‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.
Diana laughed and later remembered thinking, This is a joke.
But the prince was deadly serious – ‘You do realise,’ he said sternly, ‘that one day you will be Queen’, reproving the teenager for her hilarity.
Diana got the point immediately.
You won’t be Queen, she told herself, according to her subsequent account – but that was not what she said at the time to her future husband.
‘I love you so much,’ she declared, trying to shift the mood in a happier direction. ‘I love you so much.’
Charles’s response came back as a shrug of the shoulders and three historic words: ‘Whatever “love” means.’
The prince was so pleased with his exercise in home-baked philosophy that he repeated it publicly three weeks later when the couple announced their engagement on 24 February. On this occasion the interviewer had served up a flaccid final question about how the couple were feeling: ‘And, I suppose, in love?’ To which Diana replied at once, ‘Of course’, leaving Charles to lift his eyebrows again: ‘Whatever “in love” means.’
Friends pointed out later that he had been engaged in a serious exercise – taking issue with popular clichés about being ‘in love’. But whatever Charles meant on television, that had not been the issue when Diana had first told him that she loved him ‘so much’. Following her acceptance, the prince had gone straight upstairs to phone his mother with the crucial news the Queen had been waiting for.
‘His choice of marrying Diana was really motivated by his parents pushing him to get the succession assured,’ recalls a friend. ‘He once actually said as much to me at a dinner with Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. He intimated that he was being pushed and pushed towards marriage.’
Prince Charles’s proposal to Diana, in other words, had not been about his feelings or emotions, which were by then committed to another woman. It had been essentially a business proposition.
A few days into their honeymoon on the Royal Yacht Britannia, they opened their diaries to discuss their next engagements, when out of Charles’s dropped not one, but two photos of Camilla.
Diana chose not to spoil the moment. She had already worked out the truth about Mrs Parker Bowles from a pre-wedding lunch à deux that Camilla herself had proposed to celebrate the engagement and to ‘look at the ring’ – an oddly proprietorial suggestion to make. Camilla had posed one strangely repeated question about whether Diana was planning to join her husband with the Beaufort Hunt – and Diana, no great horsewoman, deduced that hunting was an activity in which Mrs PB was hoping to keep the prince to herself.
‘Whatever happens, I will always love you,’ Diana overheard Charles proclaiming urgently one evening on his hand-held telephone in his bath. Then her husband told her how he needed to find a country house that tied up with his work for the Duchy of Cornwall – and chose Highgrove House in Gloucestershire. Highgrove was over 190 miles from Cornwall, but less than half an hour’s drive from Bolehyde Manor, the Parker Bowles’s home near Chippenham – and it was smack in the middle of Beaufort Hunt country.
Getting ready while on honeymoon in Egypt for a white-tie dinner with President Anwar Sadat, Diana noticed that her husband’s cufflinks were engraved with two intertwined letter Cs.
‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ replied Charles defensively. ‘So what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.’
‘Boy, did we have a row,’ recalled Diana later, talking to the author Andrew Morton. ‘Jealousy, total jealousy … I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter.’
Things got worse when the couple left Britannia to round off their honeymoon in Balmoral that September. Charles would take Diana for long walks around the Highlands, finding a hilltop where he could settle her down and read philosophy to her – Carl Gustav Jung, or the writings of his friend, the guru and conservationist Laurens van der Post. Two months into their marriage, she assumed that her husband was ringing up his mistress every five minutes the moment he got back to his room at the house, asking her advice on how to handle his difficult bride.
The emotional strain intensified Diana’s bulimia nervosa, the eating disorder that had struck her, according to the princess, just a week after the couple had got engaged.
‘A bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ Charles had said, putting his hand accusingly on his fiancée’s waistline. ‘And that triggered off something in me – and the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate.’
She remembered the first time she made herself sick. The vomiting released the tension she had been feeling, and she felt ‘thrilled’ – but it proved to be the beginning of a lethal pattern in which Diana would find herself vomiting every day. When first measured for her wedding dress in February 1981, Diana had been 29 inches around the waist; on her July wedding day, she was down to 23½ inches. On top of this, she had found herself dreaming about Camilla.
Charles invited Laurens van der Post himself up to Balmoral for some personal counselling to help his wife – with no success.
‘Laurens didn’t understand me,’ Diana said. ‘Everybody saw I was getting thinner and thinner and I was being sicker and sicker. Basically they thought I could adapt to being Princess of Wales overnight. Anyway, a godsend – William was conceived in October. Marvellous news, occupied my mind.’
Diana’s pregnancy with William prompted scarcely an improvement in her condition, however, for now the princess began suffering from both bulimia and morning sickness. Concerned about the health of the baby growing inside her, she refused to take her bulimia pills – with graphic consequences: ‘Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick,’ she related to Andrew Morton in the book that, ten years later when it was published, would blow the lid off the myth of the ‘dream’ royal marriage.
1976: ‘Dear Roddy …’ Elizabeth II writes to
