A new book reveals how Elizabeth-II helped the Princess cope with the mounting unhappiness over her married life
Lomdon : Queen Elizabeth-II was ‘desperate’ to help daughter-in-law Princess Diana cope with the mounting unhappiness over her married life, but did not know how to handle the ‘emotional young woman’, a new book has claimed.
The Queen and Princess Diana reportedly shared a long- troubled relationship and a new book sheds more light on the disconnect between the two royal women.
In ‘The Queen’s Speech: An Intimate Portrait of the Queen in Her Own Words’, author Ingrid Seward details the vast generation gap between Diana, who was just 20 when she wed Prince Charles in 1981, and her formidable mother-in-law who was then 55-years-old.
The two women had a long history together as Diana’s father, the 8th Earl Spencer, had worked for the royal family and Diana herself grew up in Park House on the Queen’s Sandringham estate. “Diana was like family”, Seward told the ‘People’ magazine. “She had known her since she was a child. It was like the old aristocracy. As the Queen said, ‘She is one of us’.
But as Diana’s unhappiness mounted and her marriage to Charles unravelled, the stoic monarch found herself frustrated and perplexed by her increasingly unhappy daughter-in-law, according to the author.
“The Queen was desperate to help Diana but she just didn’t know how”, says Seward, who is editor-in-chief of the Majesty magazine. “And Diana couldn’t connect with the Queen.”
Seward says, “The Queen had never had to confront that type of conundrum. You just didn’t go into the Page’s vestibule and break down and say, ‘Oh, mama’ – because that is what Diana used to call the Queen – ‘Everybody hates me! Your son hates me!’
