Poor girl was nothing more than a broodmare to them.
Few people remember just how determinedly Diana had set out to become the Princess of Wales.
In 1980, she’d twice gone to stay with her sister Jane, who was married to Robert Fellowes, then the Queen’s assistant private secretary, at their cottage on the Balmoral estate. And after the second visit, she’d been invited to spend four days at the castle to join one of the regular Royal house parties.
During her time there, recalled one member of staff, Diana was desperate to make an impression.
‘Most of the ladies do not get up until after the guns have gone out, but Diana was always up early. If you looked out of your window at a quarter to eight, you would see her walking in the garden, and she made a great point of being there to see them off.
‘It was then that she played her sharpest card. She would go around telling everybody how much she loved Balmoral and that it was such a magical place and how she loved it beyond imagination.’
Impressed, Prince Charles started asking her to accompany him fishing and to join him on long walks through the estate in which she professed such an interest.
Diana, everyone agreed, was ‘enchanting’.
The Queen, alert to a possible new woman in her son’s life, had just two reservations. She wondered whether anyone that young could differentiate between the man and the prince. And she couldn’t help thinking that the Spencer girl would be far better suited to her younger son, Andrew.