London: On July 19, 1981, the UK witnessed the seemingly fairy-tale wedding of heir apparent Prince Charles to the beautiful and charming but shy Diana Spencer — an aristocrat of royal stock who was less than a month out of her teens.
The ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral in London was watched by a global television audience of 750 million, while 600,000 well-wishers lined the streets around the church.
While the marriage produced two sons — William in 1982 and Harry two years later — it soon deteriorated. In 1986, Charles rekindled his romance with Camilla Parker Bowles, a married woman 14 years Diana’s senior, and later revealed that by that time his and Diana’s relationship had “broken down irretrievably”.
Diana said that, when she confronted Charles over his infidelity with Camilla, he replied: “I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”
She was marginalised and saw less and less of Charles as time went by. “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” she famously said in a 1995 interview. Diana ultimately had an affair of her own — with her riding instructor, Major James Hewitt — and her marriage to Charles ended in divorce in 1996.
It seems like it was doomed from the beginning, however, judging by the tapes of what Diana said to her voice coach Peter Settelen in 1992-93 — the contents of which were broadcast in the UK for the first time in July.
They first met when Diana was just 16 and Charles, who was dating her older sister at the time, was in his late 20s. She said she was “unimpressed” by him then but, three years later, they met again and this time she said: “He chatted me up, you know, he was like a bad rash, he was all over me, and I thought, you know, urgh.
“He started kissing me and everything, and I thought, ‘Urgh this is not what people do’. And he was all over me for the rest of the evening, followed me around, everything, like a puppy. I was flattered but I was very puzzled.”
She reveals she met Charles only 13 times before their wedding and, recalling a 1981 interview, she added: “The most extraordinary thing is we had this ghastly interview the day we announced our engagement and this ridiculous ITN man said, ‘Are you in love?’. I thought, what a thick question, so I said, ‘Yes, of course we are’ ... and Charles turned round and said, ‘Whatever in love means’.
“That threw me completely. I thought, what a strange question and answer. Absolutely traumatised me.”
To add to the problems with their relationship, biographer Tina Brown says Charles soon became jealous of his wife’s popularity.
“Everywhere they would go, there were two lines,” said Brown. “Charles would go down one line, and Diana the other; the side that got Charles would groan, and the side of Diana, everybody cheered and went crazy.
“After a time, that gets old, and in the end Prince Charles felt very overlooked, very hurt, very left out. He didn’t have the self-confidence or the secure nature of his manhood, in a way, to accept that Diana, forevermore, was going to eclipse him.”
So Diana — whose ancestry can be traced back to former monarchs James II, Charles II and even the Tudor Henry VII, as well as to a string of mistresses of former kings — faced up to a future outside of the royal family, her destiny as a future queen denied.
After her divorce, she had a two-year relationship with British-Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who she reportedly described as “Mr Wonderful” and whose family she went to visit in Lahore in 1996, apparently on the invitation of Imran Khan.
Her final romance was with Dodi Fayed, the son of Egyptian billionaire Mohammad Al Fayed, on whose yacht the couple enjoyed a private getaway in the Mediterranean.
Various sources have offered conflicting views on the seriousness or otherwise of that summer fling, but the world was denied the chance to see if there would be a happy ending for Diana by the Paris car crash that took the lives of both her and Dodi on August 31, 1997.
— The writer is a freelance journalist based in the UK
