And I nearly started blubbing.
I just felt so sad and empty.” She told him about the Queen Mother. “It’s not hatred,” she said.
“It’s sort of pity and interest mixed in one. Every time I look up, she’s looking at me.”
On June 7, 1992, the Sunday Times began to print Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, under a headline that put the marriage in a single line: “Diana driven to five suicide bids by uncaring Charles.” The book was built on her own voice. In 1991, a friend had carried a tape recorder in and out of Kensington Palace, and she had recorded hours of answers to the author’s questions.
She denied having helped with the book.
Two weeks after the serialization began, the prince wrote a letter to Nancy Reagan. His reply survives. “It is so awful,” he wrote.
“Very few people would believe it. And then no one can really understand what it all means until it happens to you, which is why it all keeps getting worse and worse. One day I will tell you the whole story.
It is a kind of Greek tragedy.”
In the same month, the prince’s father, Prince Philip, sat down and wrote to his daughter-in-law. Over the next four months, letters went back and forth. His tone was frank and, by the evidence later read in court, kind.
“If invited, I will always do my utmost to help you and Charles to the best of my ability,” he wrote, “but I am quite ready to concede that I have no talents as a marriage counselor.”
On December 9, 1992, the Prime Minister, John Major, stood up in the House of Commons and read a statement from Buckingham Palace. “It is announced from Buckingham Palace that with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate.”
She was 31 years old, separated from the heir to the throne. The sessions with Peter Settelen ran from September 1992 to December 1993. On paper, they were lessons in public speaking.
In practice, they were something closer to confession. “There’s just nobody to physically scream at,” she said. “Or someone to put their arms around me.
Just listen when I cry.”
On June 29, 1994, the prince appeared in a long television documentary. Asked whether he had been faithful to his wife, he said he had until the marriage had, in his words, irretrievably broken down. That autumn, an authorized biography was published.
Her own secret was dragged into the light that same autumn. A book called Princess in Love appeared, written with the cooperation of James Hewitt.
On November 20, 1995, she answered him in her own voice on camera in front of the whole country. The interview was recorded for the BBC program Panorama. Nearly 23 million people in Britain watched it.
She was asked about Camilla. She answered with the most famous sentence of the whole marriage. “Well, there were three of us in this marriage,” she said, “so it was a bit crowded.”
She talked about the post-natal depression and the label that came with it. She talked about the bulimia. She talked about hurting her arms and legs.
At the end, she was asked what role she wanted for herself. “I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts in people’s hearts,” she said. “But I don’t see myself being queen of this country.”
Before the night was out, her husband’s oldest friend had answered. Nicholas Soames had known the Prince of Wales since 1970. Her accusations, he told the BBC, stemmed from mental illness.
He said she was showing the advanced stages of paranoia. He would later apologize. But on the night itself, that was the answer from her husband’s side.
She had a phrase for what all this had done to her, and she gave it in the interview too. “There’s no better way to dismantle a personality,” she said, “than to isolate it.” She was clear that the people around her had seen what was happening.
“Everybody was very anxious,” she said, “because they could see there were complications but didn’t want to interfere.”
There was a Christmas gathering on December 14, 1995. Among the guests was the young woman who looked after her sons, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. At the gathering, by the account that has come down, the princess said four words to her: “So sorry about the baby.”
There was no baby. The words referred to a rumor, a vicious and wholly false one, that the young nanny had been pregnant.
The response came fast. Four days later, a lawyer approved by the queen wrote demanding an apology. The answer to where the rumor had come from would take more than 25 years to emerge.
In late 1995, a BBC journalist named Martin Bashir had been feeding the princess stories. Among them was the claim about the nanny. It was, as the corporation itself would later admit, wholly baseless.
Bashir had got close to her through deception. He had a graphic designer make fake bank statements, suggesting that people close to her were being paid. He showed them to her brother, Earl Spencer, and her brother introduced him to her.
In 2021, an inquiry led by Lord Dyson found that Bashir had deceived and induced her brother to arrange the meeting. The same inquiry found that she would probably have agreed to be interviewed anyway.
On December 20, 1995, an announcement came from Buckingham Palace. The queen had written to both of them, to her son and to his wife. She urged them to divorce.
The marriage had to end.
Neither of them went to court on the day the marriage ended. The divorce was undefended and uncontested. The decree nisi was granted on July 15, 1996.
The decree absolute came on August 28. The grounds were simple: they had been separated for two years. A clerk from the prince’s legal team took the application to the court by hand with a check for £20 to dodge the cameras.
By press reports, she received a lump sum of about £17 million, along with about £400,000 a year to run her private office. Custody of the boys was shared. She kept her apartments at Kensington Palace.
And she lost something that mattered to her more than she let the public see. With the divorce, the style of Her Royal Highness was taken away. She remained Diana, Princess of Wales, but no longer a royal highness.
There was one more term in the settlement. The agreement contained a confidentiality clause. It forbade discussion of the divorce and of their married life.
The woman who had recorded her marriage on cassettes in 1991, who had talked about it to a voice coach’s camera in 1992 and 93, who had described it on television to 23 million people in 1995, was now bound by agreement not to talk about it at all.
On the day the divorce became final, two hours later, she went to a charity lunch. By one newspaper’s account of that day, she was still wearing the sapphire. It was the ring she had chosen herself 15 years and 6 months earlier.
The one decision about the marriage that had been entirely hers.
She died in Paris on August 31, 1997, a year and three days after the divorce, at the age of 36. The inquest that sat in 2007 and 2008 returned a verdict of unlawful killing, blaming the driver’s negligence and the pursuing vehicles, and found no evidence of any plot.
The account of this marriage did not end with her death. It had been recorded, and the recordings outlived her. In October 1997, Andrew Morton published a new edition of his book, and in it, he confirmed what she had denied for five years: she had been the source all along.
In 2004, an American television network broadcast extracts from the tapes themselves. That same year, extracts from the voice coach’s tapes were broadcast too. In 2017, a British channel broadcast more of them.
In 2021, the inquiry led by Lord Dyson found that Martin Bashir had obtained the Panorama interview by deceit, and the BBC accepted the findings in full. Her elder son said that the corporation’s failures had contributed to his mother’s fear, paranoia, and isolation. The following year, the BBC said it would never broadcast the interview again.
The prince married Camilla Parker Bowles on April 9, 2005. When he became king on September 8, 2022, Camilla became queen. In May 2023, she was crowned beside him.
The woman the bride had searched for in the congregation at St. Paul’s is now queen.
The marriage they describe was crueler than the public could have imagined in 1981. But its cruelty was not the kind that makes for a simple story. There was no single villain in her account.
No one act that broke her. What broke her, by her own telling, was the slow closing of every door.
At the beginning of it all, there was a ring she had picked out herself, a sapphire ringed with diamonds, the one choice in the whole marriage that was entirely hers. She wore it at the engagement and on the day it ended, and it outlasted everything that came between. And on the brightest morning of her life, walking toward a man whose old love sat in the congregation, in front of 750 million strangers, the bride in the 25-foot train had been searching the congregation for one face, and found it.