THE pressure was on for Prince Charles to marry and produce an heir – and when Lady Diana Spencer came along, it seemed like the answer to everyone’s prayers.
She was just 19, unsullied by sex or scandal, of impeccable breeding and in the prime of her child-breeding years. The perfect woman, the world thought, to become the future queen of the United Kingdom.
But the spectre of Camilla Parker Bowles loomed large – and it would be the thorn that poisoned the relationship almost from the start.
THE MEETING THAT STARTED IT ALL
Diana was 16 in November 1977 when her older sister Sarah – who’d dated Charles – introduced her to the Prince of Wales at a shooting party at Althorp House, the Spencer family estate.
“I was Cupid,” Sarah later quipped.
Diana told her friends she’d marry Charles one day. Journalist Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles, says Diana laughingly told her friends, “He’ll be the one man on the planet who isn’t allowed to divorce me.”
A few years later, Charles recalled that first meeting with Diana. “I remember thinking what a jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was,” he told The Telegraph. “I mean, great fun and bouncy and full of life and everything.”
Charles and Diana didn’t see each other again until they were invited to the Sussex home of a mutual friend in 1980.
The prince was still grieving the loss of his great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten and Diana expressed her sympathy.
“And he was all over me for the rest of the evening, following me around like a puppy,” she recalled in archive footage used in the 2017 documentary Diana: In Her Own Words. “I wasn’t quite sure how to cope with all this because I’d never had a boyfriend. But then it sort of built up from there.”
THE ENGAGEMENT
Charles and Diana began dating with Queen Elizabeth’s approval.
When Diana – who was by then a nursery teacher’s assistant at a London school and sharing a flat with three girlfriends – was photographed at Balmoral Castle, their relationship became public knowledge.
They went on 13 dates over five months but most of their courtship took place over the telephone.
“He wasn’t consistent with his courting abilities,” Diana recalled. “He’d ring me every day for
