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- A fairy tale without a happy ending: 45 years since the wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles
A fairy tale without a happy ending: 45 years since the wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles
Exactly 45 years ago, on July 29, 1981, one of the most famous, recognizable and expensive weddings in the history of Great Britain took place, called the "Wedding of the Century". Prince Charles married Diana Spencer, but a happy family life was not destined to happen. About how the Wedding of the Century went and how the couple's relationship developed after — in the material of Izvestia.
How the relationship between Prince Charles and Princess Diana began
Prince Charles and Diana Spencer first met in 1977, when Lady Di was 16 years old. Her older sister Sarah invited the future monarch, with whom she was in a relationship at the time, to the Althorp Estate to hunt. The affair, however, did not last long.
The next time Charles and Diana met was in 1980, three years later, when she was 19 and he was 33. The prince invited the girl to spend the weekend in Cowes, a small town in the north of the Isle of Wight, aboard the royal yacht Britannia. Diana quickly captured the attention of the heir to the throne, and soon he invited her to relax at Balmoral Castle, the Windsor summer residence in Scotland, where he introduced the girl to his family. Elizabeth II immediately liked her: a beautiful young girl from England with a noble family seemed to the queen to be an ideal candidate for the role of princess.
The romance between Diana and Charles developed very quickly, and on February 3, 1981, the prince proposed marriage to Lady Dee. At that time, the couple had been together for about six months, but they did not see each other very often — after a vacation at Balmoral, the young couple went on several dates in London.
At that time, Diana was working as a kindergarten teacher's assistant. She couldn't study — she failed her final exams from school twice, and studied at the institute for only one semester. Nevertheless, Diana proved to be a talented pianist, practiced swimming and diving, studied ballet and tap dancing.
After graduation, she worked in low-paying positions and attended accelerated cooking classes at the same time. So the future princess managed to be a babysitter, a dance teacher, a waitress at parties and an assistant teacher.
Charles received an impeccable education and upbringing, but did not have the best reputation in his personal life. By the age of 33, he had quite a few affairs, and in 1979 he even proposed to his second cousin, but was refused. Even during his relationship with Spencer, the prince had an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles. Subsequently, the affair with Camilla will stretch through the entire family life of Charles and Diana.
The Wedding of the Century
On July 29, 1981, the whole of England joined the televisions, where the royal wedding of Diana Spencer and Prince Charles was shown live. A total of £2,859 million was spent on the celebration, and the wedding itself became the most expensive in British history.
The preparations took five months, and the press eagerly called the celebration a fabulous wedding. It was decided to hold the ceremony not in Westminster Abbey, but in St. Paul's Cathedral, because it could accommodate many more guests. A total of 3,500 people attended the wedding.
However, everything went awry at the very beginning. Firstly, Diana's wedding outfit went down in history as a "disaster dress." Renowned London designers of the time, David and Elizabeth Emanuel, worked on it. They decided to break the record for the longest train in the history of royal weddings and created an 8-meter hemline, which was a dubious decision, given the ivory color of the dress.
But the most important failure of the outfit was the fabric — silk taffeta. This is a hard material that does not just crease, but freezes like paper, and you can return to its original appearance only with the help of an iron. The bride had to ride in a closed carriage to the venue of the ceremony. Upon exiting, it became obvious that everything that could be wrinkled was crumpled, both the dress itself and the long hem. Despite the poor quality of the broadcast at the time, the cameras still captured the princess's disastrous outfit with a bunch of ridiculous folds, not matching the royal wedding.
Secondly, at the ceremony, Diana confused Charles's first and second names out of excitement: instead of "Charles Philip Arthur George," the bride pronounced "Philip Charles Arthur George." In addition, Lady Di did not make a promise in her oath to "obey" her husband, which was done specifically by agreement with Charles. Nevertheless, it became a sensation and shocked the audience. Charles, in turn, instead of saying, as he should have, "I promise to share with you everything that belongs to me," he said, "I promise to share with you everything that belongs to you."
After the wedding, the couple went to Buckingham Palace, where a festive reception was held. On the balcony of the palace, Charles and Diana appeared together in front of the audience, and their kiss became one of the main symbols of the event. The bride's bouquet, consisting of white orchids, freesias, gardenias and lilies of the valley and weighing about 2 kg, was traditionally laid at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.
The family life of Charles and Diana
Immediately after the wedding, the couple went on their honeymoon. First they went to Broadlands, where Charles's brothers decorated their car with a "Just married" sign. Then the newlyweds went to Gibraltar, after which they took a cruise around the Mediterranean Sea, and completed the trip in Scotland, at Balmoral Castle, where Spencer had previously met the royal family.
After returning from their honeymoon, the couple settled in Kensington Palace. Almost immediately after their honeymoon, the couple faced a deep crisis. Charles preferred secluded recreation, hunting and reading, while Diana adored ballet, fashion and active social life. If they spent time together, Charles usually read books to Diana, which they then discussed over breakfast.
Soon, the newly married wife became pregnant. Chalz's plans were to move to the remote Highgrove estate after the birth of his first child, and the prince left to equip the house. Nevertheless, Diana flatly refused to move.
Firstly, the princess hated rural life, preferring social gatherings. And secondly, the estate was adjacent to Camilla Parker-Bowles. Charles actively kept in touch with her even after the wedding. They often spent time together or talked for hours on the phone. At the same time, Charles convinced Diana that this was an exceptionally friendly conversation.
The marriage turned out to be unhappy. The newlyweds were very different, Charles did not take his wife seriously and never put her first for himself, preferring to spend time alone or in the company of his mistress. Diana began to suffer from loneliness, which developed into depression. The stress worsened Lady Dee's long—standing illness, bulimia, which began just a week after the engagement.
As a result, it became clear that the spouses initially perceived marriage differently. If Diana always wanted a real family built on love, then Charles proposed because his family was putting pressure on him to settle down, at least for the press and the public. The wedding was a formality for Charles, and he wasn't going to change his lifestyle because of it. The prince, who was 33 at the time, needed to match royal duties, and 19-year-old Diana seemed like the perfect, unsophisticated candidate.
In the late 1980s, it became known that serious problems had arisen between Charles and Diana. Both spouses began to appear more often at separate events, and their joint outings gradually decreased.
In 1992, British Prime Minister John Major announced the decision of the Prince and Princess of Wales to live separately. At the same time, the marriage was not officially dissolved.
The Prince's affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles
Camilla and Charles met back in 1970 at a social reception where the young prince could often be seen. Then the heir was dating Camilla's friend, who quickly got bored with Charles, and she decided to set him up with Parker-Bowles. She, in turn, although she was not beautiful, had incredible charisma, a slightly rude manner of communication and perseverance. The first thing she said to the prince was, "Did you know that my great-grandmother had an affair with your great-grandfather? Maybe we should try it?"
Charles was not known for his constant relationships — he had a lot of girls. The heir did not think of them as future princesses, since in the end his family had to pick up a wife for him. So, Charles easily made new mistresses, leaving the old ones without regret. It was a completely different story with Camilla — the Crown Prince fell in love.
However, Camilla also had a reputation for being amorous, and at the time of meeting Charles, she was even in a relationship with Officer Andrew Parker-Bowles. Despite the fact that the girl came from a noble family, she did not have secular manners or a suitable upbringing for the future princess. Charles's appearance in Camilla's company led to a series of scandalous investigations by journalists, who began to find more and more compromising material on the prince's companion.
The lovers parted under the onslaught of paparazzi and the royal family, and Charles went to serve in the navy. Camilla returned to her ex and married him in 1973.
Two children were born in the Parker-Bowles marriage. Camilla's husband, Andrew, turned out to be by no means a faithful spouse. The couple's family life was full of infidelities on Andrew's part. Camilla followed her husband's example and after a few years of marriage resumed her relationship with the heir to the British crown. Andrew didn't care at all.
After the separation, the feelings flared up with renewed vigor. Charles spent more and more time with Camilla, which did not leave the queen indifferent. She directly forbade the girl to be near the prince. However, the ban was consistently violated, and Elizabeth II decided to marry her son.
But even after the wedding, the relationship between the prince and Camilla continued. Diana knew about her husband's affair and suffered deeply. In an interview with the BBC in 1995, she uttered the famous phrase: "There were three in our marriage - it's too crowded."
In 1994, Charles revealed for the first time in a TV interview that he had cheated on his wife with Camille. This confession caused a huge response and a flurry of criticism against the heir to the throne. In 1995, Camilla divorced her husband Andrew Parker-Bowles. Soon after, she began to appear in public in the company of Charles, which finally confirmed their close relationship.
The divorce and death of Princess Diana
Although the marriage was preserved only on paper, the Queen's permission was needed to obtain a divorce. As a result, Elizabeth II supported the decision to end the marriage after consulting with Charles and Diana.
On July 15, 1996, the London High Court heard the royal couple's divorce case. The procedure took only three minutes. The list of 31 couples whose marriages ended that day included the names "His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales." In the column "the reason for the divorce," Charles indicated: "There are insurmountable differences." In August 1996, the divorce became legal.
Under the terms of the divorce agreement, Charles paid Diana compensation in the amount of £ 17 million and undertook to cover the annual costs of maintaining her personal office in the amount of £ 500 thousand. To raise these funds, the prince was forced to convert all his investments into cash and even borrow several million from his mother. Queen Elizabeth II herself allowed Diana to continue to own part of Kensington Palace and raise her sons there. However, the princess lost the title of "Her Royal Highness".
After the divorce, Diana continued to do charity work. She participated in international campaigns and remained one of the UK's most prominent public figures. The lack of a royal title did not take away from her another, equally important title — "Queen of human Hearts." She traveled the world a lot, personally visiting the sick, the disabled, and orphans. The Princess provided support to people with AIDS and HIV-infected, fought for the prohibition of anti-personnel mines and helped the homeless.
On the night of August 31 in Paris, Diana Spencer got into a car accident in the tunnel under the Alma Bridge. Around midnight, the deputy head of the security service of the Parisian Ritz hotel, while driving, lost control and crashed into the 13th pillar of the bridge. In the car were Diana Spencer and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed with a personal bodyguard. The driver and Dodi died on the spot. Diana was taken to the hospital, but the girl could not be saved. The only survivor was Al-Fayed's bodyguard.
Before the accident, the car was harassed by French paparazzi, so initially journalists who violated privacy were blamed for the accident. Nevertheless, the investigation, which lasted 18 months, eventually blamed the driver, in whose blood alcohol was found.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
