This was the painful divorce of Lady Di and Prince Charles 26 years ago
The separation of the princes of Wales began in 1992, but the divorce lasted until 1996 for these reasons.
If there was a marriage as historic as it was stormy, it was that of Lady Di and Prince Charles. Before announcing their engagement in 1981, they only went on 12 dates, all of which were accompanied by other people. Five months later, hardly knowing each other, they were already married. Diana was 19 and Carlos was 32.
Lady Di and Prince Charles divorced in August 1996. But the final separation began in 1992, the most famous couple in the world, whom a billion people saw getting married on television, went through four hurtful years before divorce.
As the documentary The Story of Diana relates, due to her position and age, the prince was under pressure to marry. After unsuccessful courtships with Lady Di's older sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, and Camilla Parker Bowles, Carlos would "settle down" to end his playboy fame as one of the most coveted singles. Diana seemed the right candidate to start a family with the heirs of the British royal family.
Few noticed the indicator that the pair was not solid. In a post-engagement interview, a reporter asked if they were in love and while Diana said “sure”, the prince said “whatever love means” and laughed.
After Harry's birth, after four years of marriage, the couple already had serious problems. Diana suffered from bulimia and depression from the tension in the marriage. She herself confessed it in 1995 in a television interview where she declared "the cause was a situation where my husband and I had to keep everything together because we did not want to disappoint the public and obviously there was a lot of anxiety in four walls."
In that same interview, the princess revealed that she always knew about Carlos's infidelity with Camilla. "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded," he said. Thus she felt more than isolated by her husband. One of her shelters was the charity work she did and that characterized her so much, but eventually the bomb exploded.
Carlos had an out-of-wedlock relationship with Camilla; Diana with James Hewitt, a former British Army soldier. So the couple was getting closer and closer to their end, as they could no longer keep these romances a secret thanks to the leak of Diana's phone calls with James. Every time she felt more watched and paranoid as her brother explains in the documentary available on Netflix.
Due to the unsustainable relationship, the princes of Wales announced their separation in 1992, but long before they stopped being a couple. Even Prime Minister John Major had to give the royal family announcement. They maintained a cordial relationship for William and Harry, and while Carlos was still with Camilla, Lady Di was with businessman Dodi Al-Fayed. During that time, the princess kept the title of royal highness.
According to the Telegraph, Carlos' father, the Duke of Edinburgh, tried to be a marriage counselor for the couple to rescue their marriage. Felipe and Diana exchanged letters, but it was not enough to fix it. After months of negotiations between Queen Elizabeth II, Charles and Diana, the divorce was signed in August 1996. For her part, the princess declared that she did not want to divorce, but it is said that the monarch was the one who pressed for it to happen.
Although the queen agreed to leave the title of royal highness to Diana, Charles insisted that she did not. Then Lady Di stopped being Diana, Princess of Wales, and had to bow to all members of the royal family, as protocol dictated that she was no longer one of them.
In that spectacular accident in Paris, Diana died on August 31, 1997, just one year after the divorce. It seemed that she and her partner, Dodi Al-Fayed, would finally breathe a little after the mediatic divorce, when they tried to flee from the press that harassed them so much on the way to the airport and died.
Prince Charles married his former girlfriend and lover Camilla Parker, now the Duchess of Cornwall, in 2005.
