Parents pass on their experiences to their children whenever they can, and King Charles is apparently no exception. According to royal expert and writer Ingrid Seward, the monarch wanted to have a heart-to-heart with his eldest son, Prince William, before his wedding to Kate Middleton, to warn him against the risk of marital mistakes he had made in the past.
“His father told him: ‘Look, William, there’s nothing more important than your family. Don’t make the mistakes I made. I did my duty but neglected my marriage and look what happened,'” Seward told the New York Post.
King Charles’ first marriage to William and Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana, was notoriously rocky, and when they decided to end their marriage, things had gotten to the point where a reporter covering the couple’s visit to South Korea in November 1992 – as reported by the Express – said that during the trip “there was hatred radiating between the two of them.” It was to be their last official trip together; Charles and Diana officially announced their separation just over a month later, in December 1992.
After the separation, Diana continued to talk about feeling alone and neglected during their marriage. She also spoke about Charles’ relationship with his current wife, Camilla, in her controversial 1995 interview with BBC Panorama, and over the years royal experts have speculated that Charles putting duty before Diana’s feelings was a key issue in the relationship.
Elizabeth Holmes, author of HRH: So Many Thoughts on Royal Style, told Us Weekly that Charles and Diana’s marriage was “almost like a business transaction” and that the then-prince may have been drawn to the idea of a wife like Diana, who “ticked a lot of boxes and fit the bill and was clearly very eager and willing and keen to please.”
Elizabeth also said the couple’s particularly short courtship (Charles had only met Diana twice when he began romantically pursuing her in July 1980, just a year before they were married in a lavish wedding in July 1981) “in some ways speaks volumes about how Charles was approaching this and the pressures he was feeling. It was almost like a formality.”
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It is unclear whether Charles was the one who directly advised against a short engagement for William, but the prince was determined not to repeat the same mistake in his marriage and took the opposite approach to his father in his relationship with Kate , whom he dated for nearly a decade before popping the question. According to author and royal family expert Katie Nicholl, William took things slowly to avoid putting Kate in the same situation his mother ended up in.
“Before William asked Kate to marry him, he wanted to be sure it was what she really wanted. By living together, Kate would have been able to decide if she wanted to marry into it – if she didn’t, she could back out,” Nicholl wrote in her book Kate: The Future Queen, adding: “Forever scarred by his parents’ divorce, it was essential to William that when he married, it would be for life.”
–Adnkronos International, Rome (TNS)
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