Most of us think we know Princess Diana’s relationship with Queen Elizabeth –who died on Thursday at the age of 96– from what we see in the TV series “The Crown”: Diana, the lonely “outcast”, out of her water and “drowning” in royal splendor, watches helplessly as her heartless husband continues his extramarital affair and cold and distant monarch to turn a blind eye.
But, as with most things, the real story is more complicated.
Queen Elizabeth – Princess Diana: A relationship “cold – hot”
The shocking death of Princess Diana, in a car accident in 1997, shook the royal family to its core. Brown described how the loss of a beloved national icon – and the mother of two of her grandsons, including the future king – was a “traumatic mingling of the public and the private” for the Queen.
Her role as a symbolic and silent figure was reversed. While her initial reaction was to shut herself up at Balmoral and comfort her grandchildren, the public demanded the opposite. Tabloid headlines screamed “Show us you care!” and they were asking the Queen to return to London and order the Union Flag to be flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace.
The kings refused and for five days insisted on the protocol, which stipulated that Princess Diana was no longer royalty and therefore should not be treated as such. Finally, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened, persuading the Queen to return and defuse tensions by addressing the nation live through a her televised statement.
It is widely accepted that she was the only time in the Queen’s entire reign that she misdiagnosed the mood of the nation. In the 2017 anniversary edition of his biography, Morton wrote: “One of life’s many ironies [της βασίλισσας] is that Diana’s impact on the royal family is measured by how much more welcoming the House of Windsor is to newcomers.”
As Brown summarizes in “The Palace Papers,” the Queen Elizabeth made it clear that this must never happen again “the issue was Diana’s explosive celebrity, the problem of the British monarchy being overshadowed, drowned out by an overzealous, dangerously popular member of the family other than the Queen or the heir to the throne”.
Source: News Beast
I’m Robert Neff, a professional writer and editor. I specialize in the entertainment section, providing up-to-date coverage on the latest developments in film, television and music. My work has been featured on World Stock Market and other prominent publications.
