The Surprising Amount Of Time It Took Princess Diana To Learn To Be A Royal
Princess Diana did not have an easy time as a royal, something that the fictionalized Netflix drama The Crown played heavily upon in Season 4. Fans saw the unhappy marriage between Diana and Prince Charles, as well as his romantic affiliations with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
Fans grew so irate while watching The Crown that Camilla and Charles had to turn off their Twitter comments because people were coming for them so viciously, claiming that Diana had been wrongfully treated by them. It's worth stressing that the Netflix drama really is fiction, so it's not fair to watch it as a documentary or to assume that Charles was as awful as he's depicted in The Crown.
However, Netflix also released the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words, and this seems more on the nose for people who want to get a closer look at the truth, at least from Diana's perspective. In the midst of talking about her royal life and her marriage, Diana spilled the details on how long it took her to "become" royal and the timeframe is shocking.
Diana said 'nobody' in the royal family helped her
Princess Diana got candid about her royal life in documentaries that were compiled to create Diana: In Her Own Words. The clips were filmed in 1991 to create material for the 1992 biography written by Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story, according to Vogue. The recordings were then used to create the documentary in 2017, and it has become a hit thanks to the resurgence of interest in the royal family.
While speaking about her struggling marriage with Prince Charles and his increasing jealousy at her popularity, Diana said, "I learned to be a royal in one week. I was thrown into the deep end, which, now, I prefer it that way. Nobody ever helped me at all," Diana added. "They'd be there to criticize but never be there to say 'Well done.'"
It seems like lessons were learned the painful way. Morton wrote in the 2017 anniversary edition of Diana: In Her Own Words that Queen Elizabeth II tried to be more present to newer additions. "One of the many ironies of [the queen's] life is that Diana's impact on the royal family is measured by how much more accommodating the house of Windsor is now to newcomers," Morton wrote.
"It is noticeable that the queen frequently joined Prince William's bride Catherine Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, in the early days of her Royal career. Certainly lessons have been learned—but at a price."