King Charles - 2. The War Of The Waleses

0:03 Calarogu shark media. There is a particular kind of war that is fought not on battlefields, but in newspaper columns, not with weapons, but with whispers. It is the kind of war where both sides smile for the cameras and then brief their allies the moment the shutters stop clicking. It is a war of image and narrative, of carefully placed stories and calculated leaks. And in the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, this is exactly the war that Charles and Diana waged against each other, with the British press as their battlefield and the watching world as their audience. It would come to be known as the War of the Waleses, and it would leave the monarchy shaken to its foundations. To understand how they got there, you have to understand what the marriage looked like from the inside. By the middle of the nineteen eighties, from the outside, the fairy tale held. Two children had arrived.

1:17 William born in June of nineteen eighty two, robust and cherubic and adored by the nation. Harry born in September of nineteen eighty four, red haired and spirited. The family was photographed at polo matches, on ski slopes, on the steps of hospitals. They looked like what the Palace needed them to look like. But behind the doors of Kensington Palace, the marriage had become a cold and miserable arrangement. Charles and Diana occupied separate emotional worlds. They spent increasing amounts of time apart. Charles retreated to High Grove, his country estate in Gloucestershire, where he could garden and and entertain the circle of friends he preferred. Diana stayed in London, adrift and isolated, struggling with an eating disorder that had become severe. Bolimia had taken hold of Diana in the early years of the marriage. She would later describe throwing up four or five times a day a way of managing the anxiety and loneliness and sense of powerlessness that had come to define her life. The Palace did not know how to respond to this. Mental health was not a subject the institution understood or discussed. The approach was the one it always used. Carry on, be seen, perform the duty. The feelings were your own problem. Charles, for his part, felt overwhelmed and unequipped. He had been raised by a father who expressed love through expectation and a

2:51 mother who expressed it through presence without warmth. He did not have the tools Diana needed him to have. When she wept, he withdrew. When she raged, he retreated to High Grove. And Camilla Parker Bowles was always there, steady and calm and uncomplicated, the antidote to everything Diana represented. By many accounts, Charles and Camilla remained in contact throughout the marriage. They were careful, They were discreet, but not careful enough. This is Crown and Controversy, King Charles, Episode two, The War of the Waleses. In nineteen ninety two, everything broke open at once. The author, Andrew Morton, had been working in secret for years on a book about Diana.

3:57 What made this book different from every previous royal biography was its source. Diana herself had secretly recorded hours of deeply personal testimony on audio cassettes, smuggled out of Kensington Palace and handed to Morton through a trusted intermediary. The palace had no idea it was coming. Diana Her True Story was published in June of nineteen ninety two. Its contents were unlike anything the public had ever read about the royal family. Diana's bolimia, her suicide attempts, her profound loneliness inside the marriage, her belief that Charles never loved her, her sense that the Palace had abandoned her to suffer alone.

4:40 The book was a sensation. It sold out immediately, The tabloids ran excerpts for days, and the public, which had watched Diana for a decade and sensed something beneath the surface, now had confirmation of what that something was. The sympathy for Diana was overwhelming, The damage to Charles was severe. The Palace responded the way it always responded, with silence and careful deniability. Charles did not confirm the book. He did not deny it. He continued his public schedule. By most accounts, he was privately furious and wounded. He felt exposed, ambushed, betrayed.

5:24 The woman he had married had gone to a journalist and told the world the most private details of their life together. Whatever his failures as a husband, this felt like a declaration of war. Diana denied initially that she had cooperated with Morton. The denial did not hold too many details were too specific, too intimate, only she could have known them. The Palace knew it, the press knew it, the public strongly suspected it. And then came the tapes. In November of nineteen ninety two, a transcript of a recorded phone conversation between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was published. The recording had been made several years earlier, leaked through channels that were never fully explained. The content was explicit, it was intimate. It was, by any measure, the most embarrassing thing to happen to a member of the British royal family in living memory. Charles and Camilla were caught on tapes speaking to each other with the ease and tenderness of two people who had loved each other for a very long time. The intimacy of the conversation went far beyond a casual friendship. This was widely interpreted as evidence of a continuing relationship conducted while Charles was married to the most famous woman in the world. The transcript was nicknamed Camilla Gate by the press, and it ran on front pages around the world. It was read aloud on radio programs. It was dissected in Parliament, It was

6:54 discussed in living rooms and pubs and offices across Britain. The to the throne had been caught in what the world interpreted as an affair, and the evidence was right there in his own words. By most accounts, Charles was deeply humiliated, not just embarrassed, but genuinely and profoundly exposed in a way that a man of his particular pride and reserve found almost unbearable. He'd spent his life in service to an institution that demanded dignity above all else, and now his most private moments had been broadcast to the world. The Queen watched all of this with a composure that those around her described as almost unnerving. Elizabeth had survived crises before, she would survive this one. But she was also, according to those close to her, genuinely alarmed.

7:51 The monarchy's relationship with the public depended on a degree of mystique, a separation between the institution and the mess of ordinary human feeling. That mystique was evaporating in real time. Diana was not finished. If Charles had Camilla as his ally, Diana had something more powerful, the press, and through the press, the public. She understood instinctively what Charles had never quite grasped that in the modern world, public love was its own form of protection. The more the people adored her, the harder it was for the Palace to simply manage her into silence. Diana was widely believed to be working, through allies in the press, to shape her side of the story. Sympathetic accounts appeared in newspapers and magazines, painting her as a woman wronged, a mother devoted, a princess abandoned by an institution that did not deserve her. Some of these stories were accurate, some were shaped. All of them served a purpose. In nineteen ninety two, a second set of tapes emerged. These were recordings of Diana in intimate telephone conversations with a man named James Gilby, a family friend. The tapes were nicknamed Squidgygait, after an endearment Gilby used for Diana in the recordings. In them, Diana

9:24 spoke candidly about her unhappiness inside the royal family, her frustration with the institution, her fears about the future. The revelation that Diana had also been conducting an intimate friendship outside her marriage complicated the public narrative somewhat, but only somewhat. Diana's approval ratings remained extraordinary. She was not seen as the villain of this story. She was seen as a woman who had sought comfort in the ruins of a marriage that had never truly begun. The public extended her the grace it was not yet ready to extend to Charles. Both sides were seen as using the press to shape the narrative, briefing and counterbriefing, each acutely aware that the other was doing the same. The Palace tried to stay above it, and mostly failed. The Queen's advisers urged restraint.

10:18 Restraint was not something either Charles or Diana was capable of anymore. In December of nineteen ninety two, Prime Minister John Major stood up in the House of Commons and announced that the Prince and Princess of Wales had agreed to separate. He was careful to note that the separation had no constitutional implications. He was careful not to use the word divorce. The Palace was still hoping somehow that this could be managed, contained resolved without the finality of a legal ending. It could not. The years between nineteen ninety two and the eventual divorce in nineteen ninety six were a continuation of the same grinding, public mutually destructive conflict.

11:07 Charles gave a television interview in which he acknowledged his relationship with Camilla, describing it as having resumed after the marriage had irretrievably broken down. He was asked directly whether he had tried to be faithful to his marriage vows. He said that he had until the marriage had broken down. It was at best a partial defense. Diana watched that interview, and then in November of nineteen ninety five, sat down for one of her own. She told the BBC's Martin Basher things she had never said publicly before. She spoke of her bolimia, she spoke of her self harm, She confirmed her affair with the cavalry officer James Hewitt, and she said, in words that rang out across the world, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. Twenty three million people in the United Kingdom alone watched that interview. The Queen, who had not been told it was happening, was by every account furious, not with Charles specifically, not with Diana specifically, but with the situation itself. With the impossibility of it, with the way the two of them had turned the most private of failures into the most public of spectacles. She wrote to both of them shortly afterward and told them in terms that brooked no argument, that a divorce must now proceed as quickly as possible. The War of the Whaless had consumed nearly a decade. It had damaged Charles's reputation

12:40 in ways that would take years to repair. It had made Diana one of the most beloved figures on the planet. It had shaken public faith in the monarchy at a time when the institution could least afford it, and it had not yet reached its most devastating chapter. Next time, on Crown and Controversy, King Charles, the divorce is finalized and Diana loses her royal title. Charles feels relief, shadowed by guilt, and Diana, freed from the Institution, but stripped of its protection, steps out alone into a world that is about to become far more dangerous than she knows.

13:26 Crown and Controversy is a production of Calaroga Shark Media executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermot. While no one truly knows what happens behind closed palace doors. This series uses news sources, on the record, quotes, and some artistic license to craft this entertainment series. Some moments have been dramatized for storytelling effect, where appropriate character perspectives and motivations are drawn from reported accounts, interviews, and biographical sources. AI narration was used in the creation of this series. To keep up with the modern day Royal family, follow our podcast Palace Intrigue, a seven day a week, ten minute update on the Royals.