How Charles married Diana without ever truly knowing her

Charles Proposed to Diana Having Spent More Time With His Horse Than With Her. The Palace Knew It and Approved Anyway.

The courtship between Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer lasted approximately six months from initial serious consideration to engagement. In that time, the couple spent — by Diana’s own estimate, and by the accounts of those who arranged their meetings — barely a dozen evenings together. They had never been alone for longer than a few hours at a stretch. They had never, in the way that ordinary couples do, simply lived alongside each other long enough to discover what the other person was actually like.

This was not unusual for royal courtships of the era. What was unusual — and what has occupied historians and royal biographers ever since — was how clearly the warning signs were visible to those who arranged the match, and how thoroughly those warnings were overridden by institutional priorities.

Those closest to Charles before the engagement have described, in memoirs and interviews over the years, a prince who was genuinely uncertain. He liked Diana. He found her charming, uncomplicated, and refreshing after years of relationships with women who understood the full complexity of what they were getting into and were deterred by it. But he was not in love with her — not in the way that had been true of Camilla, not in the way that would have made the marriage’s difficulties navigable.

He discussed his uncertainty with his advisers. The advice he received — which has been confirmed by multiple sources, including Jonathan Dimbleby’s authorised biography — was to proceed. The succession required a marriage. The public expected a wedding. Diana met the criteria. Whatever reservations Charles had would, it was implied, resolve themselves in time. They did not resolve.

Diana, for her part, had no significant reservations before the wedding. She was 19, she was in love — or believed she was — and the idea of marrying the Prince of Wales was so far beyond the ordinary possibilities of anyone’s life that the complications were genuinely invisible to her. She did not understand what she was entering. She could not have.

What she entered, she described in her recorded testimony as being “thrown in at the deep end” — an understatement so measured it becomes, in context, devastating. She went from nursery school assistant to Princess of Wales in eight months. She went from a flatshare in Earls Court to Buckingham Palace. She went from anonymity to the most photographed existence on earth.

Nobody had prepared her. The institution had looked at a 19-year-old girl, assessed her suitability against its checklist, and said: yes, she’ll do.

The checklist did not include a question about what she would need, or what she would cost when it went wrong.