Princess Diana felt ‘oppressed’ on her honeymoon with Prince Charles, royal historian claims
Although the honeymoon pictures show the couple smiling, Princess Diana is said to have been unhappy during the holiday
PRINCESS Diana married Prince Charles in a fairytale wedding in 1981 – but there was trouble in paradise on the honeymoon, it has been claimed.
Diana is said to have felt “oppressed” at the Queen’s Scottish estate Balmoral, which she visited as part of her holiday with her new husband.
Despite photos showing the newlyweds being all smiles, royal experts claim Princess Diana was already starting to feel unhappy.
On the Netflix documentary The Story of Diana, which initially aired in 2017, historian Sally Bedell Smith reveals: “She seemed to be having a great time, but in fact, she couldn’t stand being at Balmoral.
“She felt oppressed and hemmed in.”
The couple put on a great show for photographers, however, and royal snapper Jane Fincher recalled how they acted “romantic” in shots.
She said: “The particular moment I remember when they looked very, very romantic – he was sort of, completely smitten by her – was when they were walking in the heather by the river.
“They just looked so in love and he was gazing at her, he kept picking up her hand and kissing it, just like a Prince Charming would.
“She kept putting her head on his shoulder and it was all very romantic.”
However, royal biographer Tina Brown said in her 2007 book The Diana Chronicles that Princess Diana despised Balmoral.
She wrote: “The formality of Balmoral’s intractable routine made Diana desperate.”
The royal couple spent most of their two-week honeymoon sailing the Mediterranean aboard the royal yacht Britannia, before heading to Scotland.
While they were aboard, Princess Diana discovered that Prince Charles still carried items around in honour of his former flame, Camilla Parker Bowles.
In Penny Juror’s book The Untold Story, the biographer wrote: “On one occasion, she [Diana] and Charles had been consulting their diaries when a photograph of Camilla fell out of his.
“Another time, when they were in formal dress for dinner, she noticed the Prince was wearing a pair of gold cufflinks engraved with interwoven Cs."
And it quickly emerged that the couple had very different ideas of how the sailing week should go.
Penny explained: “The whole thing was a disaster, serving only to demonstrate how very little they had in common.
“The Prince had wanted envisaged a wonderful holiday in the sun, swimming, reading, painting and writing thank-you letters.
“So he'd taken along his watercolours, some canvases and a pile of books by the Afrikaner mystic and writer Laurens van der Post, which he'd hoped he and Diana might share and then discuss in the evenings.
“Diana, however, was no great reader. She hated his wretched books and was offended that he might prefer to bury his head in one of them rather than sit and talk to her.
“She resented him sitting for hours at his easel, too, and they had many blazing rows.”
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