![]() While Camilla had the same limited upper-class education, she was on Charles’s wavelength – absorbed as he was by hunting and other country pursuits, at home in the same social circle – in a way that Diana could never be.ĭiana came sharply into focus during a Sussex house party weekend in July 1980. ![]() They had no intellectual connections, few mutual friends, no interests in common, and none of the shared life experiences he would have with a contemporary.Īfter the polo, during a barbecue, Charles and Diana had their first extended conversation. He had been through the ups and downs of the formative years of early adulthood, pushing to find a role for himself and channel his passions into action, while Diana was still an adolescent. The 12-year age gap between Charles and Diana was unbridgeable. He was forced, in effect, to rob the cradle. In 1980 – more than a decade after the sexual revolution had started – he was hemmed in by the royal custom of marrying a virgin, or at least a woman who seemed virginal. While Charles had no “apparent surge in feeling” for her, he had begun “to think seriously of her as a potential bride”.Īt 31, he was facing the fact that every woman suitable in terms of pedigree, age, worldliness, and intelligence was either married or had long since lost her virginity. In early May he joined a group, including Diana, at the Royal Albert Hall for Verdi’s Requiem. The expectations for Charles to settle down were rising even as his options were narrowing. There was no doubt that Charles still felt a powerful gravitational pull toward Camilla. Queen Elizabeth II with son Charles, grandson William and husband Philip.ĭuring a dinner in Government House on the first night, she and Charles were reported to be flirting so openly that a dismayed Edward Adeane, the prince’s private secretary, left the room. Diana even came to Sandringham for a shooting party in February 1980: a good start, but the twin forces of duty and pleasure-seeking kept Charles busy for the next two months. Since Charles’s first encounter with Diana at her family home, Althorp, in November 1977, they had crossed paths on several occasions. The Spencer bloodlines were entwined with the royal family’s. ![]() How indeed? On paper, Diana seemed perfect, if worrisomely young: tender with children sporty and enthusiastic sensitive, informal, and open, with an apparent love of the countryside and its pursuits. “How could I have got it all so wrong?” he wrote six years later in an anguished letter to a friend. Pressured and panicked, he had rushed into a decision before he was ready, understanding little about the girl of 19 who gave him beguiling sidelong glances. The prince had already given notice that he wouldn’t let his heart rule his head in such a decision. Charles thought he could grow to love Diana, just as the arranged marriage of his grandmother and King George VI later grew into love. In the TV interview, Charles said he was “amazed” that she was “brave enough to take me on”. His friends knew he hadn’t fallen in love, but that Diana fit Dickie’s ideal vision of a “sweet charactered girl” lacking a romantic past. Set against his tortured ruminations on the meaning of love and marriage over the years, he was being honest, in his bumbling way, about his uncertainty. Prince Charles and Princess Diana with sons Harry and William in the mid-1980s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |