We’ll never forget how Camilla betrayed poor Diana
ONE of the most poignant stories in the Mail’s captivating series this week about Diana’s jewellery is that of her simple gold-link charm bracelet — it seemed to symbolise all her hopes for her marriage.
Charles pledged to buy her a charm for it every year on her birthday, each with special meaning.
The first he gave her was a ‘W’, marking William’s birth in 1982, followed by a little gold wombat, the young Prince’s nickname as a baby. Then came an ‘H’ for Harry.
Forget the dazzling diamonds and sapphires, this was the item she cherished. A symbol of hope and a rebuke to Camilla whose own love token for the Prince — those infamous cufflinks engraved with interlinked ‘C’s — Diana had discovered to her horror on her honeymoon.
Astonishingly, the charms kept coming even as their relationship disintegrated — a pair of ballet shoes, a tennis racket, a St Paul’s Cathedral to mark their wedding anniversary.
Yet all the while, behind her back, Charles was cynically betraying her with Camilla. Only when Diana’s dreams of happiness turned to dust did she finally gave up wearing the bracelet in public.
In Channel 4’s controversial Diana: In Her Own Words, her ballet teacher Anne Allan revealed Diana’s utter devastation on discovering Charles’s affair with Camilla years before he publicly admitted it on TV. Her bodyguard Ken Wharfe, appalled at the way Charles’s camp tried to discredit Diana, said: ‘I saw more royal virtues embedded in her than in him.’
After Diana and Charles separated in 1992, she went through a profoundly painful period.
Countless women who have experienced broken marriages or seen friends and family go through breakups understand and feel deep sympathy for what Diana suffered.
The thousands of words written about her as we approach the anniversary of her death have reminded us with shocking clarity how she was wronged by Charles and Camilla.
How Camilla, in particular, ruthlessly schemed to continue her relationship with Charles whatever the effect on Diana.
As Camilla basks in the glow of her rehabilitation all these years later, she’d do well remember what she put Diana through. Because many of us haven’t forgotten — or forgiven.