Was Prince Charles Princess Diana’s Greatest Heartbreak? Friend Says Late Royal ‘Loved Charles Until Her Dying Day’

When Princess Diana perished in a car crash in Paris on the last day of August 1997, she’d been divorced from the future king of England for a little more than a year. That doesn’t mean Diana was not still in love with him, however. In fact, a close friend of the late royal recently revealed that Diana loved Prince Charles until the day she died.

How Diana met Prince Charles

The future ‘people’s princess’ was an innocent 16-year old the first time she laid eyes on the Prince of Wales. The location was Althorp, Diana’s ancestral family home, and the occasion was a grouse hunt.

Prince Charles was there because he was dating Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah Spencer. The pair had been seeing one another casually for a while, but the romance never quite took off. Diana’s feelings for Prince Charles certainly did, though.

In her 2008 book, The Diana Chronicles, author Tina Brown explained that after Prince Charles left the hunt, the teenage Diana told her friends that she would one day marry the prince. In response to her friends’ query about how she could be so sure of an eventual marriage to the oh-so eligible royal, Diana replied: “He’s the one man on the planet who is not allowed to divorce me.”

When Diana was 18 years old, some friends who lived in Sussex invited her over for a visit, noting that the prince was staying at their home while mourning his friend and mentor, Lord Louis Mountbatten. In later years, Diana explained that when she told Charles she was sad to see him alone at Mountbatten’s televised funeral and suggested he might be lonely, the prince seemed instantly smitten, according to Reader’s Digest.

The wedding of the century

Prince Charles and Diana exchanged vows in an elaborate ‘fairy tale’ wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in July of 1981. Although the pair would not divorce until 1996, the union was strained from the beginning due to the prince’s unwillingness –or inability– to call things totally off with one Camilla Rosemary Shand with whom he’d been romantically involved since 1972.

Diana bore two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. By the final decade of the 20th century, rumors of the prince’s infidelities were more than Diana could bear.

In 1992, Prime Minister John Major read an official statement on behalf of the royal family announcing the formal albeit ‘amicable’ separation of the prince and princess of Wales, explains Pop Sugar. The royal divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996.

In the weeks and months leading up to and following their split, Diana and Prince Charles seemed to go their separate ways. Prince Charles finally went public with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

The newly single princess famously hooked up with Pakistani heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan, before becoming involved with her final lover, Dodi Fayed. Did she love them? Perhaps, but she also carried a torch for her one and only husband until she passed away in Paris in 1997.

Princess Diana defended Prince Charles to the end

“I think she loved Charles till her dying day,” said Diana’s astrologer, Debbie Frank. “I’m not saying she longed for him. She didn’t. But there was still that wound there like there was with her mother. And it was probably more about the mother than Charles actually.”

Biographer Tina Brown and Frank, weren’t the only ones who insist that the princess loved Prince Charles until her dying day. Back in 2008, fashion maven Roberto Devorik revealed to the UK Daily Mail that despite the fact that the beloved royal was ‘devastated’ by her husband’s dalliance with Camilla, she defended his good name from criticism.

To illustrate his point, Devorik shared a story about a time when Diana and other friends were dining at his home, and the subject of Charles came up in an unfavorable way. Without batting an eye, the princess told her dinner companions: “He is the father of my children and the future King of England and if I have a difference with him that is my problem. Nobody should make a mockery of him.”