Lady Diana ‘wanted to publish Charles’ love letters’ before dying

Rivers of ink have been spilled on Charles and Diana’s “a little too crowded” marriage (Camilla’s cause). Yet only now are we discovering that the narrative of that union almost universally depicted as unhappy is missing a piece: the love letters Charles wrote to Diana at the beginning of their union. Letters that the princess, shortly before dying, «he would have wanted to make publicto demonstrate that the their love was true and genuine». The royal biographer tells the story Ingrid Sewardwho revealed to the British press some of her previously unknown conversations with Lady D in the weeks preceding her tragic death in Paris on 31 August 1997: «Diana told me that she would have loved to publish the love letters that Charles had sent her when he was young. He wanted to let the world know how much he loved her and she loved him.. And he wanted their children to know it too, William And Harry. After all, at least initially, Charles and Lady D had loved each other very much.». The accident under the Alma Bridge in Paris prevented Diana from realizing her wish. And what happened to those love letters is unknown: we do not know who owns them, or even if they still exist.

What is certain, however, is that they would have shown us the lesser-known side of Diana and Charles’s marriage. A marriage that started badly: shortly before the wedding, Diana, as she herself said, had discovered a gift from Camilla to Charles: a pair of cufflinks with the letters “G” and “F” engraved on theminitials of “Gladys” and “Fred”, the nicknames that lovers used in intimacy. Which had unleashed hysterical scenes. That day the princess had lunch with her sisters: «I told them I couldn’t marry him.that I didn’t want to do it. They replied: “Big trouble, your face is printed on the tea towels. It’s too late to back out.” Even the wedding proposal, according to the news, had been the least romantic ever. Charles asked for Diana’s hand in marriage on February 3, 1981 in Windsor, without even kneeling as tradition dictates. Then, after making the proposal, «he ran away without even hugging Diana»as royal biographer Christopher Wilson stated in the 2019 documentary Charles & Di: The Truth Behind Their Wedding. «He did nothing of what one would expect from a marriage proposal. He called his mother and said very simply: “Done. You told me to find someone to marry, here she is.“». A worthy beginning of an unhappy and “a little too crowded” marriage (as Diana defined it in the historic interview with the BBC on 20 November 1995) which ended with a stormy divorce in 1996.

But did Charles and Diana ever love each other? Some royal observers are convinced that they did. For example, Dickie Arbiter, former press secretary to Elizabeth II, denying the reconstruction of The Crown 4 in 2020 he declared: «In the For the first five years of their marriage, Charles had almost no contact with Camilla. I followed Charles and Diana’s royal tour of Australia in 1983. They couldn’t help but touch each other. One’s hands were always on the other. The prince kept caressing his wife’s bottom. Once she even gave him a squeeze in public.” In the first years of marriage, according to Arbiter, between Charles and Diana “there was true love and happiness“. A narrative that now seems confirmed by the correspondence which Lady D, as Stewart says, wanted to show the world.