The Windsor Files: Exposing the Royal Family’s Darkest Secrets | Queen Elizabeth II Documentaries – hW

there was a time when the royal house of windsor had everything a dynasty could desire in 1991 britain had helped secure peace after the gulf war conflict the ceremony of trooping the color had a sense of victory over the dark forces of aggression but for the queen the next conflict would be fought uncomfortably closer to home princess diana had done more than provide the next royal generation she had given a new vitality to an aging institution she looked certain to complete the queen mother’s task of taking a popular family

monarchy into the 21st century under the impressive facade of royalty on parade there were dangerous tensions which would shatter the image of the monarchy no one foresaw then that within a few troubled years princess diana once the future queen would be divorced stripped of her royal title and died tragically the summer of 1991 would be the last time the royal family would all appear together publicly within a year both the princess of wales and the duchess of york would be removed from the royal fold diana had married too young at only 20

she had been unable to cope with the royal system sarah the duchess of york worldly wise at 26 fed little better she too would be divorced and lose her title as mother of the future king diana’s isolation created confusion a princess alone cut adrift from the royal family like diana fergie had absorbed their morals and their ethos she expected protection but her indiscretions were cruelly exposed diana found affection and the love her husband could not give her in other people and in other ways her unique empathy with the public set her apart

from her husband’s family her warmth and compassion for the forgotten and dispossessed made her an icon of caring in a selfish age her beauty and magnetism created jealousy among the royal family her popularity caused rivalry with her husband behind her duties diana hid her unhappiness her illness and her secret life hidden from her adoring public diana’s private life was known only in royal and society circles older members of the royal family were their love of pomp pageantry and position seemed blissfully undisturbed

by diana’s personal problems well of course as the first person to speak the truth about diana and to write about her she really was and to see that this was a multifaceted woman with many contradictions and someone who was pulling in many different directions i haven’t been surprised at what has happened in the last five years in the paperback edition of down in private area count a conversation that took place at windsor between the prince and princess of waves and the queen and the duke of edinburgh where diana was warned if she pushed for

a separation she would inevitably get a divorce that the result would be she would be marginalized diana and i didn’t speak for three years after that book came out eventually when we spoke she said to me you were right she said i didn’t believe you at the time but you were right the sourness of diana’s relationship with charles was exposed to the world during an official tour of korea in 1992 their visit created such embarrassment that britain had to apologize to the host nation the royal couple continued this official union until the poisonous

atmosphere could no longer be disguised diana’s marriage and the relations between her and prince charles really presented the royal family with an almost insoluble problem it is announced from buckingham palace that which has insisted on a formal separation announced by prime minister john major in the house of commons major said that diana could still become queen unaffected got up in the house of commons and said this does not affect the whole series of things it doesn’t affect charles’s position as future head of the church i

doesn’t affect diana’s future position as queen of england and everybody said come off it john you’re pretty implausible most of the time but this is totally rubbish i think once actually the extent of the rift between the two of them had become public knowledge once both of them both diana and charles had started a public competition for favor which inevitably amounted also to blaming the other were competitions for public favor once that’s happened you couldn’t possibly have the two of them remaining married and again if they had

remained married the question would have been first of all everybody said this is a sham and the second thing they would have said is but how can she possibly be queen in 1993 diana made her last official visit to wales as their princess as usual her pulling power was immense an expectant crowd including the press waited for the royal convoy to arrive foreign diana knew instinctively that her popularity with both the public and press gave her a power base and a trump card to match the power of the royal system for years she fought the

courtiers who effectively controlled the monarchy immensely photogenic she liked publicity and used it to her own advantage a new art form in the beginning we used to describe as the last silent film star that was nowhere near the truth diana was not very good on television what she was brilliant at was posing for popular newspapers for the tabloids and she invents this new art form which is really look at it i mean some of the most famous images we have diana outside the taj mahal and it’s greeted i want to be alone

or the famous scene in seoul where in korea where she’s pulling away from prince charles and the youth she always makes with her eyes there’s great heavy cold eyes and the look going up there this what she’s doing she is posing for a picture which she knows will have a tabloid headline there were times when the acting gave way to real emotion her performance unable to contain the real turbulence within during the summer of 1992 diana’s secret sorrows became public dramas following the revelations about her private life

during a speech at a hospice in liverpool her composure broke as she fought back tears in all that you do you reflect so very sincerely the philosophy of tender loving care which is and always will be the hallmark of this hospice gathering her composure diana reached out to her adoring public for their support and understanding her emotional breakdown was due to the publication of a sensational book claiming to be the true story of her life and exposing her suffering within her marriage its author confirmed his story on

television the tears that she’s shared in public in liverpool was nothing compared to the tears that she spent that she’s shed over the last year i can’t emphasize strongly enough the volatility of the situation inside kensington palace her husband’s uncaring attitude his unfaithfulness and the coldness of the royal household were disclosed in candid detail the book revealed her cries for help her suicide attempts and her eating disorders there are a number of sources for the for the suicide attempt some of the sources are off the record

in tape recorded interviews and on each occasion when i was quizzing the people about these suicide attempts i asked them who told you and the answer came back on each occasion the princess of wales despite the publicity created by the revelations of an unhappy marriage diana continued with her royal duties outwardly their marriage still appeared to be in good shape but behind the scenes forces were at work to discredit her diana knew that her husband’s friends were making her out to be unbalanced and plans were made to expose her as an

adulteress a personal and sensitive phone call with a male friend who called diana squidgy had been intercepted and the tape sent mysteriously to a newspaper labelled by the press as the squidgy gate tapes they were published in august 1992 james gilby who is a named source in andrew morton’s book was revealed as diana’s confidant it’s just so difficult so complicated he makes my life real real torture i’ve decided diana’s friends retaliated by publicly exposing mrs camilla parker-bowles as charles’s long-term mistress

sometime after her first public appearance at a polar match attended by the queen in june 1992 an intimate telephone conversation between charles and camilla was leaked to the newspapers i knew it would revive me i can’t bear a sunday night without you later in a television interview charles admitted that he and camilla had been lovers since 1986.

they met regularly at her farmhouse in the country diana was not slow to realize how important the tapes were in her battle with charles once diana had the tape she is supposed to have tried to use it as leverage to get a separation because she wanted a separation not that by then she was so unhappy with the prince of wales but she was unhappy with the courtiers running her life well once they knew of the existence of the tape these very courtiers spun around and taped her with her lover at the time who was james

gilby to rarely stymie her and have a quid pro quo situation whereby she would not be able to use the tape to damage the prince of wales diana certainly believed that she was not accidentally taped and i know this from her personally on the other side of the world in new york the disgraced duchess of york hoped to resolve her problems by earning enough money to pay off her mountainous debts her mother-in-law the queen cleared some of the overdraft accumulated during fergie’s brief spell as a royal wife but

further debts had arisen thanks to the duchess’s high spending money and men were the twin sources of fergie’s fall from grace she hoped her royal connections would sell her literary endeavors what we’ve seen actually in the british royal family is farce and tragedy being played out simultaneously diana is the tragedy poor poor fergie is the farce palace officials viewed diana and fergie as a continuing danger to royal stability but unlike charles prince andrew behaved with great civility to his estranged wife believing that the happiness of

their young daughters beatrice eugenie came first fergie’s downfall was prompted by her love for rich handsome americans first there was the dashing texan steve wyatt then his friend johnny bryan followed brian had claimed that he was an honest broker helping fergie with her marital and financial problems the papers told a different story the indiscretions of previous royal generations had been covered up fergie found like diana that hers were exposed she blamed the publication of these photos and earlier ones with wyatt on

her enemies the grey men within the palace now she obviously did quite a lot of damage to the monarchy out of the family monarchy but it was always limited by the fact that nobody ever took her very seriously did they i mean you remember his lord chartres wasn’t it when he was asked his opinion as terribly as they sat up there looked over as halfman’s spectrum said volga volga falca and i think we all felt that she was vulgar vulgar the difficulty with her was ever to imagine that this hooray henrietta was actually

duchess of york and called her royal highness and curtsy she was so improbable actually i have a very very soft spot for fergie i think that with all her vulgarity and all her crassness she was actually quite an honest go-getting girl i also think she was never malicious she never tried to damage the monarchy she never tried to damage her husband and in that sense there is quite an instructive contrast with diana i mean diana for all her virtues was very vindictive she went out of her way to damage charles as much as possible there

was also an element of vindictiveness directed against the royal family this attack so public in the in the morton book on the family firm now fergie was never guilty of that she was just preposterous poor dear the royal family were on holiday at balmoral when the pictures were published of fergie on holiday with her lover johnny bryan the queen could not forgive her daughter-in-law’s reckless behavior rather than endure the looks and whispers over her topless frolics with johnny brian fergie fled from the royal

holiday home in scotland she was subsequently banned from royal events meanwhile in belmoral it was family business as usual with the royals attending their church service diana and fergie had plotted to leave the royal family together in the event diana held back humiliated fergie went back to a rented home and life as a single mother she had been cast out in the cold by her husband’s family fergie floundered from one house to another one unsuitable man to the next one wild scheme to a worse one consulting fortune tellers over her

prospects meanwhile the royal band played on triumphal processions were a sign of a dynasty that looked to the past to distant times when monarchs had awesome power over troublesome wives outwardly undisturbed by the antics of her eldest sons and their wives the queen perhaps drew consolation from her ancestors but diana and fergie may not have fared well in henry the eighth day his divorce from his first wife catherine of aragon who failed to bear him a son caused a breach within the catholic church of rome she was expelled

from the royal court he hounded her literally to death by moving to a series of unhealthy houses and in the 16th century an unhealthy house was quite easy to find he bombarded her with demands he took away her jewels he really terrorized her the grim tower of london faced those who fell foul of henry his second wife ann berlin was executed there for her adultery an act of high treason in those days a swordsman was sent for from france to execute it with a sword rather than having her done in with an axe which was the way common people had

their heads chopped off i mean the result was the same but there was a little bit more honour in it but later the prince regent’s battle with his wife carolina brunswick was lost when the house of lords refused him a bill of divorce ray just taught you can imagine i mean she was promiscuous she was exhibitionist she did everything um to shock and make a damn fool of herself you know and um she was fortunately abroad for most of the time and george is the fourth winning prince region simply wanted to get rid of her and

considering some of the things she did like going around in short skirts in an open carriage with a younger man in italy i i one can’t blame him not that he was a parrot and a virtue himself of course but he did have a position to keep up queen victoria founder of most of europe’s royal dynasties through marriage to her cousin prince albert had nine children and provided a perfect model of family values one of the things that’s very important to understand about our current royal family they’re of course like really the hanoverian

royal house the german royal house and they seem to have always had how can i put it tactfully a very healthy sexual appetite one doesn’t normally think of victoria you know with a famous we are not amused as a highly sexed woman but there’s no doubt about it her she hated actually having children she hated the whole process of giving birth and who wouldn’t under victorian conditions of course she was one of the early people to give birth with anaesthetic with chlorophyll doses of chloroform um but the night

after her wedding in other words her marriage night her descriptions of fact her enthusiasm her passion is quite extraordinary victoria’s son king edward vii had a lifetime of pleasure with a series of mistresses most notably with mrs alice keppel then there was daisy countess of warwick and the actress lily langtry the man with with so many mistresses that were allegedly sort of rules as to how the mistress should behave and one of them sort of explained how a mistress was supposed to behave that you curtsied

first called him sir and then jumped into bed queen alexandra tolerated her husband’s infidelities great-grandfather king edward the seventh victorious son when prince of wales notoriously had many affairs and continued to after becoming king this of course was in a different age when his wife did shut up and look the other way and was very long suffering and kind enough to invite his favorite mistress to see him on his deathbed and that favorite mistress mrs alice keppel just happens to be the great grandmother

of mrs camilla parker poles as camilla reputedly reminded the prince on one of their first meetings my great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress how about it then she supposedly said to him edward’s son king george v and his wife mary preferred victoria’s family values what happened though in the beginning of the 20th century with george v and queen mary was that there was a decision that the monarchy should adapt itself to democracy what we’re going to do we’re going to symbolize the one thing that

all our people have in common now the thing that everybody had in common in the until the 1960s was family you all belong to a family you were a product of a family you were all going to get married very few people didn’t get married and so on and the house of windsor did this and he did it extraordinary successfully very very successfully embodied typical middle-class bourgeois family values it was a bourgeois monarchy now there are always exceptions there was the exception of course of edward viii who was driven from the

throne because he wouldn’t fulfill this particular set of values george v and queen mary were cold and distant parents to their six children the eldest david was a handsome golden child with enviable charisma his upbringing concentrated on protocol in adult life he rebelled against his parents repression it was during the first world war when as a young officer he was subjected to a major encounter with the opposite sex edward viii is first introduced to sex when his equeries decide that you know he’s he’s whatever he is i can’t even

remember his age but relatively elderly not to have had sex they decide this really must stop so they give him an x i think it’s just outside amia in the first world war they give him a jolly good dinner with a great deal of wine and then a nice sympathetic french prostitute if i remember correctly called paulette is found who gives him ecstasy for the evening and then he writes this letter afterwards you know never been interested in it before now i can’t get enough and this he is then never out of love and never out of sex

um so i think we need to see this as a highly charged family which of course i suppose shows you just what problems enacting the role of the family monarchy actually presents in terms of the suppression and the control of desires thelma furness was one of his married lovers frieda dudley was another they all lost out to twice married wallace simpson king edward viii had a succession of relationships when he was a single man always with married ladies always married ladies he always believed that it was safer to have a

relationship have an affair with a married woman because she was at a commitment elsewhere she had as much to lose perhaps as he did edward viii chose married women because they were safe he liked mature women he liked the comforts of home he didn’t like silly girls he wanted a woman and a woman who would provide him with a home life he felt that he never had a home life with his parents he used to say queen mary his mother was very cold and he was terrified of king george v uh so he felt he’d never had a home life

and he wanted a home life and the way to get a home life was to be a part of a family which is what he had when he had his mistresses in 1936 david by then king edward viii gave up the throne for the woman he loved and became duke of windsor they married the following year and never returned to live again in britain all hated today thought that she had you know she had stolen the king she had made him lose his crown they all thought she was terrible adventurous they all thought she was simply after the position and what they all thought was

that once she had got him once she had married him and wasn’t the queen that she would ditch him as she had ditched two other husbands they assumed she was simply an adventurous was after the throne and once she didn’t get it that she would clear off it that didn’t happen but that is why they thought she was just real a good time girl is what they thought she was after their marriage the couple lived in france in a villa in paris the duke was always resentful that after their marriage his wife was not made a royal

highness well he thought that she was absolutely worthy of it he thought this is the least he could do um if he couldn’t make her queen and he was determined at one state that she would be queen and she was determined to be queen the least that he could do for her was to make her a royal hinds and this is what he spent really his whole life battling for this is the one supreme battle of his life more important than anything was to make her royal highness that battle of course which he never won the royal family’s attitude to divorce

and remarriage was severely tested in december 1992 when the queen allowed her divorced daughter princess anne to remarry charles and andrew had both separated from their wives that year charles only three days before he attended this wedding the quiet ceremony in balmoral’s tiny church marked a triumph for anne by marrying in scotland she had escaped the opposition of the church of england to the remarriage of a royal divorcee the 42 year old princess had shaken off the scandal surrounding the discovery of

love letters from her new husband tim lawrence then an equity to the queen the combination of palace protection for a princess of the royal house and her own capacity for a heavy workload ensured a smooth transition anne’s indiscretions were all forgotten tim a naval officer was welcomed into the family he had once served on that occasion in scotland princess anne’s grandmother elizabeth the queen mother must have recalled her own wedding in 1923 she had been hand-picked by queen mary as a bride for the diffident prince

albert known as bertie the daughter of the scottish earl of strathmore lady elizabeth beau’s line was regarded as a commoner but queen mary found her eminently suitable bertie became george vi after his brother abdicated to marry mrs simpson he called his family the firm their children princesses elizabeth and margaret were attractive unspoilt girls close to their parents the image of the ideal family in 1948 princess margaret fell for the king’s equery group captain peter townsend sadly her love was in vain a divorcee he

was barred from remarriage in the eyes of the church the queen’s sister so close to the throne marrying a divorced person wasn’t on not in the moral climate at the time just after the war years after tanzan’s departure margaret married society photographer anthony armstrong jones newly ennobled as lord snowden the marriage began with great hopes but the couple may have been temperamentally unsuited margaret was the diana of her day and never off the front pages particularly when she was romantically involved with a younger man roddy

llewellyn she was quite a sexy attractive girl i don’t see why any reason why she shouldn’t have lovers she’s got this nice quite little island in mustique a lot of people would like to be very close to princess margaret because she’s royal because she’s glamorous because she’s famous and a lot of young men probably young men would would want to become her lover i would say and she’s had a few princess margaret survived the scandal of her divorce in 1978.

years later she carries out her royal duties with resignation and royal decorum but margaret is sometimes seen as a difficult even arrogant woman princess margaret has not really been a very sympathetic personality because she’s never rarely known how to play the princess role in terms of friendship you know one minute she’s very down to earth and very much the way diana could be where people would call diana diana and she wouldn’t mind well princess margaret minded princess margaret mounted awfully if people called her margaret

so you know she’d be so relaxed with them and allow them to be so relaxed with her that they would take it to the ultimate and obvious conclusion of treating her completely as if she were a human being without royal status at which point she would clamp down and remind them that she was the queen’s sister and you know that she was ma’am and that’s so you know she’s gone through her whole life with many people who are genuinely fond of her calling her ma’am darling well tell me that’s ridiculous older royals can recall times when their

private behavior was concealed within great houses among aristocratic friends and kept secret from the public one of those mansions was broadland the elegant former home of lord mountbatten it was bought by his beautiful and wealthy wife edwina edwina mountbatten made fergie look like the sweetest most innocent baby she was promiscuous she was sexually avaricious she was bisexual she was wildly indiscreet she didn’t care who knew what she was up to as long as she was gratified her marriage to lord louis mountbatten survived for

the very simple reason that edwina ashley as she was was one of the greatest heiresses of her time and he who was a son of prince louis of battenberg had no money at all he also loved her he genuinely did love her he did not impinge upon her in any way he allowed her absolute freedom which she took you know she would put on her tiara and go to buckingham palace and the following morning take off for india with the lover broadlands in hampshire has been an important retreat for the queen and prince philip who spent their honeymoon

there prince charles took diana there in july 1981 to spend their wedding night he knew the house well through his extreme closeness to lord mountbatten the man he called his honorary grandfather always a little afraid of his own father prince philip charles looked to the much decorated war hero for manly guidance mountbatten was aware that charles was shy about entertaining women under his mother’s roof he gave charles advice about his love life and the need to keep secret liaison out of the papers mountbatten allowed him to use

broadlands as a loveness for his affairs with single girls and with married women among the married women was camilla parker-bowles she came to dominate his uh life would also of counsel charged with charles that if he was going to have a love affair with another woman particularly a married woman that it was going to be kept strictly quietly and strictly on the on on the side mountbatten himself could be the most indiscreet of men but where relationships were concerned he could be ultra discreet and he would have been

impressed upon prince charles and bon diana the need for the utmost discretion and he certainly wouldn’t have allowed them either any of them either of them to have made the public confessions that they subsequently did in earlier times royals kept their secrets they expected deference from newspapers who kept silent over scandals the new generation of royal women particularly diana and fergie emulated the marital behavior of previous royals such as the parents of princess alexandra her father the late duke of kent was the

son of george v known as prince george he married the beautiful greek princess marina a glamorous couple they had many indiscretions in terms of what goes on nowadays it wasn’t really shocking it was just sort of very human you know he had a coke problem he was bisexual had an affair with like no coward that sort of thing well she was widowed very young and she had a very healthy respect for masculine flesh and availed herself of it at every turn the problem is of course that she lived by the rules of her day which were that a married woman should

usually have an affair with a married man so there were many wives who absolutely loathed princess marina because she was busy leading their husbands by the nose so to speak but she never put her foot wrong publicly she was always beautifully presented she was a beautiful woman beautifully turned out always charming always impeccably behaved in public what she did in the previous year of her own bedroom was her business and her children understand this and respect the fact that she was she had an absolute appreciation of royal

decorum and never put a foot wrong like edwina mountbatten and princess marina diana and fergie expected their dangerous liaison to remain hidden behind the veneer of royal respectability diana remained loyal to the royal family up until the point where she felt threatened by charles’s friends and by the palace machinery of married in name only in 1986 she had fallen in love with the young officer james hewitt their on-off affair lasted five years she confessed their relationship during her 1995 panorama television interview

did your relationship go beyond a close friendship yes it did yes were you unfaithful yes i adored him yes i was in love with him that interview in which she questioned charles’s suitability to become king shuttered the uneasy peace she had held with the royal family since her 1992 separation her situation became untenable the queen demanded divorce i think diana broke the mold of the monarchy really essentially because of personality she was this extraordinary woman uh we didn’t think so at first but she turned

out to be this quite extraordinary woman she had a certain kind of common touch dare i used the word a sort of vulgarity which was is essential in a popular institution in an age of mass democracy there was something else too it was her very unhappiness and the dreadfulness of the marriage which she decided to treat in a very different way she of course decided not to go she would tell all now these two things the vulgarity on the one hand and the determination to tell all on the other ripped apart the two central themes of

the 20th century british market to destroy the great selling if you like the great advertising slope of the british monarchy the touch of vulgarity also did something else this monarchy which was a popular monarchy a very successful monarchy also depended on maintaining a distance a certain remoteness and she reached out she cut through that she broke it so she broke both the etiquette and the slogan it’s hard to think of a more complete demolition job in india diana publicly humiliated her husband expecting a token kiss charles

was rebuffed by a deaf turn of diana’s head this gesture brought the battle from the royal home out into the public arena it was no doubt at all that charles and diana were in the pr they both behaved as though they were they had their generals they had their lieutenants they had their plans of campaign and there were famous battles weren’t there diana’s war horse was a sleek limousine her battle dress selected to upstage charles who foolishly admitted adultery with camilla parker-bowles during a televised interview

there was this extraordinary moment when diana turned up at the serpentine gallery deliberately choosing the sort of art wearing that dress and you have never seen so much royal leg since the proxy marriages of the middle ages when a princess was married by proxy in the middle ages she was put naked into bed whilst the visiting ambassador who was marrying her by proxy put his naked leg down beside her well as i said you’ve never seen so much royal leg since one of those things that extraordinary split dress it was

magnificent men and women were equally entranced by diana’s startling beauty and her powerful presence she had learned every cosmetic and fashion trick to enhance her appearance against her dazzle charles looked dull and old-fashioned too rooted in tradition but diana’s death seems to have liberated him seen weeks after her funeral charles toured south africa with prince harry he seemed a new man the burden of rivalry was gone he also found himself in a completely no-winning situation everyone’s noted how his own behavior

seems to have transformed since diana’s death how much more outgoing i think he always found himself playing second fiddle to her he always found himself overshadowed by her whatever card he played she seemed to trump and i think he must desperately have hoped that divorce would somehow put an end under this awful story of course it didn’t it didn’t only her death charles no longer had to share his elderly grandmother’s popularity with the public i think that what has happened to him is a genuine tragedy

because i think for many years his work was completely ignored and the sort of person he was was twisted and perverted by the media the press had long tracked charles’s friendship with an attractive australian lady dale tryon an old confidant from his bachelor days he nicknamed her kanga and wrote her many letters but tragically within a few weeks of diana’s death she died in hospital following an operation dale tryon had been wheelchair-bound after falling out of a clinic window the previous year the daily ion that i knew was

in some ways a wonderfully exuberant and really delicious personality and in latter years quite a sad woman dale’s whole identity was caught up in having been a confidant of the prince of wales she was obsessed with the prince of wales unlike camilla the other woman in charles’s life kanga ran a successful dress shop in london’s knightsbridge when charles went back to camilla dale hoped that he would have gone back to her as well and he didn’t he and dale remained friends but that former intimacy had gone forever

and dale and i had one very close friend in common who used to say to me and has to remain nameless because she’s so well placed that it would be impossibly embarrassing for her name to be used but she used to say to me oh you know dale is still implying that she and charles are still on what do you think and i used to say absolutely not he’s not on with her but dale went around implying to people that she was still a confidant long after she wasn’t this is what i love in an exclusive interview shortly before her death kanga spoke of her

relationship with charles wonderful success this neckline just because he happens to be prince of wales doesn’t mean he’s any different from lots of other friends and i love my friends and i love him a lot but this very different thing um saying in love with someone than that you love them and my friends have been a wonderful wonderful sport of the three women who love charles only one survives camilla parker bowles is still a powerful force in charles’s life she had become the mistress who will not go quietly

charles and camilla can continue for the rest of their lives without getting married and in some ways it will suit both of them better he won’t have the fuss that making her his wife will cause and she will not be condemned to being a princess of wales because believe me to her it will be a condemnation he always understood that anyone who became the princess of wales entered into a mephistophelen bargain with the media and with the courtiers that she was sacrificing her freedom her independence and to a larger extent her individuality

he knew this and diana knew this because he told this to dana but dana was too young to appreciate what she was rarely swapping and what she was really getting into camila knows it camilla doesn’t want it after her divorce diana resolved to leave the past behind in the summer of 1997 she holidayed in san tropez with the family of muhammad al-fayed diana stayed in the fired sumptuous villa and cruised on their luxurious yacht among the party was fired’s 42 year old sandodia film producer with a well-documented interest in beautiful

women in the santropay heat diana and dodie fell in love their first meeting was captured on film in june 1988 at a polo match at this time diana was still married to charles i think diana’s affair with georgie was the royal family’s dream come true you see it suited the royal family for diana to be wound down publicly and for charles to be wound back up and diana was doing with dodie what nothing else could have done had she lived her relationship with dodie would have been an answer to the royal family’s prayers

there were no happy endings diana and dodie died after a paris car crash on the 31st of august 1997. her death and the incredible outpouring of grief forced the royal family to adapt to public opinion diana and fergie had played a dangerous game and lost their status and titles diana’s indiscretions began a chain of events which ended in the ultimate tragedy two young boys lost their precious mother and will grieve for her all their lives the queen at 71 faces urgent changes in the royal family values she has accepted

from the cradle she had believed that the monarchy was a modern institution evolving gradually with social changes now she knows that diana’s instincts and desire for reform were right even she admitted that lessons had to be drawn from diana’s death in this new emotional britain this sort of double reaction is the right thing but he can only keep that up he can only as it were oddly enough be now the inheritor of all the sentiment that was directed at diana this is the extraordinary thing he can only do it so long as he doesn’t marry

camilla camilla i think is now permanently the mistress she is now permanently behind the scenes she will never become queen she will never have a coronation there there will be always a ghost queen diana by a deep paradox diana’s death put her back into the royal family she was buried underneath the standard of a royal highness although the time had been stripped for her prince charles behaved as though he was still married to her and it’s almost as though her death wiped out the divorce she will always be charles’s wife she

will always be mother of the two princes and in a funny kind of way she’s queen from beyond the grave she went home to althrop her family’s ancestral estate back to the spencers whose forebears lie with her father in the nearby church at great brington the village she knew as a girl diana is not there she was buried away from public gays on an island in the middle of a small lake at althrop where she played as a child her memory will be adorned by myth and fable and legend her death has shown that no one can predict the fortunes of the house of

windsor diana is finally at peace