Just over a month before her wedding to the heir to the throne, Lady Diana Spencer was looking forward to dancing with her fiancé.
She and the entire royal family were invited to a party at Windsor Castle to celebrate Prince Andrew's 21st birthday. And what a party! Elton John provided the cabaret and there was a disco, complete with dry ice blowing smoke across the dance floor.
Incredibly, even the Queen joined in on the fun, dancing with Elton John while Bill Haley's 'Rock Around The Clock' played over the speakers.
But not Prince Charles: he spent the entire evening dutifully working the room, making sure he spoke to as many people as possible.
Diana was desperate. Her fiancé had been in America for most of the past week, but he clearly didn't want to dance with her.
Feeling emotionally drained, she frantically threw herself into dancing with one man after another – and eventually just danced alone.
A month before her wedding to Charles, Diana was ready to call the whole thing off. But her father warned her that to do so would be a great discourtesy to the future king
Queen Elizabeth II and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall attend President Trump's ceremonial welcome at Buckingham Palace Gardens in 2019
The Queen with Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, four months before the royal wedding in 1981
As the sun rose, a footman named Mark Simpson happened to look out the window and saw Diana in the castle courtyard.
In the dim light she cut a gaunt figure, looking exhausted and lost in thought, but still moving to a slow, rhythmic beat to a melody in her head.
At 5.30am she set off in her car for Althorp, her father's home in Northamptonshire. She was distraught, nervous, angry and had no intention of ever returning. The royal wedding was a failure for Diana.
But when she explained her decision to her father, Earl Spencer, he was horrified. After reassuring her, he pointed out that it would be a gross discourtesy to break off her engagement to the future king so close to the wedding.
And anyway, wasn't this what she had always wanted? Didn't she remember him telling her to only marry a man she loved – and his firm reply, “That's what I do”? Diana wasn't immediately convinced.
But over the course of the weekend, between tears and indecision, she finally let her father persuade her.
She couldn't deny that she still wanted to be the Princess of Wales. And at 19, she was still young enough to believe in a happy ending, despite what her instincts had told her that terrible night.
Few people remember how determined Diana was to become Princess of Wales.
In 1980 she made two trips to visit her sister Jane, who was married to Robert Fellowes, then the Queen's deputy private secretary, at her cottage on the Balmoral estate. And after the second visit, she was invited to spend four days at the castle to attend one of the royal family's regular parties.
During her time there, one employee recalled, Diana was desperate to make an impression.
“Most ladies don’t get up until the guns have been fired, but Diana was always up early. If you looked out the window at quarter to eight you would see her walking in the garden and she made a point of being there to see them off.
“That was when she played her best card. She went around telling everyone how much she loved Balmoral and how it was such a magical place and how she loved it beyond belief.”
Impressed, Prince Charles began asking her to accompany him fishing and accompanying him on long walks around the estate, in which she expressed great interest.
Diana, everyone agreed, was “charming.”
Aware of a possible new woman in her son's life, the queen had only two reservations. She wondered if someone so young could distinguish between the man and the prince. And she couldn't help but think that the Spencer girl would be a far better match for her younger son, Andrew.
Diana greets her brother-in-law Andrew with a kiss. The Queen had believed that her younger son would be a better match for Diana than her firstborn
The aristocratic Diana learned to accept the “bourgeois” peculiarities of the royal family – and so she was determined to become Princess of Wales
The Queen Mother took a more positive approach. In a grandmotherly intervention a month later, she invited Diana and Charles to Birkhall, her home on the Balmoral estate, for a few days of stalking.
A few low-key, discreet dates in London followed, and in January 1981 Diana was invited to Sandringham.
She made a point of going to kindergarten and fussing over nanny Mabel Anderson, then looking after Princess Anne's son, who had been the emotional fulcrum of Charles' childhood.
And when the guns fell early in the morning, Diana was always there, waving them off with a fawning remark about how “wonderful” Sandringham was. “She was everywhere, picking up the birds, being terribly gracious and absolutely exuding charm,” a royal confidant recalled.
“And she looked great, very relaxed and quite happy with herself.”
The same couldn't be said of Charles. “He certainly didn’t look like he’d just found the most wonderful girl in the world,” remarked a fellow guest.
But that wasn't what Prince Charles was looking for.
As he once explained, he wanted “someone whose interests I could share” and who could share his interests. “A woman,” he continued, “doesn’t just marry a man, she marries into a way of life, a job.”
This was particularly true for him, and Charles explained to Diana in detail the demands that would be placed on her if she became his wife.
They also discussed the 12 year age difference between them, but any concerns she had were quickly overcome by the sheer excitement of being wooed by the prince.
However, her future in-laws were a completely different matter: she had to get used to a number of strange family rituals and mannerisms. For example, they placed their pudding spoons and forks on the place setting, which she had always been told was very bourgeois; and at Balmoral they even used fish knives, which were said to be the height of pretentious vulgarity.
Then there was the Queen's trick of leaving her chocolates on the grand piano in the saloon at Sandringham's main entrance and then peering down from the window in the corridor above them to see who dared steal one.
And Diana had to learn not to flinch as her future mother-in-law picked ticks from the corgis and threw them into the fire, where they landed in the flames with a satisfying hiss. Diana's efforts to fit in paid off; Charles proposed to her and she moved to Buckingham Palace a few months before the wedding, largely for security reasons.
And that's where the real problems began.
During this time, Prince Edward's servant Mark Simpson became particularly close to Diana. Because of his youth and sensitivity, it was agreed that he would be the right person to help her through her first days in the palace.
“At this time Prince Charles was not making any major romantic advances towards her and I suspect that the rejection became more and more acute and she became more and more unhappy,” he said.
“I wasn't the right person to deal with it because I didn't understand it.” It didn't seem surprising to me that Prince Charles was out most of the time and didn't have dinner with her every night. I understood that the royal family had a huge schedule which made family life almost impossible unless they were at Balmoral or Sandringham.'
More than once, Simpson's friendship with Diana caused a stir among the aristocracy – the first time being when the prince returned from America and was driven straight to Windsor Castle as it was Royal Ascot week.
Simpson recalled: “Lady Diana ran to the private entrance to greet him as he got out of the car and he gave her a kiss on the cheek and went straight in.”
“I was walking down the corridor, past the shelter rooms where Diana was staying, and she called me into her living room. I went in and she burst into tears and sobbed and sobbed for at least half an hour.
Simpson felt the princess needed a hug. “I felt so sorry for her – and then Lady Susan Hussey.” [the Queen’s lady-in-waiting] came in while I had my arms around her. That was a big mistake – at least for me. She didn't think the future Princess of Wales should hug a footman.
“She came in and walked right out again.” I was embarrassed.
“After the engagement [Diana] wasn't at the palace often and it wasn't until May, June and July of 1981 that I started seeing her every day and we had these great long conversations. She told me that she hated the engagement photos and that she thought she looked fat, which is where her bulimia started.
“We talked about everything. She said how callous the family was; that she showed no emotion and Prince Charles paid her no attention and that there was a long list of people she hated and loathed.
“She hated Lady Susan Hussey and she hated Princess Anne.” She told me that her mother was a reckless woman and a self-promoter, but I knew it was just a phase because she was going shopping with her mother the next morning and her mother had 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 a place where the Queen has endless hours to spare to have leisurely lunch conversations with Lady Diana. I tried to explain to her as much as possible about the royal family. I said that they aren't terrible people, but they are very busy and don't get involved in situations because they don't have time for them.
Diana turned to the Queen for advice when her marriage was falling apart – encounters that the monarch began to fear
“I think Diana found it strange that the Queen wasn't with her, sitting at the end of her bed, chatting to her about her day.” I think she really believed that was going to happen.
“When the Queen was in the palace, any of her children – including Diana at that point – were welcome to eat whatever they wanted with Her Majesty, and all they have to do is call the Queen's page and agree say: 'Is' The Queen here for lunch today and if so, does she have anyone with her? And would it be okay if I came down?' And then the page would say, “She has an appointment and no, that wouldn’t be okay”; or, “She’s alone and it would be perfectly fine.”
“The Queen loved it when her children ate lunch or dinner with her as she was often alone.” 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 call the queen's page and find out.”
She never did that. But a few years later, when the marriage collapsed, Diana turned to her mother-in-law in desperation.
She sat in the page's anteroom next to the queen's sitting room, waited for visitors to come out, and then pushed her way in without waiting for the announcement.
She often tearfully railed against Charles, saying he hated her, and railed 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 she was victimized and no one understood her.
The queen was afraid of these meetings. She had never had to deal with such outbursts in her life, and they left her feeling exhausted, desperate, and confused.
“She just hesitated,” a member of the royal household said at the time. She listened to what Diana said, “but no solution was ever suggested.”
Prince Charles, meanwhile, was reduced to screaming at his mother on the phone to make her understand the depth of his unhappiness.
Most of the royal family blamed him for the state of the marriage; They thought that if Charles had been more steadfast in the beginning, many of the later difficulties with Diana would have been avoided.
But the prince was either too accommodating, too shy or – as many domestic servants claimed – too weak to call his wife to order.
Needless to say, in the 1980s, understanding of mental illness was far less than it is today.
Princess Margaret felt that the princess, who plunged into a series of affairs, was making a fool of her husband.
The Queen Mother, for her part, 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 walked away from it. When it became too much for him, he drove to Wiltshire for a few hours with his lover Camilla Parker Bowles, who was herself suffering from her husband's infidelities.
She seemed like a rock of reason amid the storm of hysteria.
“I’m so proud of you,” she told him, and when he protested that he wasn’t worthy of her support, she replied, “As always, you underestimate 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.
The Queen saw through the public vilification of Camilla, saying she was a “much reviled woman”.
“Mother and I” is a detailed examination of the late queen’s relationship with her heir by royal biographer Ingrid Seward
In the final years of his marriage, he could no longer bear to be with her, recalls a Highgrove employee.
The princess slammed doors, kicked walls and burst into tears. Her frustration and anger were so out of control that it was “frightening,” according to the Highgrove household. The inevitable dissolution of the marriage, triggered by the BBC interview Diana gave to Panorama, was a relief.
In 1997, a year after the couple's divorce, her untimely death sparked a wave of hostility toward Prince Charles and his mistress. Over time, he hoped that Camilla would be accepted as his wife, but the prospect frightened her.
She convinced Charles that it was not a good idea for her to get married, telling friends that the prospect was “ridiculous” and that it would never happen as he had always put his duty first. Public opinion was still against Camilla when the Queen decided enough was enough. Privately, she had felt for some time that the couple should get married.
She felt this was the only way to resolve the issue and stop what she called the “cat and mouse” game the couple was playing. At this point, she also became convinced that the marriage would prove Charles' career – as a man and ultimately as a king.
For several years after Diana's death, the Queen had been cautious about appearing at events to which Camilla had also been invited. But she had never liked them.
In the version of events spread by Princess Diana's allies, Charles had fallen straight from his honeymoon bed into the arms of Camilla Parker Bowles.
A later report claimed that he was only faithful for the first two years of the marriage.
This was creative nonsense with only one goal: to free Diana from responsibility for her affairs and to discredit Charles as a heartless, immoral villain who had driven a young girl to the brink of suicide.
The Queen, who had always kept a careful and discreet eye on the situation, had little doubt as to the truth of the matter. She said Camilla was “a much-maligned woman.” Adapted from My Mother And I by Ingrid Seward, published by Simon & Schuster on February 15th, £25. © Ingrid Seward 2024. To order a copy for £21.25 (offer valid until 9/3/24; free UK delivery on orders over £25), go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.