Princess Diana was born on July 1,
1961 and died on August 31, 1997. She was the first wife of Charles,
the Prince of Wales. They had two sons, William and Harry, who were the
second and the third in line for the thrones of the United Kingdom as
well as fifteen Commonwealth Realms. Once Diana was announced as the
future wife of Prince Charles, she was thrust into the limelight with
constant media scrutiny.
Diana was the youngest daughter of
John Spencer, Viscount Althorp and Frances Spencer, Viscountess
Althorp. She had older sisters, Sarah and Jane and a brother who died
in infancy. She also had a younger brother, Charles, who was three
years younger than her. Her parents divorced in 1969 after her mother
had an affair with wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd. Her mother took her
and her brother to live in an apartment in Knightsbridge in London.
Although their mother took them to Norfolk at Christmas, her father
refused for them to return to London. Lady Althorp sued for custody,
but Diana and her brother were awarded to her father. In July of 1976,
Lord Spencer married Raine, the Countess of Dartmouth. Diana travelled
between the homes of her parents. Her father was the recipient of the
Spencer seat in Althorp, Northamptonshire in 1975 and her moved to the
island of Seil, which is on the west coast of Scotland. Diana and her
siblings were not fond of their stepmother.
The love life of Prince Charles has been speculated about by the press for many years. Some of the women he has dated include Scottish heiress Anna Wallace, Amanda Knatchbull, Davina Sheffield, actress Susan George, Lady Jane Wellesley, the heiress Sabrina Guinness and Camilla Shand, as well as others. In his early thirties, he began to be under a lot of pressure to get married. He must have the Queen's formal consent to marry legally. He could not marry a Roman Catholic or he would lose his place in the order of succession. It was also preferred for his future wife to be a member of the Church of England. She should be of royal or aristocratic background, be a Protestant, and be a virgin.
Prince Charles had known Diana for a
few years, but first took interest in her as a possible potential bride
in the summer of 1980 when they were guests at a country weekend and she
watched him play polo. She was well received by Queen Elizabeth I,
Prince Philip, Queen Mother, and Duke of Edinburgh. He proposed to her
on February 6, 1981 and she accepted. She selected a ring that had 14
diamonds around a sapphire. She married Prince Charles on July 29, 1981
at St. Paul's Cathedral. She was 20 years old. Diana and Charles had
two children. Their son William was born on June 21 of 1982. Their
second son was born about two years after on September 15, 1984. His
name is Harry. She had a reputation of loving her children and being a
devoted mom. She went against many of the traditions of the royal
family for her own mothering instincts or desires, such as hiring her
own nanny instead of the royal nanny, choosing her children's schools
herself, going against circumcision, and taking her children to school
herself when she could.
Beginning in the 1980s, Diana was
building a reputation of supporting many charities. She had an interest
in illnesses, such as leprosy and AIDS. She worked with organizations
and charities that helped the elderly, homeless, youth, and drug
addicts. She became a big supporter of the International Campaign to
Ban Landmines and the campaign went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize in
1997.
The marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles fell apart in the early 1990s. Each blamed the other for the failure of the marriage. Charles resumed his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana said he resumed the affair as early as 1984, but Charles said it was 1986. Diana confirmed that she had an affair with James Hewitt, her riding instructor. The couple was separated on December 9, 1992. Diana was very jealous of the relationship that Tiggy Legge-Bourke had with her sons, as she had been hired as a companion to the princes. She also accused her of having an affair with Charles. The Queen asked Charles and Diana to have an early divorce. Their divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996.
After their divorce, Diana kept her
double apartment on the north side of Kensington Palace that she had
shared eith Prince Charles. She stayed there until her death. Diana
dated Hasnat Khan, a respected heart surgeon from Jhelum, Pakistan.
They were together for two years until Khan ended their relationship.
Their differences in religion and culture apparently were too much for
Khan. She also began seeing Dodi Al-Fayed.
Diana died on August 31, 1997 after a
car wreck in the Pont de I'Alma road tunnel located in Paris. The
Mercedes Benz car they were in crashed into the thirteenth pillar of the
tunnel. None of the occupants of the vehicle were wearing a seat
belt. Diana died at 4 a.m. local time, although attempts were made to
save her life Her funeral took place on September 6 of 1997 and it was
watched on television by around 2.5 billion people around the world.
After her death, an investigation was
conducted in order to determine the reason for the crash. It was
determined that Paul, the driver, had been driving the vehicle at high
speeds while intoxicated. Her funeral was attended by all of the
members of the Royal Family. Her children, Prince William and Prince
Henry walked in the funeral procession behind her coffin with their
father, grandfather, and Diana's brother, Charles Spencer. Elton John
sang a new version of his song, "Candle in the Wind." The burial of
Princess Diana occurred privately later on the same day with The Prince
of Wales, Prince William and Prince Henry, her mother, her siblings, a
close friend, and a clergyman being present. She was dressed in a black
long sleeved dress and there was a set of rosary beads placed in her
hands which had been a gift from Mother Teresa, who had died that same
week. Her grave is on the grounds of Althorp Park, where the Spencer's
family home was.
Once Diana became engaged to the Prince of Wales, she became one of the most famous women in the world. Diana had admitted during her lifetime that she struggled with bulimia, self injury, and depression. It was said that she had so passionately wanted the love of her husband, Charles, but that would forever be denied to her. Because of her interest in helping young people, there has been an award dedicated in her honor called the Diana Memorial Award, which is given to youth who have showed unselfish devotion to causes that have been advocated by the Princess.
Childhood And Teenage Years
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The root of Diana's insecurity lay in her upbringing, despite its privileges. Her family was living on the Queen's estate at Sandringham where her father had rented Park House. He had been a royal equerry for both King George VI and the young Queen Elizabeth II.
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| The wedding of Diana's parents was the social event of 1954 |
The Queen had been the chief guest when Diana's parents were married in 1954; the ceremony at Westminster Abbey was one of the social events of the year. But Diana was only six when her parents split up. She would always remember the crunch of her mother's departing footsteps on the gravel drive. The children became pawns in a bitter custody dispute.
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| The happy years of her childhood ended when she was six years old |
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| Diana as a kindergarten teacher |
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| Diana and Charles announce their engagement |
Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
On 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales died as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, France. Her companion, Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the Mercedes-Benz W140, Henri Paul, were also pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. The bodyguard of Diana and Dodi, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only survivor. Although the media pinned the blame on the paparazzi, the crash was ultimately found to be caused by the reckless actions of the chauffeur, who was the head of security at the Ritz and had earlier goaded the paparazzi waiting outside the hotel. An 18-month French judicial investigation concluded in 1999 that the crash was caused by Paul, who lost control of the car at high speed while drunk. His inebriation may have been made worse by the simultaneous presence of an anti-depressant and traces of a tranquilizing anti-psychotic in his body. Since February 1998, Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (the owner of the Hôtel Ritz, for which Paul worked) claimed that the crash was a result of a conspiracy, and later contended that the crash was orchestrated by MI6 on the instructions of the Royal Family.His claims that the crash was a result of a conspiracy were dismissed by a French judicial investigation and by Operation Paget, a Metropolitan police inquiry that concluded in 2006. An inquest headed by Lord Justice Scott Baker into the deaths of Diana and Dodi began at the Royal Courts of Justice, London, on 2 October 2007 and was a continuation of the original inquest that began in 2004. On 7 April 2008, the jury concluded that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed by the "grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes" adding that additional factors were "the impairment of the judgment of the driver of the Mercedes through alcohol" and "the death of the deceased was caused or contributed to by the fact that the deceased was not wearing a seat-belt, the fact that the Mercedes struck the pillar in the Alma Tunnel, rather than colliding with something else".On 30 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, arrived in Paris, France, with Dodi Fayed, the son of Mohamed al-Fayed. They had stopped there en route to London, having spent the preceding nine days together on board Mohamed al-Fayed's yacht, the Jonikal, on the French and Italian Riviera. They had intended to stay overnight. Mohamed al-Fayed was and is the owner of the Hôtel Ritz Paris. He also owned an apartment in Rue Arsène Houssaye, a short distance from the hotel and located just off the Avenue des Champs Elysées. Henri Paul, the Acting Head of Security at the Ritz Hotel, had been instructed to drive the hired black 1994 Mercedes-Benz S280 through Paris in order to elude the paparazzi. A decoy vehicle left the Ritz first, attracting a throng of photographers. Diana and Fayed would then depart from the hotel's rear entrance.
At around 12:20 am on 31 August 1997, Diana and Fayed left the Ritz to return to the apartment in Rue Arsène Houssaye. They were the rear passengers in a black Mercedes-Benz S280, registration number "688 LTV 75", driven by Paul. Trevor Rees-Jones, a member of the Fayed family's personal protection team, was in the front passenger seat.
They left from the rear of the hotel, the Rue Cambon exit. After crossing the Place de la Concorde they drove along Cours la Reine and Cours Albert 1er (the embankment road running parallel to the River Seine) into the Place de l'Alma underpass . At around 12:23 am at the entrance to the tunnel, their driver lost control; the car swerved to the left of the two-lane carriageway before colliding head-on with the 13th pillar supporting the roof at an estimated speed of 105 km/h (65 mph).It then spun and hit the stone wall of the tunnel backwards, finally coming to a stop. The impact of the crash caused substantial damage, particularly to the front half of the vehicle. There was (and still is) no guard rail between the pillars to prevent this. The Place de l'Alma underpass is the only one on that embankment road that has roof-supporting pillars. As the victims lay in the wrecked car, the photographers continued to take pictures. Critically injured, Diana was reported to repeatedly murmur "Oh my God," and, after the photographers were pushed away by emergency teams, "Leave me alone".
Diana, who had been sitting in the rear right passenger seat, was still conscious. It was first reported that she was crouched on the floor of the vehicle with her back to the road. It was also reported that a photographer who saw Diana described her as bleeding from the nose and ears with her head rested on the back of the front passenger's seat; he tried to remove her from the car but her feet were stuck. Then he told her that help was on the way and to stay awake; there was no answer from Diana, just blinking.
In June 2007 the Channel 4 documentary Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel claimed that the first person to touch Diana was Dr. Maillez, who chanced upon the scene. He reported that Diana had no visible injuries but was in shock and he supplied her with oxygen.
The first police patrol officers arrived at the scene at 12.30. Shortly afterwards, the seven paparazzi on the scene were arrested. Diana was removed from the car at 1:00 am. She then went into cardiac arrest. Following external cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Diana's heart started beating again. She was moved to the SAMU ambulance at 1:18 am. The ambulance departed the crash scene at 1:41 am and arrived at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 2:06 am. Despite attempts to save her, her internal injuries were too extensive: her heart had been displaced from the left to the right side of the chest, which tore the pulmonary vein and the pericardium. Despite lengthy resuscitation attempts, including internal cardiac massage, she died at 4 am. At 5:30, her death was announced at a press conference held by a hospital doctor; Jean-Pierre Chevènement, France's Interior Minister; and Sir Michael Jay, Britain's ambassador to France. Many have speculated that if Diana had worn a seat belt, her injuries would have been less severe. Initial media reports stated that Trevor Rees-Jones was the only car occupant to have worn a seat belt. These reports proved incorrect, as both the French and British investigations concluded that none of the occupants of the car was wearing a seat belt at the time of the impact. Later that morning, Chevènement, together with French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, Bernadette Chirac (the wife of the French President, Jacques Chirac), and Bernard Kouchner (French Health Minister), visited the hospital room where Diana's body lay and paid their last respects. After their visits, the Anglican Archdeacon of France, Father Martin Draper, said commendatory prayers from the Book of Common Prayer. At around 2:00 pm, Diana's former husband, Charles, Prince of Wales, and two older sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes, arrived in Paris; they left with her body 90 minutes later.
Initial media reports stated Diana's car had collided with the pillar at 190 km/h (120 mph), and that the speedometer's needle had jammed at that position. It was later announced the car's actual speed on collision was about 95–110 km/h (60–70 mph), and that the speedometer was digital; this conflicts with the list of available equipment and features of the Mercedes-Benz W140 S-Class, which used a computer-controlled analogue speedometer, with no digital readout for speed. At any rate, the car was certainly travelling much faster than the legal speed limit of 50 km/h (31 mph), and faster than was prudent for the Alma underpass. In 1999, a French investigation concluded the Mercedes had come into contact with another vehicle (a white Fiat Uno) in the tunnel. The driver of that vehicle has never come forward, and the vehicle itself has not officially been identified. An eighteen-month French judicial investigation concluded in 1999 that the car crash that killed Diana was caused by Paul, who lost control of the car at high speed while intoxicated.
On 6 January 2004, six years after her death, an inquest into the deaths of Diana and Dodi Fayed opened in London held by Michael Burgess, the coroner of the Queen's household. The coroner asked the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to make inquiries, in response to speculation that the deaths were not an accident. The Metropolitan Police investigation reported their findings in Operation Paget in December 2006.
Later in 2004, US TV network CBS showed pictures of the crash scene showing an intact rear side and an intact centre section of the Mercedes, including one of an unbloodied Diana with no outward injuries, crouched on the rear floor of the vehicle with her back to the right passenger seat—the right rear car door is completely opened. The release of these pictures caused uproar in the UK, where it was widely felt that the privacy of Diana was being infringed, and spurred another lawsuit by Mohammed al-Fayed.
In January 2006, Lord Stevens explained in an interview that the case is substantially more complex than once thought. On 29 January 2006 that agents of the British secret service were cross-examined, because they were in Paris at the time of the accident. It was suggested in many journals that these agents might have exchanged the blood test of the driver with another blood sample (although no evidence for this has ever been forthcoming).
On 13 July 2006, despite an unofficial blackout on such photographs being published. The photograph was taken shortly after the crash, and shows the Princess slumped in the back seat while a paramedic attempts to fit an oxygen mask over her face.
Funeral
By 10 September, the pile of flowers outside Kensington Gardens was 1.5 metres deep in places and the bottom layer had started to compost. The people were quiet, waiting patiently in line to sign the book and leave their gifts. There were a few minor incidents. Fabio Piras, a Sardinian tourist, was given a one-week prison sentence on 10 September for having taken a teddy bear from the pile. When the sentence was later reduced to a £100 fine, Piras was punched in the face by a member of the public when he left the court. The next day, Maria Rigociova, a 54-year-old secondary school teacher, and Agnesa Sihelska, a 50-year-old communications technician, were each given a 28-day prison sentence for having taken eleven teddy bears and a number of flowers from the pile outside St. James' Palace. This too was later reduced to a fine (of £200 each) after they had spent two nights in prison. Some criticised the reaction to Diana's death at the time as being "hysterical" and "irrational". As early as 1998 philosopher Anthony O'Hear identified the mourning as a defining point in the "sentimentalisation of Britain", a media-fuelled phenomenon where image and reality become blurred. These criticisms that were repeated on the 10th anniversary, where journalist Jonathan Freedland expressed the opinion that "It has become an embarrassing memory, like a mawkish, self-pitying teenage entry in a diary,... we cringe to think about it." In 2010, Theodore Dalrymple wrote "sentimentality, both spontaneous and generated by the exaggerated attention of the media, that was necessary to turn the death of the princess into an event of such magnitude thus served a political purpose, one that was inherently dishonest in a way that parallels the dishonesty that lies behind much sentimentality itself". Some cultural analysts disagreed. Sociologist Deborah Steinberg pointed out that many Britons associated Diana not with the Royal Family but with social change and a more liberal society: "I don't think it was hysteria, the loss of a public figure can be a touchstone for other issues."
The Palace's stance was one of royal protocol: no flag could fly over Buckingham Palace, as the Royal Standard is only flown when the Queen is in residence, and the Queen was then in Scotland. Furthermore, the Royal Standard never flies at half-mast as it is the Sovereign's flag and there is never a dead Sovereign (the new monarch immediately succeeds his or her predecessor). Finally, as a compromise, the Union Flag was flown instead, at half-mast, as the Queen left for Westminster Abbey on the day of Diana's funeral. This set a precedent, and Buckingham Palace has subsequently flown the Union Flag when the Queen is not in residence.
Public reactions
After the end of the ceremony, the coffin was driven to Althorp in a Daimler hearse. Mourners cast flowers at the funeral procession for almost the entire length of its journey and vehicles even stopped on the opposite carriageway of the M1 motorway as the cars passed on the route to Althorp. In a private ceremony, Diana was buried on the Althorp estate on an island in the middle of a lake. In her casket, she wears a black Catherine Walker dress and is clutching a rosary in her hands. A visitors' centre is open during summer months, allowing visitors to see an exhibition about her and to walk around the lake. All profits made are donated to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
During the four weeks following her funeral, the overall suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17% and cases of deliberate self-harm by 44.3%, compared with the average reported for that period in the four previous years. Researchers suggest that this was caused by the "identification" effect, as the greatest increase in suicides was by people most similar to Diana: women aged 25 to 44, whose suicide rate increased by over 45%.
In the years after her death, interest in the life of Diana has remained high. As a temporary memorial, the public co-opted the Flamme de la Liberté (Flame of Liberty), a monument near the Alma Tunnel, and related to the French donation of the Statue of Liberty to the United States. The messages of condolence have since been removed, and its use as a Diana memorial has discontinued, though visitors still leave messages at the site in her memory. A permanent memorial, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain was opened in Hyde Park in London on 6 July 2004. Diana was ranked third in the 2002 Great Britons poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the British public after Sir Winston Churchill (1st) (her cousin), and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (2nd), just above Charles Darwin (4th), William Shakespeare (5th), and Isaac Newton (6th). That same year, another British poll named Diana's death as the most important event in the country's last 100 years. Historian Nick Barrett criticised this outcome as being "a pretty shocking result".
In 2003, Marvel Comics announced it was to publish a five-part series entitled Di Another Day (a reference to the James Bond film Die Another Day) featuring a resurrected Diana, Princess of Wales, as a mutant with superpowers, as part of Peter Milligan's satirical X-Statix title. Amidst considerable outcry, the idea was quickly dropped. Heliograph Incorporated produced a roleplaying game, Diana: Warrior Princess by Marcus L. Rowland, about a fictionalised version of the twentieth century as it might be seen a thousand years from now. Artist Thomas Demand made a video, Tunnel, in 1999, that featured a trip through a cardboard mock-up of the tunnel in which Diana died.
After her death, the actor Kevin Costner, who had been introduced to the Princess by her former sister-in-law, Sarah, Duchess of York, claimed he had been in negotiations with the divorced Princess to co-star in a sequel to the thriller film The Bodyguard, which starred Costner and Whitney Houston. Buckingham Palace dismissed Costner's claims as unfounded. Actor George Clooney publicly lambasted several tabloids and paparazzi agencies following Diana's death. A few of the tabloids boycotted Clooney following the outburst, stating that he "owed a fair portion of his celebrity" to the tabloids and photo agencies in question.
Conspiracy theories
Although the initial French investigation found that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died as a result of an accident, the conspiracy theories persistently raised by Mohammed al-Fayed suggested that she was assassinated. In 2004 a special Metropolitan Police inquest team, Operation Paget, headed by the then Commissioner Lord Stevens, was established to investigate the conspiracy theories.In October 2003, ten months before her death, she wrote about a possible plot to kill her by tampering with the brakes of her car. "This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous." She said "my husband is planning 'an accident' in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry". A report with the findings of the criminal investigation was published on 14 December 2006. The inquest was closed following the conclusion of the British Inquest into the deaths in April 2008.
Diana's maternal grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a close friend and lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. Through these links with the Royal Family, Diana became a childhood playmate of Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. She did not have a happy childhood as her parents drifted apart. Sometimes, she would tiptoe downstairs and watch, leaning over the banisters, as her mother Frances and father Johnnie fought both verbally and, apparently, physically. When Diana was six, Frances left her husband for the wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd. From that age, Diana was deprived of the full-time mother love she famously believed was so important. At the time, Frances sought custody of Diana and her younger brother Charles. But she was thwarted by her mother Ruth who said the children should stay with their father. After the Spencers divorced in 1969, Lady Diana continued to live at Park House until the death of her grandfather, the seventh earl, in 1975. She then moved to the Spencer family seat at Althorp House, in Northamptonshire. Yet again, happiness eluded her. Diana had a succession of nannies to look after her, far too many in fact. Most described Diana as "difficult" or "tricky."
At nine, Diana went to Riddlesworth Hall, a boarding school near Diss in Norfolk. Even at the best of times, school was not an institution in which she would shine, at least not academically. With the inevitability of family tradition, she went on to West Heath, an all-girls public school near Sevenoaks, Kent, where her mother had gone. But astonishingly, after one of the most expensive educations money could buy, Diana failed all her O-levels - even at the second taking - and left school at 16. Engulfed by turmoil and misery, she kept her sanity and sense of caring at this time by mothering her brother Charles, now Earl Spencer.
A brief stay at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, an expensive Swiss finishing school, Diana's father bought her a flat which she shared with friends on the borders of Kensington.
Three days a week, the beauty who was to become one of the world's most famous women worked for well-heeled friends cleaning floors for £1 an hour, serving canapes at parties and acting as a nanny. Then she became an assistant at the Young England kindergarten, in London's Pimlico.
Her stipulation was that if she went, her new child had to go, too. Buckingham Palace didn't like the idea, but everybody else did. And it worked for her. After landing in Alice Springs in Australia, she installed William with Nanny Barbara Barnes at a safe house in New South Wales and whenever she had a spare moment, she would travel there with Charles to spend even a few hours with the nine month old Prince. In between, she carried out engagements all over Australia and was a triumph wherever she went.
Immediately after this visit, there was a second important one, this time to Canada.
The timing was terrible. Everybody was exhausted from the first trip to Australasia and Prince William was left behind. Diana was not happy.
The Prince and Princess and young William had a break after these two trips when they could concentrate on playing mum and dad in a reasonably normal manner. However, the Princess's progress from popular idol to saint, achieved through her remarkable personal warmth as comforter of the sick, the dying and the needy, was not easy for her husband to swallow. She won worldwide acclaim for her espousal of the cause of Aids victims, doing much to dispel the common belief that social contacts, such as shaking hands, could spread the disease. In between the tours of the UK, there were regular overseas visits by the Prince and Princess.
The Government realised that Diana, in particular, was a major asset to the country, and they couldn't wait to get her into a country to help boost goodwill and extra exports.
The tours came in quick succession. There was one to Spain, another to France, a magnificent two-week visit to all parts of Italy, to Portugal, to the United States of America and later to Brazil, Japan and India. But within the Royal Family, the Princess seems to have been regarded as an uncontrollable "wild card", and she was isolated accordingly. No single event can be said to have caused the breakdown of the marriage. The Prince told TV viewers that he was faithful to Diana until the relationship had "irretrievably broken down" - in the second half of the Eighties.
The Princess's estimate of when the marriage died is earlier than her husband's.
She says it was effectively over after the birth of her second son, Prince Harry, in September 1984. Prince Charles had hoped for a girl. A dismissive remark - "Oh it's a boy and he's even got rusty hair" - marked the beginning of the end. "From that moment, something inside me died," the Princess told friends. Rage and rows were reported as commonplace. The Prince stuck rigidly to his annual schedule of polo, hunting, shooting and fishing, regardless of school holidays or family weekends. The Princess sank into the trough of bulimia.
Charles, taught from birth to keep his feelings under a tight rein and to himself, hid his unhappiness behind the mask of his royal duty. But his wife - more emotional, more theatrical, too highly-strung and less well trained - was unable to camouflage her distress.
One of the main problems was that they had nothing in common. Diana was never an airhead - she was quick-witted and bright - but most things that she liked Charles did not.
She did like the opera and the ballet, as does Charles. She didn't dislike hunting in the way that people accused her of - although she wasn't mad about it. And she didn't object to polo in the early days, as some suggested, but she found many of Charles' intellectual friends boring. She grew to loathe the dinner parties he gave at Kensinton Palace.
She had little in common with many of the guests - people such as the late Laurence Van Der Post and Prince Charles's polo friends. She was no gourmet, didn't particularly like wine, except in bursts, when she would binge on certain drinks, and would start going to bed before the party broke up and quite early.
After a year or two of trying her best - which wasn't good enough - she started missing the dinner parties altogether. She acquired a young set of friends, more her own age, to spend time with. They included James Gilbey, the car dealer with whom she had the famous "Squidgy" phone conversation, and guards officer Major David Waterhouse.
She would attend dinner and bridge parties with these people in preference to being at home with her husband. When she wasn't socialising she actually led a lonely existence.
Occasionally she would go to the cinema on High Street Kensington but often would curl up at home with a book and go to bed early. It seemed that the whole world was in love with her except for her husband. As an antidote to her lonely existence, Diana agreed to fulfil more and more engagements on behalf of her many charities and to work out even harder. People who criticised her for going out to gyms and running the gauntlet of the dreaded paparazzi each morning didn't understand her need to get out of Kensington Palace. She felt cooped up there, incredibly frustrated. One of her aides told me: "She has this great urge to go out and meet real people. Of course she could have a private gym at the palace but she finds the place a little bit like prison." At the same time, Diana's relationship with her family was proving very difficult. Originally she got on very well with her mother but in recent years that relationship deteriorated.
She was quite hostile towards Frances Shand Kydd, with Diana believing and telling friends that her mother drank too much. The princess was furious when Mrs Shand Kydd gave an interview in which she expressed the opinion that Diana was upset that her HRH tag had been removed during her divorce settlement. At the same time, Diana's relationships with her brother, Charles, and her two sisters, Sarah and Jane, were up and down.
The volatile red-head, Lady Sarah, was a sometime lady-in-waiting for Diana, but they didn't always get on that well. There was ever-present sibling rivalry and always a bit of a problem that Sarah had been the girlfriend of Charles before Diana. In the case of her brother Charles, Diana was unhappy when she was refused permission to create a home at the Althorp family seat in Northamptonshire. The princess was equally distraught at the breakdown of Charles's marriage to Victoria and their subsequent departure for South Africa where the two lived in separate homes near Capetown. With Jane there was a problem too.
During the mid-Eighties when the prince and princess were taking their young children, William and Harry, on bucket-and-spade holidays as guests of the King and Queen of Spain in Majorca, there was little physical or mental rapport between the two. A sunshine holiday in the summer of 1986 first publicly exposed the cracks in the marriage.
I remember that year being shocked at the indifference displayed between the two while they were out for a day's cruise off Palma, Majorca. For seven hours the couple did not exchange a single word with one another. They were on King Juan Carlos's motor yacht, the Fortuna, but not together. When Charles came up on deck Diana went below and vice versa. Diana swam alone, Charles wind-surfed all by himself. They didn't exchange a single word. Still it was hard to understand that the marriage was failing.
But clearly it was.
Charles came home three days early from Majorca, leaving behind his wife and young sons. It was said that the prince was going fishing. Many later believed the real reason was that he wanted to join Camilla Parker Bowles in Scotland. Newspapers asked: "Are Charles and Di still in tune?" Buckingham Palace insisted everything was fine. In fact, friends have said that after this trip to Majorca the couple never slept together again. Her husband's early departure set a pattern that was to become familiar over the next six years. They spoke little and appeared to go out of their way to avoid each other's company. The Princess repeatedly dropped hints about her husband, telling one hospital patient Charles did not approve of the books she read.
At a polo match, Charles kissed his wife for consolation after losing a game. She scornfully wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Then, witnesses told of an extraordinary scene in the car park where Diana appeared to kick out at her husband and he shoved her back against the car. Throughout the Eighties, I could not accept - I just didn't want to - that there was a problem within the Wales' marriage. But signs were beginning to emerge that all was not well.
In each country that they visited I heard whispers that they were not sharing the same bedroom. In February 1987, the Prince and Princess visited Portugal together but hotel staff said he had one bedroom and his wife asked for another. Vic Chapman explained to me that this was only for practical reasons. Loyally, he would explain that they needed separate rooms so that they could get ready in a hurry in the morning without bumping into one another. I was half convinced, but the signs were slightly ominous. Neither I, nor any of my colleagues, could really accept that things were going wrong. Wasn't this the marriage of the century? A marriage of which dreams are made? We certainly knew that there were problems, but as Vic Chapman said and I accepted all marriages have their ups and downs. On the domestic front, all was going well enough. Diana was involved in numerous charities as Patron or President and was a triumph. She was not only charming and able, but she helped raise millions of pounds for the organisations she was spear-heading. She was tireless in her quest to help the disadvantaged and poor. When she attended an engagement she would always over-run her allotted time considerably.
Each child got a pat on the head, each parent received numerous kind words. She was faultless. She also began to feed on the adulation and adoration that the public gave her. In some ways she no longer needed Prince Charles, but by the end of the Eighties he was no longer there for her. I have no doubt that, in his own way, he tried to make the marriage work. He knew how catastrophic it would be if it ended in divorce.
He did not contemplate the idea for a moment but emotionally he was involved with only one woman - Camilla Parker Bowles. It is hard to say whether Diana really hated Camilla by now. I'm told she was more contemptuous of her than anything else. And by now, as we have subsequently learned, Diana had taken her own lover, James Hewitt, a good-looking former cavalry officer who had helped teach William and Harry to ride and at the same time had won the Princess's broken heart. In her infamous Panorama interview Diana talked of how much she had "adored" Hewitt. But the marriage struggled on and, outwardly at least, the seams were not coming apart. By the autumn, the couple were leading separate lives, sometimes not meeting for up to a month.
The Princess wanted her husband's undivided love and attention. That was what he could not supply. She sought friendship outside her marriage - with used-car dealer James Gilbey and James Hewitt, a handsome Life Guards officer. Diana's relationship with Major Hewitt is supposed to have lasted from 1986 to 1991. If Hewitt has told the truth of a passionate affair, then the princess betrayed her husband as surely as he was accused of betraying her. Charles continued to see Camilla who coincidentally is the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of Charles's great-great grandfather, Edward VII1.
No one was surprised when, in 1988, author Anthony Holden published a biography portraying the royal relationship as a marriage of convenience.
Throughout 1988 Diana was treated, sometimes for days at a time, by eminent London psychiatrist Dr Maurice Lipsedge. He broke her dependency on the gorging and rejection of food, which is the foundation of bulimia. Friends say the doctor made her see that the illness was a result of inner depression and insecurity and that, once she conquered that, the physical side could be dealt with. And it was. The marriage, however, had become a tyrrany of togetherness and seemed beyond treatment. Had Charles and Diana been an ordinary couple, they would undoubtedly have divorced years earlier. They were christened "The Glums." Diana looked positively gloomy at her husband's side, yet relaxed and friendly on her own. Charles, in turn, appeared cold and disinterested in his wife.
By 1991, the marriage was teetering on the edge with former royal policeman Andrew Jacques revealing: "They never smile, laugh or do anything together. They seem to want as little contact as possible." In February 1992, the royal couple visited to India where for the first time I learned that the they were not in separate bedrooms but on separate floors of their palace. In India, the signs of open hostility between Charles and Diana became more and more apparent. There was one truly grim day when the couple split with Charles staying behind in Delhi to address businessmen while Diana went to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal, the world's most romantic monument to love.
The book exposed the prince as a distant father, uncaring husband and adulterer. It disclosed that, even as the fairytale couple honeymooned on the Royal Yacht Britannia, the prince was in regular touch with his longtime companion and mistress, Camilla. Doubts about the origin of the Morton revelations were squashed when, three days after the first extract of the book was published, the princess visited her friend Carolyn Bartholomew who had furnished much telling material for the book.Emotional and mental stability became the theme of coverage of the princess in the US, where Americans largely saw her as the victim of a cold-hearted Charles.
In Britain, Diana had only to shed a few tears in public for the nation to be at her feet.
The princess continued to maintain her extraordinary hold on public sympathy and affection despite the publication of tapes of intimate phone conversations. These were apparently between her and James Gilbey, whose voice could be heard professing love, and became known as the "Squidgy Affair." A taped conversation between Charles and Camilla was also published. The disastrous tour of Korea by the ill-at-ease prince and princess in November 1992 - was followed a month later by Buckingham Palace's announcement of their separation. It was inevitable that everyone would take sides. The nation was either for Charles or for Diana. The question was whether the princess's bulimia destroyed the marriage, or did her unhappiness within the marriage lead to bulimia. The truth lay in the no man's land between the two camps.
In December 1993, the Princess announced in a blaze of publicity that she intended to reduce her official engagements and develop a more private life.
In an emotional speech to Headway National Head Injuries Association she said: "I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and to give me the time and space so lacking in recent years. "I could not stand here today and make this sort of statement without acknowledging the heartfelt support I have been given by the public in general.
"Your kindness and affection have carried me through some of the most difficult periods, and always your love and care have eased that journey For that I thank you, from the bottom of my heart." Foolishly, in my opinion, Diana dropped all her Scotland Yard security deciding officers were restricting her freedom by always being around.
But the limelight beckoned again just four months later when Diana took on the role of Red Cross roving ambassadress and the Queen invited her to join the D-Day commemorations.
Diana did not drop her patronages and presidencies after her announcement that she was withdrawing from public life. But she did go into partial Purdah. I was told then that she would start to carry out engagements that she wanted to fulfill and not engagements that were more or less thrust upon her by the organizations she represented. I was told then that she would never go back to carry out the number of duties that she had once indulged in. And the information given to me was correct. That was a phase of her life that was gone forever. But she was still incredibly caring and brought great benefits to many millions of people worldwide. She cultivated a great friendship with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was the one person in the world to whom Diana would fly if needed.
All the while Charles - pursuing his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles - and the rest of the nation were unaware of the passionate affair going on at Hewitt's home in Devon. Hewitt said: "Diana's love is all-encompassing. "I was privileged to be on the receiving end. What we had together was very, very special and will remain with me forever." But the smooth-talking charmer, dubbed a cad and Royal rat, was snubbed by many old Army pals and society people in horsey circles. He has revealed that Diana wrote to him every day while he was a tank commander in the Gulf War. It is thought he could have as many as 100 love letters from the princess in his possession. One of Diana's close personal aides is alleged to have resigned after it was suggested that she try to buy some of the letters back. Those who have accused Hewitt of already making huge sums of money out of his affair with the then future Queen of England have long feared he would try to cash in on the letters. But in any backlash to Diana's tragic death, it remains to be seen whether Hewitt will seek or find a buyer for those intimate letters, or whether he will keep them secret or even destroy them.
Public opinion, and even new laws, over press intrusion and privacy may make the letters unsaleable in the foreseeable future. Like the wrongs and misdeeds of past kings and queens, they may have to be locked away for years until they can be read as part of "history" rather than the living legend of Diana. Hewitt was not at his estate in the Devon countryside yesterday. But his twin sister Syra greeted callers at Eversfield Manor, near Okehampton, red-eyed from crying. She said in a breaking voice: "It is terrible, shocking news. I can't believe it."James is not here. He will be away for a week. "I have left a message for him on an answering machine."Syra, like Hewitt's mum, Shirley, shared some intimate moments with Diana when she travelled in secret to their cottage in Ebford, just outside Exeter.
Hewitt and Diana enjoyed romantic weekends in the ivy-clad, thatched "lovenest" - which yesterday stood sadly empty. It is up for sale - at £160,000 - by the family since James and his mother moved to the country mansion about 30 miles away. They paid a judge £225,000 for the five-bedroom Georgian house which has stables and rambling grounds. Another suitor from the Eighties was car salesman James Gilbey, an old friend.
She turned to Gilbey, now a 40-year-old Grand Prix marketing chief, in the mid-to-late Eighties when her marriage was at its lowest ebb. But the pair suffered public ridicule with the release of the notorious "Squidgygate" tapes, a recording of their intimate phone chat. The 30-minute tape, made in 1989 but not revealed until 1992, featured Gilbey calling Di "Darling" 53 times and "Squidgy" 14 times. However Di always insisted they were never lovers. Gilbey had been dating Lady Alethea Savile for two years when he fell for Di. After splitting with Gilbey, Lady Alethea sank into depression and drug addiction and later committed suicide. David Waterhouse, a major in the Life Guards and a Gulf War veteran, met the Princess in 1986.
He was introduced to her after the Duchess of York's wedding and they became close companions. But unlike Hewitt, the 38-year-old bachelor tried to keep their liaison secret and described speculation that they were more than good friends as "nonsense". Philip Dunne met Diana through through his sister Millie and they became close friends. He joined a skiing party at Klosters in 1987, much to Charles's apparent annoyance. Speculation surrounding them peaked when they spent a weekend alone together while Charles was abroad. Merchant banker Dunne, 36, married Domenica Fraser, daughter of former Rolls-Royce chairman Sir Ian, in February 1989.
The revelation of Diana's relationship with 51-year-old art dealer Oliver Hoare, a friend of Charles, sparked further controversy. Hoare, married to heiress Diane de Waldner, was forced to call police over Di's nuisance calls to their Chelsea mansion in 1995. Later the same year Diana was sensationally linked to former England captain Will Carling. The denials of an affair swiftly followed. But the rugby star eventually confessed to his wife Julia that he had had an intimate relationship with the Princess. Julia, 32, told a friend: "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was like a bombshell. I felt destroyed."" She decided to try and give the marriage one more chance after Will vowed never to see Diana again. But three weeks later he was photographed at a London health club at the same time as Diana. Humiliated and hurt, Julia finally lost her patience and ordered Carling to leave their home in Putney, south west London. The couple have since divorced.
In December 1995, she was reportedly dating property developer Christopher Whalley.
The 42-year-old tycoon later told how Princess Diana chatted him up at her favourite Chelsea Harbour gym club. She stopped him on the stairs and asked: ""What does a girl have to do to get a coffee around here?" He was said to have been "stunned" by her approach. A pal said: ""He thought she had mistaken him for someone else." But Whalley went on to share secret meetings with the Princess for breakfasts and lunches for 14 months. Diana is also believed to have spent weekends at his secluded country farmhouse in Yorkshire. Whalley, who works out twice a day at the exclusive Harbour Club and is one of London's most eligible bachelors, was described as "the ultimate charmer". A friend said at the time: "He is renowned for being able to get a woman's telephone number in a shorter period than anyone else on earth. "Women love him. He is intelligent, articulate and a wonderful shoulder to cry on. "When he is in love, he is intensely loyal. He is a real find." Whalley is credited with having helped her cope with the shame of the Oliver Hoare episode.
Di went to extraordinary lengths to keep their friendship quiet, even hiding Whalley in the boot of her car to sneak him into Kensington Palace. Although their relationship has cooled, they still see each other and were recently photographed leaving a restaurant together with Prince William after a lunch date. Di was said to be secretly devastated when dishy surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan ended their affair.
The handsome 38-year-old heart surgeon broke off their relationship just four months ago. The Princess had pinned her hopes on marrying the handsome Pakistani, but he decided he could not take the "intense pressure" of being Di's new man. A close pal of the surgeon told The Mirror: "He just found it too intense being under so much scrutiny all the time. "There were also problems over his religious background. "Although Diana has become fascinated by the Muslim faith, his family would expect him to undertake an arranged marriage and that would obviously be impossible in this case. "In the end he found it all too difficult and decided the best thing to do would be to break off the relationship."Diana first met Dr Khan at the Brompton Hospital in West London through her friendship with transplant pioneer Sir Magdi Yacoub.
After watching him perform heart ops, she invited him to her home at Kensington Palace.
They began sharing candlelit dinners and the pair spent spent intimate, relaxed weekends together in the Stratford-upon-Avon home of Hasnat's uncle Omar, whose wife Jane is an English lawyer. By November last year, it was reported that Diana was keen to marry the doctor and was hoping for a little sister for William and Harry. Although the pair publicly denied they were having an affair, in private the relationship blossomed. They would sometimes meet at safe houses in London, provided by close friends, or at pubs near Harefield Hospital where Khan works. The turning point came in May this year when Diana slipped away from her bodyguards in Lahore, Pakistan, to visit Khan's parents. The doctor was clearly embarrassed by the behaviour when The Mirror rang him.
After months of silence, he went on to give us an extraordinary interview in which he described Di's actions as "bizarre'. "Why would she go to meet my family? It doesn't make any sense," he said. "I realise people are going to say there must be more to our relationship if she has gone to meet my family. But I just can't explain it - it's bizarre to say the least. "It's so embarrassing when I read things like I've said I love her or that she says she wants to have my babies." His choice of words was deeply hurtful for the Princess and spelt the end of their relationship. In June this year Di went dancing with Asian millionaire Gulu Lalvani, a divorced father-of-three, 23 years her senior. The pair became close after the electronics tycoon invested a substantial sum in one of her charities. Mr Lalvani insisted they were "just good friends".
In June 1994, Prince Charles admitted that he had been unfaithful in a television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. In Dimbleby's authorised biography, published four months later,Charles said he had never loved his wife and married her only because his father had bullied him into it. The book sent shock waves through the palace by blaming his parents, his upbringing, his school as well as his wife for the emotional upheavals of his life. It caused the public to look more critically at the Princess of Wales but the exposure of more intimate details of a lacerating domestic saga marked another damaging episode for the Royal Family. Fifteen million people watched as Prince Charles opened his heart in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby in June 1994.
In August 1994, the princess was linked with England rugby captain Will Carling and, two months later, Anna Pasternak's book Princess In Love chronicled her five-year affair with former Army officer James Hewitt. If Buckingham Palace hoped that the princess would play Ophelia and float gently downstream to a nunnery, she insisted on the role of Lady Macbeth. The princess questioned her estranged husband's suitability to become King in a Panorama television interview in November 1995, suggesting that she would prefer the succession to go to Prince William.
But she then revealed: "There were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded," she said. Of her own role she said she wanted to be an ambassador for Britain: "I'd like to be an ambassador for this country. I'd like to represent this country abroad. "When I look at people in public life, I'm not a political animal but I think the biggest disease this world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved, and I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give - I'm very happy to do that and I want to do that. "I think the British people need someone in public life to give affection. I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that's got me into trouble in my work, I understand that. But someone's got to go out there, love people and show it." "I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts, but I don't see myself being Queen of this country."
The princess declared that she had no intention of initiating a divorce. But the interview had a contrary effect. Her remarks about the succession, in particular, directly challenged Buckingham Palace and launched republican elements of the Labour Party into a discussion of the need for debate on the future of the monarchy. Constitutionalists began to argue that a speedy divorce was the only way to clean up an increasingly messy battle of wills between two bitter protagonists.
Several opinion polls showed falling support for the royals, and many young Britons said the reason was Charles's affair with Camilla. In Australia, Charles was named "Republican of the Year" by anti-monarchists who felt he had done most to advance their cause. Four weeks after the princess's appearance on Panorama, the Queen wrote to her son and daughter-in-law urging a quick divorce to spare the feelings of their children. Until the interview, the prince and princess seemed to have come to a private understanding not to divorce for the sake of the children. Now the princess entrusted herself to the negotiating skills of solicitors Mishcon de Reya presided over by her chief adviser, octogenarian Labour peer Lord Mishcon. The prince was represented by the firm of Farrer and Company. There was no serious dispute over the essential terms of the divorce and in February, 1996 - three years after the separation - Diana brokered the final terms of a deal at a teatime summit with her husband at St James's Palace.
The divorce was officially announced on February 28, 1996. Di later won a settlement estimated at £17million, although she lost the right to the title Her Royal Highness.
But in the months which followed, she began to lead an increasingly lonely and isolated life. The royal soap opera descended into black farce in March, 1996, when England rugby captain Will Carling was reported to have confessed to his wife that he had slept with the princess. Public interest in the Windsors' antics waxed and waned, but the princess managed to keep the balance of sympathy in her favour. Whatever she may have done, the prince strayed first. And polls showed overwhelming hostility to the idea of Charles marrying Camilla who divorced in 1995. Diana once admitted to a close friend; "I had so many dreams as a young girl. "I hoped for a husband to look after me, he would be a father figure to me, he would support me, encourage me, say `well done' or 'that wasn't good enough'. "I didn't get any of that. From, now on I am going to own myself and be true to myself." Before embarking on her affair with Dodi Fayed, she lived a remarkably quiet life in her private apartment at the palace. It was there she felt truly safe and completely private, cocooned from the many pressures of her life. Then, last month she finally found the love she longed for with 41-year- old Dodi.
