When Diana Spencer married into the House of Windsor, she captured the hearts of the world. But while the public adored her, the people closest to her often failed her. From the moment she stepped into royal life, she was caught in a spiral of conflict and scandal that ultimately ended in her tragic death. Yet that is only one side of the story.
The real story of Princess Diana is far more heartbreaking than most people ever knew. Diana’s parents, John and Frances Spencer, were high-ranking aristocrats desperate for a male heir. In 1960, they had their third child, a boy, but he died only hours after birth. Diana arrived a year and a half later, in July 1961, born into a family still grieving that loss and already under enormous strain.
A younger brother, Charles, came three years later, but he did little to ease the unhappiness at the heart of the Spencer household. Diana’s parents began fighting almost constantly. Her two older sisters escaped to boarding school as soon as they could, and Diana did her best to shield her little brother from their parents’ quarrels. There was no one to shield her.
When the marriage finally collapsed, it was dramatic. On the surface, it seemed that everything fell apart when Frances left her husband for another man. In truth, there was far more to the story. Diana later claimed that the relationship had been marked by physical abuse alongside the infidelity.
When Frances finally left John Spencer, a chain of terrible events began that would damage everyone connected to them. After the divorce, John sued Frances for custody of Diana, then seven years old, and her siblings. Frances’s own mother testified against her daughter, helping John win the case. Frances was allowed to see her children only on weekends.
Diana later recalled how painful that arrangement was, how it broke her heart to watch her mother cry every Saturday night as the time came for them to leave. The effect on her was profound. While her older sisters, Sarah and Jane, were excellent students, Diana had no interest in academics. Her parents’ divorce had disrupted her education at a critical stage.
She enjoyed outdoor activities and was naturally social, but she never took her schooling seriously. Still, she shared one trait with her sisters: she frequently had crushes on their former boyfriends. That tendency would play a role in a turning point in her life. In 1976, Diana’s life got worse when her father married Raine, Countess of Dartmouth.
Diana and her siblings quickly nicknamed their stepmother “acid rain” because of her sharp temper and vengeful streak. When Diana’s father suffered a brain hemorrhage, Raine refused to let his children visit him in the hospital. The unhappiness at home did nothing to improve Diana’s attitude toward school. After failing her secondary school exams twice, she dropped out at sixteen.
By eighteen, she was living in London with roommates, working odd jobs and childcare positions. It was an ordinary, modest life, and she was happy with it. But it was all about to change. Around that time, Diana’s sister Sarah began bringing around her new boyfriend, Charles, the Prince of Wales.
Diana, then sixteen, later admitted that she saw the prince, who was more than a decade older, as a sad man. But she also noticed that he seemed interested in her, not in her sister. Because she was so young, nothing happened until her nineteenth birthday. That year, Diana was visiting a friend for the weekend at the same time as Charles.
They sat together, and she commented on how he had looked at the funeral of his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten. She told him he had seemed so lonely. As Diana put it, Charles almost pounced on her in response, then demanded that she end her weekend and return to Buckingham Palace with him. Diana resisted his advances that weekend, but he invited her on an upcoming sailing trip, and she agreed to go.
Then came a weekend at Balmoral, his family’s castle. When Charles wanted to spend time with her, she felt both flattered and excited. But she had never dated anyone, and she had no idea what was normal. In fact, Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s friend and former lover, gave Diana a great deal of advice about how to handle the prince.
It took Diana a long time to realize why Camilla was such an expert on the subject. The next time Diana went to see Charles, he proposed. They had met only about thirteen times in total. Despite the emotional words he spoke, there was no love in his eyes and no affection in his manner.
The absurdity of the situation, the short courtship, the age gap, and the fact that agreeing would one day make her Queen of England left Diana stunned and confused. She accepted the proposal, even though something inside her told her she would never be queen. After the engagement, Diana traveled to Australia to enjoy a few weeks of peace before the inevitable press frenzy. But while she was on the other side of the world, Charles never called her once.
That coldness was only a painful preview of what was to come. As soon as the press realized that Diana and Charles were involved, they descended on her and everyone in her life. She was still living with roommates, but none of them could take calls from family because journalists were constantly on the line. When Charles called Diana to pass along Camilla’s complaint that there were four journalists outside her window, there were thirty-four outside Diana’s.
She never complained, but she developed a terrifying way of dealing with the cameras. Though she was still a novice driver, Diana realized that one of the most effective ways to lose the paparazzi was to speed through a green light at the last moment. Diana asked the royal family for help with the press, but they essentially told her she was on her own. That attitude did not change when her engagement to Charles became official, and she left her job as a nursery assistant and moved into Buckingham Palace.
The institution left her to face her fate alone, and Diana felt extremely isolated. Living at Buckingham Palace put Diana closer to Charles, but in the worst possible way. Once, she overheard him on the phone telling Camilla, “Whatever happens, I will always love you. ” She also discovered their nicknames for each other, “Gladys” and “Fred,” when she learned that Charles had made a bracelet for Camilla engraved with those names.
Shortly after that, just a month before the wedding, Charles left on a trip, and the image of Diana crying as she said goodbye became iconic. But she was not crying for him. She was crying for herself. That was reportedly the day Diana gave up trying to stand between Charles and Camilla.
When she heard them talking on the phone, she knew she could pick up the other extension, but instead she left them alone. As Diana later said, “It just broke my heart. ”
She once tried to pull out of the wedding, confiding in her sisters. But when Diana told them that her fiancé was in love with another woman, they only laughed and told her it was too late, so she had better get used to it.
Defeated, Diana pushed herself toward the altar. On July 29, 1981, Diana Spencer walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral to meet Charles, Prince of Wales. She was a little late, because her famous, enormous dress slowed her down in the carriage on the way there and while she walked.
She took her wedding vows before 3,500 guests, with two million people waiting outside to greet the couple, not to mention around 750 million watching from home. As she walked down the aisle, Diana forgot all the days she had spent crying that week and focused instead on the lavish ceremony unfolding before her. It looked like a fairy tale, yes, but it was marked by more than a few stumbles. While reciting her vows, Diana accidentally mixed up the order of Charles’s first two names.
She was not alone in that, as Charles made his own mistake in the vows as well. The couple also asked that the vow in which the bride promises to obey the groom be removed, which scandalized the more conservative members of the royal family. Still, surrounded by all the trappings of romance, Diana convinced herself again that a happy life lay ahead. It took only the honeymoon to prove her wrong.
During the first stage of their trip, Diana realized Charles was more interested in the books he had brought than in spending time with her, and they were rarely alone for more than a moment. It was no surprise that in the period before and after the wedding, Diana’s mental health struggles worsened, including episodes of binge eating and purging. People could tell something was wrong, but they had no idea how bad it was. Diana became obsessed with Camilla and dreamed about her every night for the first three months of her marriage.
Finally, she found some relief when she became pregnant in October 1981. But although the coming baby was a welcome distraction from her situation, the pregnancy took a toll on her already fragile body. A few months into the pregnancy, Diana shocked herself and the court when she fell down the stairs in a terrifying accident. Fortunately, she and the baby were fine, but few people remembered or even knew the dark truth about the incident.
Diana later admitted that after an argument with Charles, she had thrown herself down the stairs on purpose. It was a cry for help, but Charles could not hear it. The arrival of Prince William in June 1982 brought unconditional love into Diana’s life, but it did little to improve her marriage, especially after she suffered severe postpartum depression. She and Charles went through a brief happy period when she became pregnant again, this time with Prince Harry in 1984.
But after the birth, Charles withdrew back into Camilla’s orbit. He had wanted a girl. As Charles and Camilla revived their affair, Diana’s attention turned to James Hewitt, a cavalry officer and her riding instructor. Their long-running relationship became another of the palace’s exposed secrets.
But again, it did not heal the pain Diana felt in her marriage. Eventually, it all had to come to a head. Diana usually avoided Camilla, but when she received an invitation to the fortieth birthday party of Camilla’s sister in 1989, she realized the time for confrontation had come. Getting Camilla alone, Diana sat in front of her and politely told her that she knew exactly what was going on between her and Charles.
She made no unusual demands. All she asked was that they not treat her like a fool. Then she left, and a new phase of her life began. The confrontation with Camilla gave Diana a sense of freedom she had rarely experienced before.
She started building relationships and establishing a reputation as the people’s princess. She was one of the very few public figures who advocated for AIDS victims at the start of the epidemic. In a famous moment, she not only shook hands with a sick man but also hugged him. In 1992, this connection with the public gave Diana the strength to move forward.
Before that year, her whole story, the betrayal in her marriage, the depression, the struggle with her own body, had been carefully concealed. That changed when the Sunday Times began publishing excerpts, with Diana’s approval, from the book Diana: Her True Story. Nothing was ever the same again. After the partial publication of the book, Charles and Diana separated officially.
While the royal family desperately hoped the marriage could be repaired, the drama had only just begun. Shortly after the excerpts appeared, a recording of an alleged conversation between Diana and her childhood friend James Gilbey from 1989 leaked. Its contents strongly suggested a relationship between them. On the tape, she expressed fear that she might be pregnant, and he called her “darling” and “Squidgy,” which is why the press named the incident Squidgygate.
But when it came to secret tapes, the worst was yet to come. This time it was a recording of a conversation between Charles and Camilla. The eight-minute conversation was extremely explicit and included the infamous moment when Charles told Camilla he wished he could live inside her trousers. These successive scandals kept the PR teams for Diana and Charles busy around the clock as they tried to improve their clients’ images.
Diana even sat for a tell-all interview with Martin Bashir, delivering her famous line: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. ” Any hopes they had for reconciliation quickly vanished. In December 1995, the Queen wrote to both Diana and Charles asking them to divorce. They both agreed, but that soon brought a new battle to their doorstep.
Instead of arguing over custody or money, Charles and Diana fought over Diana’s right to keep her title. While the Queen was reportedly willing to let Diana keep the title of Her Royal Highness, Charles insisted on stripping her of it upon the divorce. When his father, Prince Philip, backed him, Diana shot back, “My title is a lot older than yours, Philip. ” After all, she was the daughter of a viscount from the ancient Spencer family.
In the end, Diana lost the right to use the title of Her Royal Highness, though she kept the title of Princess of Wales. Unfortunately, this did not ease her pain, and she expressed her anger in other ways. Many believe Diana was the one who leaked the story that Charles had been in a relationship with his personal assistant, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and that Tiggy had secretly aborted his child. Diana allegedly approached Tiggy at a party and said something like, “I’m so sorry about the baby.
” It was an ugly, lonely time. Diana could not bear to be alone for long. After her divorce, she dated Hasnat Khan, a British-Pakistani heart surgeon, and almost married him before their concerns about privacy and reputed disapproval from her family over his Islamic faith drove them apart. Nearly two years later, she quickly entered another relationship, the one that would lead to her end.
In 1997, Diana took her sons for a summer holiday in the south of France, where they were guests of Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed. There she met his son, Dodi, and the two began dating. But when the press realized Diana had a new lover after they captured photos of the couple embracing, they went wild. Soon the paparazzi were chasing them across France, and the couple often resorted to desperate maneuvers to shake them off.
On August 30, 1997, Diana and Dodi had dinner at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and headed back to Dodi’s apartment in a Mercedes. Just after midnight on August 31, 1997, the car carrying Diana, Dodi, the driver Paul, and bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones approached the entrance of the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. As the car entered the tunnel, it was surrounded by motorcycles carrying photographers. The car crashed inside the tunnel while traveling at the speed that had enabled Diana to outrun the paparazzi for years.
When ambulances arrived fifteen minutes later, both Rees-Jones and Diana were conscious. Diana was reportedly repeating, “Oh my God. ” A doctor at the scene thought she was merely in shock, but the truth was far more devastating. Shortly after she was pulled from the car, she suffered a cardiac arrest.
After hours of trying to stabilize her, the doctors could do nothing more. She was pronounced dead at the hospital three hours after her initial rescue. Her lover Dodi and the driver Henri Paul also died in the crash. The aftermath was something the world had never seen.
While Prince Charles and Diana’s sisters rushed to France to retrieve her body, mourners left more than a million bouquets of flowers outside the gates of Kensington Palace. Over the following days, the pile of flowers grew to five feet high in some places. The public grief at the funeral was just as immense. As details of what happened emerged, the tragedy deepened.
After Diana’s death, several investigations were launched into the cause of the crash. Some of what they found was expected. Speed and the presence of intrusive photographers were contributing factors. But there was one dark surprise.
The driver, Paul, had alcohol and prescription drugs in his system. Still, some could not accept that as a full explanation. For nearly a decade, Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, insisted that his son’s death was the result of a murder conspiracy by British intelligence. Even Diana had suspicions that the establishment was out to get her.
She once suspected that Charles might harm her to clear the way for himself to be with his assistant Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Diana’s sons could barely come to terms with her death. After receiving the news from France, Prince Charles had to wake William and Harry before dawn to tell them about their mother. The boys were stunned, and it was their grandfather, Prince Philip, who convinced William and Harry to walk behind their mother’s coffin at the funeral days later.
He did it with a few heartbreaking sentences. When the young princes were hesitant, Philip reportedly said to his eldest grandson, William, “If you don’t walk, I think you’ll regret it later. If I walk, will you walk with me? ”
At the funeral, Philip, William, Harry, Charles, and Diana’s brother walked behind her coffin all the way from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace while millions watched and grieved.
The boys did not walk that path for the world or for the institution that had so often failed their mother. They walked it for her, and for themselves, carrying the weight of a loss that would follow them for the rest of their lives.