She was a city girl, and she pretended to love the country. “In retrospect, many would argue that she was not her authentic self during that visit, so she was more performing a role that she aspired to as opposed to being herself,” Chernock says. “Diana worked very, very hard to ingratiate herself and to model what she thought being a princess would entail, and she did it very successfully.”īut this success would later come to backfire on Diana. “She was very much a hit with the royal family – they really warmed to her,” Chernock says. The Queen thought Diana quite suitable for Charles. Viewers of Netflix’s The Crown will remember the 1980 meeting as the infamous “Balmoral test.” So when was Diana introduced to the Queen as a potential partner for Charles? “The most sustained early interaction with the royal family came when she was invited to Balmoral,” Chernock says. When they began dating, a marriage between Charles and Diana was hardly a given. He’d been invited to the Spencer estate at Althorp, where the family had moved after Diana’s father became Earl Spencer in 1975. “In fact, Diana’s older sister briefly dated Prince Charles before he met Diana,” Chernock says.Īs her royal biography notes, Diana first encountered Prince Charles in 1977. The royal family’s official website notes that, as neighbours, the families had known each other for many years. Princess Diana was born and spent her childhood at Park House, on the grounds of the royal estate in Sandringham, Norfolk. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip attended Diana’s parents’ wedding, and the Queen is the godmother of Diana’s younger brother, Charles. Diana’s father was an equerry, or personal attendant, to the Queen’s father, King George VI, and then to the Queen herself her grandmother was a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth’s mother. “The Spencers were a prominent family with close royal ties,” Chernock says. The Queen had known Diana Spencer – or at least known of her – for most of the younger woman’s life. In a way, Diana gets to narrate the story for us.” And although much hearsay has been written about how the two royals felt about each other, this is what we know from the women themselves about their complicated relationship. And so we don’t know what the Queen thought of the relationship. The Queen throughout her reign has had a very different, much more careful, choreographed approach. “Diana perhaps told too much – she disclosed quite a bit about her life and her private feelings and emotions to the press. “There’s a fundamental asymmetry in what we know about this relationship,” says Arianne Chernock, an associate professor of history at Boston University focusing on modern British history and the monarchy. What was the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana really like, though? Much of the information that’s been used to form the narrative is a bit lopsided. After several publicly tumultuous years in their marriage, Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, and Princess Diana died the following year. They had two sons, Princes William and Harry, who are Queen Elizabeth’s grandchildren. Lady Diana Spencer, an aristocrat with many links to the royal family tree, married the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, in July 1981. The Queen is silent and traditional Diana was modern and outspoken. But Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana were also very different. It’s an infamous incident, but one in which the queen’s role is rarely discussed.Queen Elizabeth II and her daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, were more alike than you may realise: They both gave their lives to public service, they were strong in their own ways, and both were devoted to their families and subjects alike. While these more recent tapes confirm that specific encounter with Her Majesty, even earlier tapes - those used by Andrew Morton for his bombshell 1993 biography Diana: Her True Story - depicted a staggeringly awful moment between Queen Elizabeth II and Diana, pregnant with William at time. “So I didn’t go back to her again for help, because I don’t go back again if I don’t get it the first time.”ĭid you know that 20-year-old Diana married Prince Charles after two other women said no? Charles is hopeless.’ And that was it, and that was help,” she says. “So I went to the top lady, sobbing, and I said ‘What do I do? I’m coming to you, what do I do?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Before her death, Diana recorded a series of tapes with speech coach Peter Settelen first released and broadcast by NBC in 2004, in which she details going to her mother-in-law for help and being denied, much like we see on The Crown.
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