Princess Diana Was Told Her Engagement and Wedding to Prince Charles Wouldn’t Be a Big Deal
When Princess Diana caught Prince Charles’s eye in 1980, the then-teenage Lady Spencer was thrilled by the attention. She assumed she was going to enter into the fairytale of her dreams. Sadly that would not be the case.
She would enter into a tumultuous marriage and be thrust center stage into a violate media. She had no idea what was coming. She later revealed that she was even told that news of her engagement to the prince would barely make a ripple in the press.
Princess Diana and Prince Charles barely knew each other when they got married
Sadly, the Prince and Princess of Wales marriage was doomed from the start. Despite their quick courtship and engagement, Princess Diana and Prince Charles barely knew each other.
The 19-year-old was a kindergarten teacher’s aide living in a London apartment with her friends, and the prince was in his 30s and hopelessly in love with his ex-girlfriend. The pair had very little in common.
By the time they’d gotten engaged, the couple had only met 13 times in person. The princess later said the prince would go weeks without contacting her and then randomly pop back into her life again. “His family wanted it. The public wanted it,” Tina Brown wrote in her book, The Diana Chronicles via Express. “Prince Charles was exhausted. He proposed.”
Prince Charles felt pressured into marrying Princess Diana
With his love Camilla already married to another man and no other suitable women willing to take on his royal life, the prince felt pressured into marrying Princess Diana.
In particular, Prince Philip was adamant that his eldest son settle down and he thought the princess was a good match. “‘You’ve either got to marry her or let her go. You can’t string a … young girl [along]. She’s only 19. You can’t string her along,’” Seward wrote in Prince Philip Revealed via Us Weekly. “And all the press is saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be the next queen.’ You’ve got to take a stand and say that this is not going to work, or you marry her.”
Seward explained, “Charles…he was frightened of his father, and he probably thought, ‘Well, OK. I’ll marry her if that’s what you want me to do.’”
Princess Diana was told her engagement to Prince Charles wouldn’t be a big deal
Though the princess was optimistic about her life alongside the young prince, she had no idea what she was in for. She was clueless about his close bond with Camilla, and she certainly had no idea the media frenzy that would begin following the news of their engagement. In fact, she was told that news of their intent to marry would barely make a splash in the press.
In her infamous BBC interview in 1995 she said via E! News,
My husband and I, we were told when we got engaged that the media would go quietly, and it didn’t, and then when we were married they said it would go quietly and it didn’t. And then it started to focus very much on me, and I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day, which is an isolating experience, and the higher the media put you, place you, the bigger the drop. And I was very aware of that.
