Highgrove, December 1995. After Charles publicly admitted the affair that shattered their marriage, he asked Diana to come to Highgrove alone. He said they needed to talk privately about the future. For the first time in months, Diana thought they might finally speak honestly to each other. Then she walked into the room and saw Camilla sitting beside the fire.
What Diana did before leaving Highgrove that evening was something Charles never forgot. By December of 1995, Diana and Charles had been living separately for 3 years. The separation had been announced formally in the House of Commons in December of 1992. They had not shared a home since. They appeared together when protocol required it, communicated through staff and solicitors, and raised their sons in the way of two people who had agreed, without ever quite saying so, that the performance must continue for the sake
of the children. Diana had held on, not to the marriage, she was clear-eyed enough to know what the marriage was, but to the idea that a divorce would be worse. Her own parents had separated when she was young. She knew what it did to children. She would not do that to William and Harry. And then, that June evening in 1994, someone at a dinner party turned on the television.
Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary about Charles was airing, a carefully constructed portrait of the Prince of Wales. Diana had known it was coming. She had braced herself for it. Then came the question, “Were you faithful and honorable to your wife during your marriage?” Charles paused. “Yes,” he said, “until it became irretrievably broken down.” Diana sat very still.
She did not cry, not in front of anyone. That was one of the things she had learned, how to keep her face exactly as it needed to be while something else was happening entirely underneath. Everyone in the room was very careful not to look at her. She stayed until it was polite to leave. She smiled. Then she went home.
She had known about Camilla for years. She had found the bracelet before the wedding. She had confronted him in private rooms. She had been told it was over, then discovered it wasn’t. But hearing him say it on television, to the whole country, to the whole world, was something different. She understood something that night she hadn’t fully understood before.
He was never going to be ashamed of it. By November of 1995, she had decided she was done saying nothing. She sat across from Martin Bashir in Kensington Palace and said everything she had been holding for years. The loneliness, the marriage, the depression, Camilla. There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.
It was the most watched television interview in British history. The interview cost her. She knew it would. She was choosing to speak in a way that could not be taken back, that the palace would never forgive. She did it anyway. When Bashir asked if she wanted a divorce, she looked at the camera. “No,” she said, “I don’t.
” She meant it. She had said the same thing to herself for years, that a divorce would be worse, that the boys deserved better than that. She was still saying it. Or trying to. The Queen’s letter arrived on the 20th of December, delivered by hand to Kensington Palace. Diana read it sitting at her desk. It was brief, as the Queen’s letters tended to be, not unkind, but direct in the way she was always direct when she had decided something.
She wrote that the situation had become untenable. That the public disagreements between Charles and Diana, the competing interviews, the leaks, the very public unraveling of their marriage were causing serious damage to the institution. That the boys deserved stability and that stability could not come from the current arrangement.
That a divorce was in her view the only reasonable path forward. That she hoped Diana would agree. Diana set the letter down. She sat for a long time without moving. She had known this was coming. After the Bashir interview, she had known it was inevitable. But knowing something is coming and feeling it arrive are different things.
She thought about what she had said to Bashir. I don’t want a divorce. She thought about William and Harry. She thought about 14 years. About the girl she had been at 20 years old walking down the aisle at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Dressed with the 25-foot train. The whole world watching. She thought about how certain she had been that morning.
How much she had wanted it to be real. She picked up the phone when it rang. It was Charles. I think we should talk, he said, in person, not through solicitors. Diana said, about the letter. Yes, he said. I’d like us to talk properly, like adults. Come to Highgrove this week if you can. She was quiet for a moment. She thought, perhaps there is still something to say.
Yes, she said. I’ll come. She drove to Highgrove the following afternoon, a Thursday, four days before Christmas. The roads were quiet. The Gloucestershire countryside gray and cold. The fields bare. The light already fading by the time she turned through the gates. For the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to believe they might actually speak honestly.
That he had asked her to come because he wanted to find some version of this that worked, not for the lawyers, not for the palace, but for them. For their sons. For whatever remained of the people they had once been to each other. She had not let herself hope for much, but she had let herself hope for this.
She parked and walked to the door. It opened before she knocked. Charles stood in the hallway. And behind him, in the sitting room visible through the open door, Camilla Parker Bowles sat on the sofa as if she had always been there. Diana stopped. She looked at Charles. He held her gaze. She said, very quietly, “You didn’t tell me she would be here.
” Charles said, “I thought it would be easier this way.” Diana looked at him. “Easier?” She said. He said, “We need to talk about the future, all of us.” She stood in the doorway for a moment. She thought about the drive here, about the feeling she’d had on the motorway that perhaps there was still something to say, that perhaps he had asked her to come because he wanted to find something that worked for both of them.
She had let herself believe that for 3 hours on the road. She looked past Charles at Camilla, who had not moved, who was sitting very still with the composure of someone who has been through worse and survived it. Diana looked back at Charles. She said nothing. She stepped inside. They sat in the sitting room, Charles and Camilla on one side, Diana on the other. Tea was brought.
The fire was lit. It looked, in its way, almost civilized. Almost. Nobody spoke for a moment. Diana looked at Camilla, then at Charles. She said, “So, this is how we’re doing it.” Charles said, “Diana?” She said, “No, I’d like to understand. You asked me to come here to talk privately, just the two of us. And she’s here.” Charles said, “I thought it was time we were all in the same room. We’re adults.
This affects all of us.” Diana said, “Does it?” Not a question. Camilla was very still. Diana looked at her directly. She said, “And you think this is appropriate, being here?” Camilla said, “I think Charles felt it was necessary.” Diana said, “Charles felt.” She said it quietly. The way you repeat something back when you want someone to hear what they’ve just said.
Charles said, “I’m trying to find a way through this that works for everyone.” Diana looked at him for a long moment. She said, “You told the Queen you agreed with her about the divorce.” Charles said, “I think it’s the right decision for both of us, for the boys.” Diana said, “Don’t do that.” He said, “Do what?” She said, “Use the boys for this.
They’re not a reason. They’re a consequence.” A silence. The fire crackled. Camilla looked at her hands. Charles said, “I’m not trying to hurt you.” Diana said, “I know you’re not.” She said it without bitterness, almost gently. She said, “That’s the worst part. You’re not trying to hurt me. You’re just already somewhere else.
You have been for years.” Charles said nothing. Then, after a moment, he said, “Camilla and I have already discussed what comes next.” He said it simply, as a fact, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t notice what he had said. Camilla looked up at him very briefly, then back at her hands. Diana looked at the fire.
“Camilla and I.” She sat with that for a moment. Then she reached up and took off her wedding ring. She did it quietly, without announcement, the way you remove something you have been wearing so long you have stopped noticing it is there. A simple gold band. She had worn it for 14 years, through the wedding and the honeymoon and the early years when she had still believed things might work, through the births of her sons, through the separations and the reconciliations and the interviews and the letters, through all of it.
She set it on the table in front of Charles. The sound it made was very small. Charles looked down at the ring. He looked at it for a long moment before he looked at her. The firelight caught the gold. Then he looked up. Diana was already standing. She said nothing. There was nothing left to say that the ring hadn’t already said more clearly than she could have said it.
She picked up her bag. She looked at Camilla once, briefly, directly. She said, “I hope you’ll be very happy.” Then she walked to the door. Charles did not stop her. She heard no movement behind her as she crossed the hallway. No footsteps. No voice. She opened the front door and stepped out into the cold Gloucestershire evening.
Behind her, in the sitting room, the ring sat on the table between them. Camilla looked at it for a moment. Then she said quietly, “You should go after her.” For the first time that evening, she sounded uncertain. Charles said nothing. He did not move. She drove back to London in the dark. She did not turn on the radio.
She did not call anyone. At one point, she realized she had driven several miles without remembering any of the road behind her. Somewhere on the motorway, she realized she was crying. She had not noticed when it started. She did not stop. When she got home, the boys were still awake. She sat them down that evening and told them she would not be joining them at Sandringham for Christmas.
She kept her voice steady. She said she needed some time for herself this year. That they would have a wonderful Christmas with their father and their grandmother. That she would be there when they got back. Harry accepted it more easily than William did. He asked if they could call her on Christmas Day. She said, of course.
William was quiet. Later that evening, he found her in the sitting room. He stood in the doorway in the way he had been standing in doorways lately, not quite entering, not quite leaving. He said, “Is it because of Highgrove?” She looked at him. He was 13 years old with his father’s eyes and his grandmother’s composure and something else entirely that was just his own.
She said, “I need some time. That’s all.” He said nothing for a moment. Then he crossed the room and sat beside her on the sofa, not saying anything, just sitting there the way he used to sit with her when he was small and something had upset him and he couldn’t find the words for it. She put her arm around him.
They sat like that for a while. A few days later, the boys left for Sandringham with their father. Diana stood at the window and watched the car until it disappeared. Then she turned back to the empty house. It was the first Christmas she had not spent with the royal family. She stayed in Kensington Palace alone.
Two months later, Diana agreed to the divorce. By the end of the following summer, the marriage was officially over. People who knew her in those months after the divorce described her as different, not healed, that was too simple a word, but lighter, somehow. As if something she had been carrying for a very long time had finally been set down.
She threw herself into her work, the landmines campaign, the hospital visits, the causes that had always mattered to her more than the protocol that surrounded them. She traveled. She laughed more easily. She was, in some ways that surprised even people close to her, happier than she had been in years. The wedding ring never appeared on her hand again.
In its place, a gift from a close friend, warm blue stone surrounded by diamonds, the aquamarine ring that the press would call the freedom ring. She wore it from that point on without exception. It suited her in a way the gold band never quite had. It was something she had chosen, something that was simply hers.
She was wearing it on the 31st of August, 1997, in the tunnel under the Pont de l’Alma in Paris. It was the last thing she wore.
