Diana Cried for 6 Hours Straight on Her Honeymoon — Charles Left and Didn’t Come Back
Diana Cried for 6 Hours Straight on Her Honeymoon — Charles Left and Didn’t Come Back
Craigowan Lodge, Balmoral Scotland, August 1981. A small stone building on the edge of the royal estate. Inside, a 20-year-old woman is pacing the room. She kicks furniture. She sobs. She stops, stares out the window at nothing, at the gray Scottish hills. Five, the rain, the emptiness. Then she starts again, pacing, crying, kicking, silence.
Then all of it, all over again. Sitting across from her is a man named Michael Colborne. He’s not her husband. He’s not a friend. He’s not her mother or her sister or anyone who loves her. He’s Charles’ personal assistant, a staff member. He was handed a crying bride like she was an item on a to-do list.
This has been going on for 6 hours. At 5:05 in the afternoon, she stops. She says five words, “I’m going upstairs.” And she leaves the room. Her husband, he left that morning. He thanked Colborne for coming, walked out the door with his friend Norton Romsey, and didn’t come back, didn’t check on her, didn’t call, didn’t send a message.
He left his 20-year-old wife 11 days into their marriage sobbing in a cold lodge with a man she barely knew, and he went for a walk. 750 million people watched this woman get married. They called it the wedding of the century. They threw street parties. They They bought the commemorative plates. They cried when she stepped out of that glass coach.
They were watching a funeral. They just didn’t know it yet. >> [snorts] >> Here’s what they also didn’t know. Later that same honeymoon, at a formal dinner with the royal family at Balmoral, the Queen herself asked Charles to go upstairs and persuade Diana to come down. Charles went. He came back red-faced.
He told the Queen, his own mother, that he couldn’t make his wife come to dinner. The room went silent. Lady Elizabeth Anson, the Queen’s cousin, was there that night. She later said everyone was vastly embarrassed, not embarrassed for Diana, embarrassed by her. The institution had picked its side before the main course arrived.
But that wasn’t the worst night. That wasn’t even close. Five, to understand the worst night, to understand those six hours in that lodge, you’ve got to go back further. Not to the honeymoon, not to the wedding. You’ve got to go back to the night before the wedding and what Charles told her. The Diana you think you know, the one in the glass coach, five, the 25-ft train, the shy smile on the balcony, that Diana never existed, not the way you remember her.
The world built a fairy tale around this woman and she spent the rest of her life suffocating inside it. So, let’s take it apart. The night before the wedding, July 28th, 1981, Charles sat Diana down and told her he didn’t love her. Not in a fight, not in anger. He said it calmly, deliberately, because according to Diana’s astrologer, Penny Thornton, who confirmed Diana told her this directly, he didn’t want to go into the marriage on a false premise.
>> [laughter] >> He wanted to square it with her. As if telling a 20-year-old girl you don’t love her, five, 12 hours before she walks down the aisle in front of the entire planet, is something you can square. But here’s what makes it worse. Two days before the wedding, Diana had already found out that Charles went to see Camilla and gave her a gift, a farewell gift.
Fifth, or at least, that’s what it was supposed to be. Diana discovered this and in her own words to Andrew Morton, “Sobbed my eyes out. Absolutely collapsed.” She was already shattered before Charles delivered the final blow that night. Diana considered not showing up the next day.
She seriously thought about walking away from the whole thing. But her sisters told her it was too late. The tea towels with their faces were already printed. You can’t cancel a royal wedding because the groom told you the truth. That night, her last night as a single woman, Diana had what she later described as a very bad fit of bulimia. She ate everything she could find and was, in her words, sick as a parrot that night.
That was how she spent the eve of the wedding of the century, alone, sick, in a palace that felt like a prison. Marrying the man she was about to marry had just told her to her face that he didn’t love her. Five, and knowing that he’d just come back from saying goodbye to the woman he actually wanted. Royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith later confirmed that Charles himself cried the night before the wedding, not for Diana, for Camilla, for the life he couldn’t have.
Two people in separate rooms, both in tears. One grieving the marriage she was entering. The other grieving the woman he was leaving behind. And the next morning, they stood at the altar and said their vows anyway. She married him because the tea towels were printed, because 750 million people were expecting a fairy tale, because she was 20 years old and every adult around her told her there was no way out.
Charles had proposed after only 12 dates. And when a reporter asked him on camera whether he was in love, he answered, “Whatever in love means.” Diana, standing right next to him, answered, “Of course.” That gap between of course and whatever in love means was the entire marriage right there, in 5 seconds, before it even started.
Then came the honeymoon. And the world saw the photographs. Charles and Diana walking through the heather by a Scottish river, looking like the most romantic couple alive. Diana told porters she could thoroughly recommend married life. Royal photographer Jane Fincher later recalled that they looked very very romantic and that Charles seemed completely smitten.
None of it was real. The honeymoon was, in the words of biographer Penny Junor, “Five, a disaster that only served to highlight how little they had in common.” But before the disaster of the honeymoon, there was the disaster of the wedding night. Charles and Diana spent their first night together at Broadlands, the Hampshire estate of Charles’s late great uncle, Earl Mountbatten.
It should have been intimate, private, the beginning of something. Instead, Charles later told a friend that the first night was nothing special. His exact words, as reported by Tina Brown, “It was pleasant enough, of course, but she really was painfully naive.” That’s how the groom described his wedding night. “Pleasant enough.
” Brown later wrote that Charles had enjoyed women who led him, mastered him, and mothered him. He was used to being served, not required to seduce. Diana was 20, she was inexperienced, and instead of patience, she got a man who found her naivety boring. Here’s what actually happened on the yacht, July 31st, 1981. The Royal Yacht Britannia departed from Gibraltar.
On board, the bride, the groom, five 21 naval officers, royal staff, a crew of over 200 men. That’s more than 220 people on a yacht, and not one of them was there for Diana. Not one friend, not one family member, not one person who knew her before she became the Princess of Wales. She was the most isolated woman on the Mediterranean that summer.
And she was surrounded by people every minute of every day. The yacht sailed through the Greek Islands, through the Aegean. I five passed coastlines that should have been romantic, through sunsets that should have meant something. Diana later wrote in a letter on Britannia crested paper to her lady-in-waiting that the honeymoon was a perfect opportunity to catch up on sleep.
That’s what she wrote about the most romantic two weeks of her life, catching up on sleep. Five, because the alternative, writing what was actually happening, was something she couldn’t do. Not yet. Charles had packed for the honeymoon like he was going on a solo retreat. He brought watercolors, canvases, a pile of books by the South African mystic Laurens van der Post.
He hoped he and Diana would read them together and discuss them over dinner. Diana wasn’t a reader. She didn’t want to talk about van der Post. She wanted her husband to look at her, to talk to her, to act like he’d married her because he wanted to, not because it was too late to stop. He didn’t. He sat at his easel for hours.
He buried himself in books. And when Diana pushed back, when she told him she resented being ignored on her own honeymoon, they had what Junor called blazing rows. One I’m five afternoon, Charles left his painting on the veranda deck and walked away for half an hour. When he came back, Diana had destroyed the painting and all his materials.
Every brush, every canvas, gone. The palace version of that story is that Diana was being difficult, emotional, unstable. But here’s what nobody asks. What kind of desperation does it take for a 20-year-old bride to destroy her husband’s belongings on their honeymoon? That wasn’t a tantrum. That was the only language she had left.
She tried talking. She tried crying. She tried asking to be seen. None of it worked. So she broke the things he loved more than her. Because at least then he’d have to look at the space where they used to be. And then came the cufflinks. One evening on the Britannia, Charles and Diana dressed for a formal dinner.
Diana looked at his wrists. He was wearing a pair of gold cufflinks, two C’s intertwined. Not C for Charles, C and C, Charles and Camilla. A gift from the woman he was in love with, worn openly on his honeymoon with the woman he’d just married. Diana confronted him. And on her own recordings, the Channel 4 tapes she made years later, she described exactly what he said.
“Yes, so what’s wrong?” “They’re a present from a friend.” A present from a friend. That’s what he called Camilla on his honeymoon while wearing her initials against his skin. They had a blazing row. But here’s the detail that cuts. He wore them. He chose to put them on. He stood in front of a mirror, clasped Camilla’s initials onto his wrists, and walked out to dinner with his wife.
That wasn’t absent-minded. >> [gasps] [snorts] >> That was a man who couldn’t stop reaching for the woman he actually wanted, even when the woman he’d married was standing right in front of him. It got worse. A few days later, Charles and Diana were sitting together doing something ordinary, checking their diaries, going over schedules.
A photograph fell out of Charles’s diary. It was a picture of Camilla. He’d been carrying it with him on his honeymoon, tucked inside his personal planner, next to his appointments and his to-do lists. He kept her face that close. Biographer Penny Junor later wrote that it was hard to believe anyone as intelligent as the Prince of Wales could be so utterly incapable of imagining what a new wife might conclude if she found a photograph of his former lover in his diary.
But he didn’t think about that. Five, because he wasn’t thinking about Diana. He was thinking about Camilla every single day. And that’s not speculation. Charles’s own valet, Stephen Barry, the man who dressed him, who was with him every morning, confirmed it. Barry said the prince simply had to be in contact with Camilla or he couldn’t function properly.
If he went without his daily phone call to her, 05 he’d become touchy and ill-tempered. He was calling Camilla from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, from a royal yacht, on his honeymoon. 05 Every day. Because he couldn’t get through 24 hours without hearing her voice. Diana was on her honeymoon with a man who needed another woman’s voice just to function.
And her body was already telling the truth her words couldn’t. Her bulimia on that yacht was, in her own words to biographer Andrew Morton, appalling, absolutely appalling. Four times a day, she’d eat everything she could find and be sick within 2 minutes. Four times a day, every day, for 2 weeks on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
Nobody stopped her. Nobody intervened. Nobody said a word. The cruise ended. They flew to Scotland, to Balmoral, the Queen’s estate. And if Diana thought the yacht was lonely, Balmoral was something else entirely. Because now she wasn’t just trapped with a man who didn’t love her. She was trapped with his entire family. Their rituals, their dogs, their horses, their rain-soaked countryside that stretched on forever in every direction.
Their fi- Their silence The particular silence of people who’ve decided you don’t belong and are waiting for you to figure it out on your own. Balmoral was the royal family’s private world. It had its own rules, its own rhythms, its own language. Breakfast at a certain time, walks at a certain time, shooting, fishing, dogs everywhere, conversation about horses and weather and land. Diana didn’t hunt.
She didn’t fish. She didn’t ride. She didn’t care about gun dogs or grouse moors or any of the things that made this family feel at home. She was a London girl. >> [sighs] >> A city girl. And she was stuck in the Scottish Highlands with people who’d been coming here since before she was born, who knew every path and every ritual by heart, and who looked at her like she was a guest who’d overstayed.
Diana hated the countryside. She hated the royal family’s obsession with animals and field sports. She hated the rain that came down without stopping. And she felt, she knew, that Charles was avoiding any kind of closeness with her. She was 20 years old. She was 400 miles from London. She had no friends there, no allies, no one who saw her as anything other than the newest addition to the institution.
And the institution expected her to perform. Smile for the cameras. Walk through the heather. Stand by the river. Tell the press everything was wonderful. She did it. She was flawless. The photos from Balmoral show two people who look like they’re in love. Diana could act. She’d been acting since the moment she said, “I do.
” Because the alternative was to let the world see the truth, and nobody wanted that. Not the palace, not the family, not the press, nobody except Diana. Behind the cameras, she was unraveling. Lady Elizabeth Anson, the Queen’s own cousin, was at Balmoral that summer. She said Diana had become unglued. She refused to come to dinner. She withdrew.
She stopped performing for the family the way she performed for the photographers. And when she stopped performing, the family didn’t ask what was wrong. They were embarrassed. Charles was mystified. Penny Junor wrote that he was mystified and despondent, that he genuinely had no idea what he’d done wrong.
And that’s the detail that’s worse than cruelty. He wore another woman’s initials on his wrists. He carried her photograph in his diary. >> [gasps and sighs] >> He called her every day from the ocean, and he could not understand why his bride was falling apart. He looked at Diana and saw a problem without a cause, a woman being difficult for no reason.
A situation he couldn’t fix, not because it was complicated, but because he couldn’t see his own hand in it. He wasn’t pretending. >> [sighs] >> He really didn’t see it. That’s not indifference. That’s something deeper and more devastating than indifference. That’s a man so completely oriented towards someone else that the woman standing right in front of him, crying, kicking, begging to be seen, was invisible.
Diana could have set the lodge on fire and Charles would have been confused about why she was upset. Four forces were moving toward the same room. The isolation that was eating her alive, the performance she couldn’t sustain much longer, the family’s cold embarrassment, and her husband’s total, unshakable inability to see what he was doing to her.
All of it, every cufflink, every photograph, every phone call, every silent dinner, every walk he took without her, was converging on a single morning in a small stone lodge at the edge of the estate, Craigowan Lodge. The same room. 05 the same scene. But now you know everything. Charles called Michael Colborne to Balmoral.
Colborne arrived at the lodge. Charles thanked him for coming. Then, with no explanation, he walked out the door with Norton Romsey. Think about that. He summoned his assistant to Scotland. He handed his sobbing wife over to a staff member, and he left. No apology, no explanation, just, “Thank you for coming.
” And the door closing behind him. What followed was what Colborne later described as the most shocking, distressing, five and draining day of his life. For six solid hours, with no interruption beyond a plate of sandwiches at lunchtime, he sat in that room while Diana cried. She paced. She kicked furniture. She ranted about everyone and everything connected to the place she hated.
Then she’d fall into brooding silence, the kind of silence that fills a room like smoke, and then she’d start all over again. Crying, pacing, kicking, silence over and over for 6 hours. No husband, no mother, no sister, no friend, a staff member and a plate of sandwiches. That was the honeymoon of the most famous bride on Earth.
At 5:05 she stopped. She said, “I’m going upstairs.” And she left the room, just like that. As if someone had turned off a switch. For 6 hours of grief, and then silence. And during this same stretch at Balmoral, during another massive row between Charles and Diana, Charles suddenly appeared in front of Colborne and threw something at him.
Colborne caught it. It was Diana’s wedding ring. She’d lost so much weight that it didn’t fit anymore. The ring that had been placed on her hand inside St. Paul’s Cathedral, in front of the entire world, was now too big for the finger it was made for. Her wedding dress designer later confirmed that Diana’s waist had gone from 26 in at the start of fittings to 23 in by the wedding day.
And it kept shrinking after that. She was disappearing in plain sight, and the ring was proof. Charles threw it at a staff member. He didn’t hold it, didn’t put it in a box, didn’t say, “We’ll get this fixed.” He threw it, like it was a problem he needed someone else to deal with. Just like his wife.
Now, here’s what they said about her, what the palace whispered for decades. She was fragile, emotional, unstable, too young, too demanding. Five, difficult. That was the word they loved. Difficult. As if wanting your husband to love you on your honeymoon was an unreasonable request. As if noticing another woman’s initials on his wrists made you the problem.
As if crying when you’re abandoned in a foreign country by a man who promised to love and cherish you 11 days earlier. A five in front of God and 750 million witnesses made you difficult. Diana wasn’t difficult. She was the only person in that marriage behaving rationally. She married a man who told her the night before their wedding that he didn’t love her.
She went on a honeymoon where he wore Camilla’s initials on his body, carried Camilla’s photograph against his skin, and called Camilla every single day from the middle of the sea. She was surrounded by 200 people and completely alone. She cried and kicked furniture and screamed for 6 hours because that was the only sane response to an insane situation. Charles wasn’t cruel.
He was something worse than cruel. He was oblivious. And every single person around him, the family, the staff, the protocol, the institution, was designed to protect that oblivion, to keep him comfortable, to make sure his world stayed intact while hers fell apart. Diana’s pain was an inconvenience. Her honesty was an embarrassment.
Her need to be loved was treated as the problem. The woman they called difficult was the only honest person in the building. So, here’s what happened to everyone. Five Michael Colborne, the man who sat with Diana for those 6 hours, who absorbed what her own husband refused to witness, left royal service not long afterward.
He later said those years were among the most difficult of his life. He was the only person who stayed in the room, and it cost him. Norton Romsey, the man Charles walked out with that morning, leaving his bride behind, remained one of Charles’s closest friends for life. >> [sighs] >> He was at Charles’s second wedding.
To Camilla, Charles got what he wanted. He married the woman whose initials he wore on his honeymoon cufflinks. The photograph that fell from his diary became his everyday life. It took him 24 years, but he got there. Diana spent the next 16 years becoming the most photographed, most loved, most watched woman on the planet.
She shook the hand of an AIDS patient in 1987 when the rest of the world was still terrified to be in the same room. She walked through active minefields in Angola in January 1997 wearing body armor and a face shield when governments wouldn’t even acknowledge the crisis. She sat on the edge of hospital beds and held the hands of people who’d been told they were untouchable.
She turned vulnerability into a kind of power that no one in that family had ever seen before or has seen since. She died at 36 in a tunnel in Paris on August 31st, 1997, 16 years after that honeymoon. She never got the one thing she asked for in that lodge, to be chosen, to be the one he stayed in the room for.
The whole world chose her. The one person she needed to choose her never did. The wedding ring was resized. She wore it for 11 more years, every public appearance, every handshake, every photo. >> [gasps] >> That ring, the one that had been too big since the honeymoon, sat on a finger like a daily reminder of what she’d lost before she ever had it.
When she finally took it off, it wasn’t because a marriage had ended. The marriage ended in that lodge in August 1981. High five, 11 days after the wedding of the century. She took off the ring because the law finally caught up with what she already knew. That she’d been alone in that marriage since the first night.
There’s a kind of cruelty that doesn’t need malice. It only needs someone who can’t see you. Someone who looks at you every day and sees a role, a duty, a problem to manage, but never you. Never the woman underneath the title. Diana didn’t cry for 6 hours because Charles was a monster. She cried because she finally understood something that would take the rest of the world another 16 years to figure out.
She’d married a man who was right there in front of her and completely gone. Physically present, emotionally absent, spiritually somewhere else, with someone else in a life he wished he was living instead of the one he’d chosen. And no amount of love, not hers, not the world’s, fi- was ever going to bring him back into the room. She knew it in that lodge.
She knew it at 20 years old. And she spent the rest of her life proving that she could matter to the whole world, even if she never mattered enough to the one person she wanted. If you know someone who still believes the fairy tale, who still thinks 1981 was a love story, send them this. They deserve to know what happened inside that lodge, but the honeymoon wasn’t the worst of it.
What happened when they got back to Kensington Palace? What Charles said to her about her body. What the palace did when she finally asked for help. That story is next, and it’s worse than anything that happened in Scotland.
