- Princess Diana was only allowed to address Prince Charles as “lord” until they were engaged.
- The princess should not call him by his first name, writes the royal biographer Andrew Morton.
- “In the Prince Charles circle, that was considered the norm,” added Morton.
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It has been 40 years since Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer announced their engagement on February 24, 1981.
The couple’s engagement interview was attended by real fans around the world, but some people may not know how formal the couple had been with each other until that moment.
According to Princess Diana’s biography “Diana: Her True Story” by Andrew Morton, she was forced to call Charles “sir” when they were dating and was only allowed to address him by his first name when they became engaged .
“It was only when Lady Diana was formally engaged to Her Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, that she was allowed to call him ‘Charles’. Until then, she treated him modestly as ‘Lord’, “wrote Morton in the book, which was first published in 1992.
Although Diana also had an official title – she was formally known as Lady Diana until she married – Charles used her first name.
“He called her Diana,” added Morton. “In Prince Charles’s circle, that was considered the norm.”
Morton went on to explain that Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah, had only been “so formal” during her nine-month relationship with the prince.
“Obviously, it was right to do that because I was never corrected,” Lady Sarah told Morton.
Diana met Charles when she was 16 and the prince, 29. However, they only started a romantic relationship three years later. The couple met a total of 13 times before getting married, the princess later said on tapes secretly recorded for her biography.
On the same tapes, Diana is famous for calling her royal wedding “the worst day of my life”.
“I don’t think I was happy. I never tried to cancel, in the sense of actually doing that, but I think [it was] the worst day of my life, “she said.
She also described herself as “a lamb for the slaughter”.
The tape images were first published in the 2017 National Geographic documentary, “Diana: In Her Own Words”.
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