Charles and Diana’s Divorce: 3 Heartbreaking Quotes From Prince Harry About His Parents’ Split
Through the years, Prince Harry has opened up about his parents’ King Charles III and Princess Diana’s divorce. From what he said about never seeing either one “enough” during their separation. Plus, how, in a way, the divorce ultimately helped him bond with Meghan Markle.
King Charles and Princess Diana divorced in 1996 after a 4-year separation
Harry became a child of divorce in 1996. His parents formally divorced one year prior to Diana’s death. However, King Charles and Diana had already been separated for four years by the time their split became official.
King Charles and Diana announced their separation on Dec. 9, 1992. The announcement came 11 years following their nuptials on July 29, 1981. King Charles and Diana exchanged vows at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, with the now-Queen Camilla among the guests.
Thanks to bombshell biographies and interviews from both King Charles and Diana in the ‘War of the Waleses,’ the world became aware of the king’s affair with his now-wife as well as the tumultuous nature of his and Diana’s relationship.
‘She was by herself’: Divorce left Diana ‘completely exposed’ to harassment, according to Harry
In the 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex opened up about being children of divorce. While Harry’s parents divorced when he was 8, Meghan’s parents, Doria Ragland and Thomas Markle, divorced when she was 6.
Harry recalled the paparazzi harassment endured by his late mother, which he witnessed only get more intense after the divorce.
“The moment she divorced, the moment she left the institution, then she was by herself,” Harry said of Diana. “Yeah, she may have been one of the most influential, powerful women in the world. But she was completely exposed to this.”
Meanwhile, Diana said something similar in her controversial BBC Panorama interview. “Everything changed after we separated. And life became very difficult then for me,” she told Martin Bashir in 1995.
Harry doesn’t want to ‘repeat the same mistakes’ as his parents
Elsewhere in the docuseries, Harry shared he and Meghan have a desire not to “repeat the same mistakes” as their parents.
“There’s so much, I think, from anyone’s childhood that you bring with you into the present, especially when you’re the product of divorce,” Meghan said.
“I think most kids who are the product of divorced parents have a lot in common, no matter what your background is,” Harry added. “Being pulled from one place to another, or maybe your parents are competitive, or you’re in one place longer than you want to be, or another place less than you want to be. There’s all sorts of pieces to that.”
Harry ‘never saw’ his parents ‘enough’ after King Charles and Diana split
Previously, in 2017’s Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Harry opened up about the “interesting way of growing up” with parents who were no longer together.
“There was a point where our parents split and,” Harry said, “we never saw our mother enough or we never saw our father enough. There was a lot of traveling and a lot of fights on the back seat with my brother [Prince William] — which I would win.”
“It was an interesting way of growing up,” the now-father of two concluded.
