Their story is often one of chaos, betrayal and drama. The marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana was far from a glittering fairy tale — and almost everyone suspected as much. Yet, there was love. Charles, out of modesty or awkwardness, reserved his rare outbursts of tenderness for Diana alone.
On the eve of their wedding, the future King of England sent his fiancée a signet ring accompanied by a card on which he had written: “I’m so proud of you and when you come up I’ll be there at the altar for you tomorrow. Just look ’em in the eye and knock ’em dead.” Diana had confided in author Andrew Morton in his book Diana: Her True Story — in Her Own Words, delivering her memories, her wounds and those fragments of tenderness to which she had hardly been accustomed.
For Charles was not a man prone to romantic gestures. His former butler, Paul Burrell, told Marie Claire that if Diana sent Charles cards, he didn’t respond in kind: “It’s so sad to say that he never loved her, so he never returned the compliment,” confided a former palace employee. “He wasn’t romantic. He tried to be, but he didn’t have an ounce of romance in him.”
Despite these rare attentions, the wedding preparations were a source of unbearable stress for Lady Di, to the point of triggering violent bouts of bulimia on the eve of the nuptials. On the morning of her wedding, she spoke of a “deadly calm,” confiding to the English author: “I felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter. I knew it, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
And yet, madly in love with Prince Charles, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She believed in the story, she believed in him. “I really thought I was the luckiest girl in the world,” she recalled. “He was going to take care of me… But I was wrong.”
