A divorce that shook the world and broke the hearts of many still makes the news. A new documentary reveals little-known incidents about a package from the Prince to Camilla falling into Diana's hands, and much more.
When the late Princess Diana and Prince Charles got divorced, it became one of the biggest news stories to rock the media world. In fact, it was extremely and thoroughly well-documented so much so that it became one of the biggest divorces of the 20th century. So you'd think that there was nothing more to learn from it considering how much of it was recorded. Yet, 23 years later, we're still discovering new things about the infamous separation.
The late Princess Diana and Prince of Wales got married in 1981. Soon, they welcomed Prince William and Prince Harry into the world. But then scandal hit the family with the not-so-secret affair the Prince was having with Camilla Shand (presently the Duchess of Cornwall), and the two got divorced on August 24, 1996. This was almost a year before the car crash in Paris that took Princess Diana from the world and left everyone reeling. A new documentary by Channel 5 called The Royal Family at War reveals new information about the divorce that shook the royal family.
It mentions that the late Princess Diana and Prince Charles sat together and cried on the day they signed their divorce papers. Ingrid Seward, the editor of Royalty Magazine, said that the couple was much more amicable by the time their divorce was finally settled.
"Diana did tell me something quite interesting," Ingrid said. "She said that on the day of the divorce, she and Charles sat down together on the sofa and they both cried," she explained. "It was this crazy separation, but by the time the divorce was finalized, they were on much better terms," she added. So maybe things weren't as bad as it seemed especially after their quite public fallout.
At the start of the documentary, the love story that brought the two together was shown. It also claimed that Princess Diana never wanted to divorce Prince Charles but rather adopt a temporary separation instead.
It also showed that the late Princess Diana was starting to feel threatened by Camilla Parker Bowles, a woman who is now the Duchess of Cornwall as well as Prince Charle's wife. "At the time of the marriage, Charles was not seeing Camilla, but Diana was convinced he was," Ingrid said. She added that Diana's fears were not unfounded because she had intercepted a package that Charles had been sending to Camilla at the time.
The documentary revealed that inside the package was a bracelet that had letters F and G engraved on it. While this didn't seem significant at first, the letters stood for "Fred" and "Gladys" - nicknames that Prince Charles and Camilla had for each other. "Diana, of course, floods of tears, went to Charles and demanded to know what was going on. But Charles, so insensitive, he insisted on still giving it to Camilla," said Ingrid.
"Charles did not show huge emotional intelligence if I'm brutally honest," said royal biographer Penny Junor.
One of the things the documentary showed was the war cufflinks that Prince Charles had. Given to him by Camilla on their honeymoon, the cufflinks interlink with two Cs.
But that was one of the milder points of the recording. One of the more volatile events featured in the documentary was the confrontation that occurred between Princess Diana and Camilla at a party they attended in 1989.
Diana approached Camilla and told her that she was aware of what was happening. She warned Camilla saying, "Don't treat me like an idiot." Camilla's response to that was, "You've got two beautiful children, Harry and William, what more would you want?" Diana replied, "My husband."
Ken Wharfe, a former security officer for Diana said that the Prince and late Princess spoke not one word to each other as they headed back to Buckingham Palace the night of the party.
The royal couple tried to control the media fallout by talking directly to them. Diana was the first one to get her side out there with author Andrew Morton who wrote Diana: Her True Story. The book talked about how sad Diana was and how she felt about Camilla.
"She was absolutely miserable, and she felt she was like a prisoner of the Palace," Morton says during the documentary. "Nothing prepared me for the cascade of information and the controversy that the book aroused," he adds. "She was speaking like a prisoner in a cell, that just had a few minutes to get the story out."
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