People PEOPLE Diana, Charles, and Camilla: The Untold Story

diana, charles and camilla

25 YEARS LATER: THE UNTOLD STORY ‘THERE WERE THREE OF US IN THIS MARRIAGE.’ HOW DIANA REVEALED THE TRUTH BEHIND THE FAIRY TALE • CHARLES & CAMILLA’S DECADES-LONG LOVE PLUS MEGHAN MARKLE & MORE WOMEN WHO SHOOK UP THE WINDSORS…

the women who shook the throne

From the moment guests arrived in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018, it was obvious that the wedding about to begin would be unlike any in British history. In the pews George and Amal Clooney and Serena Williams mixed with the Archbishop of Canterbury and Princess Mabereng Seeiso of Lesotho. Never before had the rousing voices of a multicultural gospel choir filled the Gothic stone walls, or had an African-American preacher from Washington, D.C., delivered a passionate sermon from the pulpit. (The reception that night was surely the first on the premises deejayed by Idris Elba.) As Harry, the son of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, and Meghan Markle, the daughter of a television lighting director father and yoga instructor mother, debuted as husband and wife, those…

all the girls he loved before

IN 1974 PRINCE CHARLES’S GREAT-UNCLE AND MENTOR Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten wrote him a letter with some advice: “I believe in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down.” He may have had in mind keeping Charles single long enough for Mountbatten’s teen granddaughter Amanda Knatchbull to come of age. (Knatchbull turned down Charles’s proposal in 1979.) But he was also sending Charles another message: that his someday bride—a future Queen of England—could not herself have a history of oats-sowing. “For a wife,” the letter continued, “you should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for.” Already the requirement that Charles, as heir to the throne, marry someone…

who’s that girl

GREAT FUN AND BOUNCY AND FULL OF LIFE,” Charles would recall of his earliest impression of Lady Diana Spencer. His then-girlfriend Sarah’s kid sister was wearing, he remembered, an anorak, corduroy pants and Wellington boots the day they met at a hunting shoot at Althorp, her family home. Diana would later admit she found the not-quite-30-year-old future King “pretty amazing.” A little more than two years later, in July 1980, Diana, by then 19 years old and working as a teacher at a kindergarten, and Charles met again at a post-polo barbecue. He had long since broken up with Sarah Spencer but remembered Diana. “They just clicked,” Sarah later told biographer Penny Junor. It seemed, she said, “he met Miss Right, and she met Mr. Right.” And according to royal watchers,…

sealed with a kiss

WATCHING THE PREWEDDING coverage on television from her bedroom as a seamstress pressed her wedding gown, the bride-to-be had a moment of panic. “Do I really have to go out in front of all these people?” Diana asked, according to seamstress Nina Missetzis. So timid as a child that she once agreed to be in a school Christmas pageant only if she didn’t have to speak, Diana would soon be center stage as some 750 million watched her marry Prince Charles on July 29, 1981. Despite her nerves, she didn’t disappoint when she arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral in an 1881 glass coach. In her billowing gown made of 40 yds. of silk and embroidered with 10,000 sequins and pearls, its breathtaking 25-ft. train the longest in royal history, she…

come rain or shine

THE HONEYMOONERS STRODE hand in hand through the Scottish heather, stopping on the banks of the River Dee to pose as 60 or so photographers snapped away. “I hope you’re pleased with the picturesque view,” Prince Charles said, gesturing toward the moors behind them. But for the press on the grounds of Balmoral for a photo session on Aug. 19, 1981, the wild beauty of the highlands was incidental; their lenses were aimed squarely at a new princess in love. “She kept putting her head on his shoulder,” photographer Jayne Fincher said to People in 2017. “They looked so in love.” The British public was as smitten with them as the newlyweds appeared to be with each other. When the couple arrived in Wales in October 1981 for their first official…