The marriage between King Charles And princess Diana marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Royal family, one royal commentator has argued. Tom Quinn, author of Gilded Youth, claimed that the failed union of the then Prince and Princess of Wales and the Welsh’s devastating war in the early 1990s forced the firm to move away from a centuries-old tradition of arranging marriages or finding only partners. among the aristocrats to marry high-profile royals for love.
Mr Quinn, who analyzed the upbringing of royal children over the centuries in his book, told Express.co.uk: “In a way, the marriage of Charles and Diana was the last gasp of a tradition that went back about 500 years. years.
Then the older royals and people like Lord Mountbatten basically joined the Queen Mother and Lady Fermoy, who was Diana’s grandmother, saying, ‘Look, we’ve got to get something done for Charles, but we need someone who’s had absolutely no boyfriend, who’s extremely aristocratic and a little naive’.
“They wanted someone for Charles who wouldn’t dominate him, who would do as royal wives always did, who would have accepted that if he needed a mistress, that was fine.
“And of course Diana seemed perfect at first glance, but she wasn’t the mouse they thought she was. And the result, as we know, was ultimately a divorce.”
Queen Elizabeth II, who had married the man she loved in 1947 but could also find him in the small pool of European royalty, agreed to a divorce from her firstborn that same year, and the split was finalized in the summer of 1996.
The crisis the Firm was thrown into as a result of this public war between Charles and Diana showed the royals that it was time to change their approach to marriage, Mr Quinn argued.
He said: “I think the whole royal family saw that if you arranged a marriage for dynastic reasons, as they did in the case of Charles and Diana, the result would be disastrous.
“And that’s why they’ve moved on to the modern view, where it’s much better if you let younger royals choose their mates. And so it’s almost like the old experiment had failed and they’re trying the new experiment.”
Despite being the heir to the throne, prince william was free to marry a woman, Katefrom a middle class background.
Likewise in 2018 Prince Harrythen sixth in line to the throne, was allowed to marry the now Duchess of Sussex, born and raised in California with a past as an actress.
Mr Quinn added: “I think it’s definitely how they felt [with] arranged marriages get your fingers burned badly.
“I mean, the royal family almost came to an end, you could say, the whole divorce and then the TV interviews and so on were so destructive. So they just try to avoid that.”
Gilded Youth by Tom Quinnpublished by Biteback, is available in hardcover (£15).