Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
It’s my duty to stand up for Diana
Earl Spencer’s mission to protect late sister’s legacy
was a suitable wife for the heir to the throne rather than because he loved her. As she told journalist Andrew Morton in 1992: “Charles had found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.”
And so, naive, hopeful Diana married a stranger over a decade her senior. Before the wedding they’d only been on a handful of dates – as she later said: “We met 13 times and we got married.”
Diana took on the high-profile role of Princess of Wales, as a young girl needing kindness, compassion and reassurance, but got none of this.
Instead she was pushed to her limits by the infamous three people in her marriage, the coldness of her new family and a husband increasingly jealous of her popularity.
Her childlike innocence was obvious to everyone who met her. The Queen Mother’s page William Tallon remembered 19 year-old Diana wandering around Clarence House the night before her wedding in search of company, and ending up riding a spare bicycle ringing the bell and singing, ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales.”
“She was just a child, you know, just a little girl,” said Tallon. Never mind Prince Charming, impressionable, inexperienced Diana thought Charles was her knight in shining armour.
“I remember being so in love with my husband that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. He was going to look after me,” Diana told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words. “Well, was I wrong on that..”
Many of Diana’s issues arose from the difficult childhood she had. When she was just seven, her happy family unit was destroyed when her mother, Frances, left her father, John, for another man.
According to her brother, Charles Spencer, Diana felt abandoned by their mother.
He said: “While she was packing to leave, she promised Diana she’d come back to see her. Diana used to wait on the doorstep, but she never came”.
Feeling rejected by her mum would fill Diana with a sense of worthlessness that she would struggle with for the rest of her life. It also made her hungry for love, and a prime candidate to be taken advantage of.
The Windsors are reserved and aloof, but Diana couldn’t have been more different – warm, open, and loving.
When Charles and Diana’s marriage ended, she was thrown to the wolves. Diana had provided the heir and a spare, and the royals cast her aside like an old toy.
All these years later, the horrible injustice of it all still stings. Diana never got the happy ending she deserved. Instead the fairytale she was promised turned out to be a horror story. BOMBSHELL INTERVIEW RAGES ON