The terrible accident that occurred under the Alma bridge in Paris on August 31, 1997 would have prevented Lady Diana to realize a desire pondered for a long time: to make public a correspondence that could, perhaps, reveal an unpublished background to her union with Charles III. The princess wanted, it seems, to tell a part of her history at court that had remained in the shadows for reasons unknown until now and that would have put her ex-husband in a difficult, even embarrassing, position.
Charles’s Letters to Diana
Lady D and Charles have they ever truly loved each other? Was there at least a moment of peace in their stormy relationship? The answer is not easy to give. Their history, in some ways, has not been entirely linear. The behavior of the current King, in particular, seems ambiguous at times.
According to royal biographer Ingrid Seward, however, that period of love and serenity between the two did exist and there is evidence that princess he would have liked to make known to the whole world: “Diana told me very briefly, before she died, that she hoped people would see the love letters she had received from Charles.”the expert told The Times on July 23. “She really wanted people to know that she loved Charles and that he loved her. I always remembered that. (Diana) wanted her children to know that. There was a time of great love between them.”
Apparently, however, no one has seen these letters. It is not clear when the princess received them, nor how many there were, nor where they are today. The alleged existence of the correspondencethen, only fuels the mystery regarding the true feelings of Charles and Diana, complicating the narrative of their story and the implications of their choices.
“Irreparably damaged”
It is not easy to try to figure out exactly when Charles sent the love letters to Diana. We know that the then heir to the throne and the princess married on July 29, 1981, when she was 20 and he was 33. They had met for the first time in 1977 and, People reminds us, they met only 13 times before the big day. In 1982 they had their first child, the Prince William and in 1984 their second child, Prince Harry. On 9 December 1992, the then Prime Minister John Major announced to Parliament the couple’s separation and on 28 August 1996 the divorce was made official.
Lady Diana lost the style of Royal Highness, but retained the title of Princess of Wales. In those 15 years, however, several events occurred which, examined from our perspective, make the story quite confusing and, consequently, rather complicated to hypothesize a dating for the correspondence. On 29 June 1994, in the interview with Jonathan Dimbleby reported by the New York Times, Charles said he had been faithful to his wife “until” their relationship “he was not irreparably damaged, even though we both tried.”
In another historic interview, the one given to the BBC on 20 November 1995, Diana, on the contrary, revealed: “There were three of us in this wedding, so it was a little crowded”referring to the connection between the then Prince of Galles and Camilla. Who was telling the truth? Was there really a moment when Charles convinced himself that he could make his marriage to Diana work and, perhaps, even believed that he was in love with his wife?
“Whatever ‘in love’ means”
On February 24, 1981, when Charles and Diana released their first statements after the official announcement of the engagementthe interviewer asked them if they were in love. The princess replied: “Naturally”. The prince let slip a more enigmatic sentence: “Whatever it means to be ‘in love’”. Diana laughed and Charles added that the word “lovers” could lend itself “to the interpretation” of anyone who listened to it.
Although the princess had appeared amused by the comment of theheir to the thronein the recordings included in the documentary “Diana. In Her Own Words” (2017) recalled: “Carlo turned around and said ‘whatever ‘in love’ means,’ completely throwing me off…it traumatized me.”
Perhaps Carlo’s sentence was not the height of aplomb and elegance: it is not excluded, however, that it did not exactly reflect the thoughts of the prince. Or rather, that it was an incomplete reflection, said without worrying too much about the consequences, about offending Diana and about the fact that those words would be quoted countless times in the years to come.
Royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith offered a rather convincing explanation to People: “It was a completely inappropriate thing for him to say, but understandable, given the way his mind worked and the kind of things he had said in the years before. You have to look at it in the context of the series of interviews he gave in the 1970s, about what he wanted in a wife, what it really meant to be in love. He was mulling things over and thinking out loud. I don’t see it as a callous, cruel statement.” More than anything it would have been a philosophical commentarylet’s say, said at the most inopportune moment and left forever hanging.
“Your face is on the tea towels”
If Carlo’s sentence during the first interview after the engagement can be interpreted in different ways, the same cannot be said for the bracelet that Lady Diana would have found in the office of the prince’s personal secretary, Michael Colborne, shortly before the wedding. A gift from Charles to Camilla on which were engraved the initials of their nicknames, namely “Fred” And “Gladys” (taken from the names of characters from the comedy series “The Goon Show”).
In the recordings sent to Andrew Morton for the writing of his book-scandal “Diana. Her True Story” (1992), the princess claimed she was on the verge of calling off the wedding after the discovery: “I was still too immature to understand all the messages that were coming to me. And then someone in her office told me that my husband had purchased a bracelet for her. One day I walked into the office… and I said, ‘Oh, what’s in the package?’. I was told, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t look.’ So I opened it and there was the bracelet. I was shocked and said, ‘He’s going to give it to her tonight.’ Anger, anger, anger…”.
Diana would have asked her for advice family. “He invited his sisters to lunch at Buckingham Palace and spoke to them about his situation,” writes Morton. “She was confused, sad and bewildered by the turn of events. At the time, when she seriously considered calling off the wedding, (her sisters) downplayed her fears and forebodings of disaster. ‘Unlucky Duch,’ they said, calling (Diana) by her nickname. Your face is on the tea towels, so it’s too late to back out.”
“I do not love you”
But that’s not all: according to the revelations of Penny Thornton, Diana’s friend, in the documentary “The Diana Interview. Revenge of the Princess”, the night before the wedding the irreparable happened: “One of the most shocking things Diana told me was that the night before the wedding Charles confessed to her that he didn’t love her.” Furthermore, according to the reconstructions of the sources, the then Prince of Wales would have hesitated quite a bit before asking Lady D to marry him. To the point of irritating the Prince Philipwho allegedly ordered him: “Either you marry her or you leave her. She’s only 19.”
A parenthesis of happiness?
All these events, concentrated in the period immediately preceding the royal wedding, give us the picture of a stormy union from the beginning. After the wedding, things even got worse due to their incompatibility of character. In this regard, on 21 June 1992 Charles wrote to the former First Lady Nancy Reaganwith whom he had been corresponding since 1985, quoted by People, that his union with Diana was increasingly resembling a “Greek tragedy and it would certainly make a great play. It’s terrible. Few people would believe it.”
The events do not even coincide with the insiders’ reconstruction according to which Carlo had broken off the relationship with Camilla after her marriage to Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973 (they divorced in 1995), and then took her back in 1986, at the same time as Diana’s liaison with Major Hewitt. All of this makes it even more difficult to date Charles’s alleged love letters to Diana. Complicated, but not impossible.
The period between the first meeting, in 1977 and 1984 could be the right one. In particular thesummer of 1984as Andrew Morton still claims in “Diana. Her True Story” (1992). In fact Charles and the princess would have “they grew very close to each other in the six weeks before Harry was born, closer than they had ever been.”
Of course, these are just unverifiable hypotheses, for now.
However, we cannot exclude a priori that between Carlo And Diana there was at least a parenthesis of more or less apparent happiness and that the alleged love letters were the concrete expression of this temporary tranquility. A moment in life in which both would have believed they could resist, that they could change the situation. Even despite the possible presence of Camilla.