THE Misunderstood PRINCE

The MARRIAGe of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was already in deep trouble as they honeymooned at Balmoral. Suffering from insomnia and growing thinner by the day, the Princess wept for hours on end — when she wasn’t berating her new husband about his former mistress or complaining about the oppressive atmosphere of the royal court.

‘What is it now, Diana?’ Charles would implore. ‘What have I said now to make you cry?’ Again and again, he reassured her that his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles was in the past. he tried soothing Diana, but felt powerless to contain her emotional storms, which shocked him in their intensity and suddenness.

At his wits’ end, he began seeking refuge in the Balmoral countryside with his paint-box, books, fishing rod and guns, but that only made his young wife even more aggrieved.

Finally, in desperation, Charles invited his guru — the 74-year-old philosopher Laurens van der Post — to Scotland. But Van der Post could make no headway with the weeping Princess, suggesting only that she should urgently seek psychiatric help.

Unsurprisingly, Diana was prescribed Valium. She refused to take it, however, convinced in her growing paranoia that the Royal Family was trying to sedate her.

There seemed at least a glimmer of hope when she agreed to have therapy with Dr Alan McGlashan, a friend of Van der Post’s. But she saw him only eight times.

Instead, it was her distressed and bewildered husband who began having therapy with Dr McGlashan, and continued to do so regularly for the next 14 years.

According to Charles’s friend Van der Post, McGlashan perceived him as ‘misunderstood and starved’ of ‘really spontaneous, natural affection’, and provided the Prince with ‘the respect his own natural spirit deserves’.