It’s not unusual for Queen Elizabeth II to organise one-to-one meetings with her family members. It’s important that she is kept up to date with their work and what they’re up to, and the royal family are said to report to her regularly.
However, there was one royal that the Queen ‘dreaded’ meeting with, and that was the late Princess Diana. She reportedly visited the Queen on several occasions in the lead up to her separation from Prince Charles, and it left the monarch ‘feeling drained and confused’.
In Ingrid Seward’s book, The Queen & Di: The Untold Story, she writes: ‘The Queen came to dread these meetings with her daughter-in-law.
‘They left her feeling drained and despondent and confused – an uncommon state for a woman accustomed to the certainties of her position.’
As a result, the Queen reportedly saw Diana less and less.
Royal author Penny Junor also wrote about the Queen’s relationship with the former Princess of Wales in her book, The Firm.
‘Diana’s popularity was phenomenal but it was not the first time that the nation, or indeed the world, had fallen in love with a beautiful royal princess,’ she claims.
‘When the mania over Diana was at its height, one of the Queen’s courtiers said, “Ma’am, you will never have seen anything like the publicity Charles and Diana are having.”
‘”You were not around,” she said witheringly, “when Margaret and I were having our future husbands talent-spotted for us.”‘
But the Queen did invite Diana to a state banquet after her separation from Charles and requested her company at Sandringham for Christmas in 1993 (a year after their split). It didn’t go down very well with the rest of the family, but the Queen is said to have made the offer as she believed that Charles and Diana might get back together.
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