Even when the public hated Camilla, Queen Elizabeth thought marrying her would be the making of Charles. And anyway, she’d always believed Diana should have gone for Andrew instead!

Queen’s lady-in-waiting] came in while I had my arms around her. That was a big mistake – for me, anyway.

She didn’t think the future Princess of Wales should have her arms around a footman.

‘She came in and went straight out. I was mortified.

‘After the engagement, [Diana] wasn’t at the palace very much and it wasn’t until May, June and July of 1981 that I started seeing her every day and we had these great long chats.

‘She told me she hated the engagement photos and she thought she looked fat, which was when her bulimia started.

‘We talked about everything. She said how unfeeling the family was; how they had no emotion and Charles wasn’t paying her any attention, and there was a great long list of people she hated and loathed.

‘She hated Lady Susan Hussey, and she hated Princess Anne. She told me her mother was a ruthless woman and a self-promoter, but I knew it was just a phase, as she would go shopping with her mother the following morning and her mother helped her a lot. She even claimed the Queen wasn’t paying her any attention.

‘But, to be fair, Buckingham Palace is a workplace; it’s not somewhere where the Queen has got endless hours to spare having cosy chats with Lady Diana over lunch.

‘I tried to explain to her as much as I could about the royal family. I said they are not terrible people, but they are very busy and they don’t get involved in situations as they don’t have time for them.

‘I think Diana thought it was strange that the Queen was not up there with her, sitting on the end of her bed chatting to her about her day. I think she genuinely thought that was going to happen.

‘When the Queen was at the palace, any of her children – and at that stage that included Diana – are welcome to have any meal they want with Her Majesty and all they have to do is phone up the Queen’s page and say, “Is the Queen in for lunch today and if so, does she have anybody with her?

And would it be all right if I came down?” And then the page would say: “She’s got an appointment and no, it wouldn’t be OK”; or else, “She is on her own and it would be perfectly fine.”

‘The Queen loved it if her children had lunch with her or dinner as she was often on her own. She would be as flexible as she could.

‘I felt it was my job to explain to Diana that if she wanted to eat with the Queen or see the Queen, all she had to do was ring up the Queen’s page and find out.’

She never did. A few years later, however, when the marriage was crumbling, Diana did turn in desperation to her mother-in-law.

She’d sit in the page’s vestibule next to the Queen’s sitting room, wait for any visitors to come out, then push her way in without waiting to be announced.

Often in tears, she’d rant about Charles, saying he hated her, and rail against her mother, her stepmother, her sister Jane and her husband Robert Fellowes, and anyone else who had upset her. Everyone else was to blame.

Diana insisted that she was being victimised and no one understood her.

The Queen came to dread these meetings. She’d never had to deal with such outbursts in her life, and they left her feeling drained, despondent and confused.

‘She just procrastinated,’ a member of the royal household said at the time. She listened to what Diana said, ‘but no solution was ever put forward.’

Charles, meanwhile, was reduced to shouting down the telephone at his mother to try to make her understand the depths of his unhappiness.

Most of the royal family blamed him for the state of the marriage; if Charles had been firmer in the beginning, they thought, many of the later difficulties with Diana would have been avoided.

But Charles was either too accommodating, too timid or – as many of the household staff maintained – too weak to call his wife to order.

Needless to say, there was far less understanding of mental illness in the 1980s than there is today.

Princess Margaret felt that the princess, who was throwing herself into a series of affairs, was making a fool of her husband.

The Queen Mother, for her part,

‘Charles was discredited as a heartless, immoral blackguard ’

suspected that Diana was incapable of telling the truth.

Like his mother and grandmother, Charles hated confrontation and did what he usually did when faced with a crisis beyond his immediate control: he turned away from it.

When things got too much, he drove to Wiltshire for a few hours with his lover Camilla Parker Bowles, who herself suffered from her husband’s infidelities.

She seemed like a rock of sanity amid the storm of hysteria.

‘I am so proud of you,’ she’d tell him, and when he protested that he wasn’t worthy of her support, she’d reply: ‘As usual, you’re underestimating yourself.’

It was the kind of flattery and affection he had craved all his life, coupled with a loving intimacy he had never enjoyed with Diana.

In the final years of his marriage, he couldn’t bear to be with her anymore, a member of the Highgrove staff recalls.

The princess slammed doors, kicked walls and burst into tears, her frustration and anger so out of control that they were, according to the Highgrove household, ‘frightening’.

The inevitable denouement of the marriage, propelled by the BBC interview Diana gave to Panorama, came as a relief.

Then in 1997, the year after the couple divorced, her untimely death provoked a wave of animosity towards Charles and his lover. With time, he hoped Camilla would be accepted as his wife, but the prospect frightened her.

She persuaded Charles that it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to marry, telling friends the prospect was ‘farcical’ and that it would never happen as he’d always put his duty first.

Public opinion was still running high against Camilla when the Queen decided enough was enough. Privately, she’d felt for some time that the couple should get married.

Her feeling was that it was the only way to end the issue and stop what she called the ‘cat and mouse’ game the couple were playing. By then, she was also convinced the marriage would prove the making of Charles – as a man, and eventually as King.

For a few years after Diana’s death, the Queen had been wary of appearing at any event to which Camilla had also been invited. But she’d never disliked her.

In the version of events put about by Princess Diana’s allies, Charles had fallen straight out of the honeymoon bed into the arms of Camilla Parker Bowles.

A later report claimed he’d remained faithful for only the first two years of the marriage.

This was creative nonsense with just one aim: to absolve Diana of responsibility for her affairs and to discredit Charles as a heartless, immoral blackguard who had driven a young girl to the brink of suicide.

The Queen, who had always kept a concerned if discreet eye on the situation, had little doubt about the truth of the matter. Camilla, she said, was ‘a much-maligned woman’.

Adapted from My Mother And I by Ingrid Seward to be published by Simon & Schuster on February 15 at €29.25 © Ingrid Seward 2024.