Pop quiz: who are the messiest members of the Royal Family? These days, you’d be tempted to say Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. After all, these two were rocking the boat long before they ditched most of their royal responsibilities and moved to America. Since that move, they’ve created more and more scandals by doing things like airing the family’s dirty laundry in an infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey. However, these royal rebels pale in comparison to Charles and Diana. Decades after Diana’s untimely passing, she and her husband remain the most controversial members of this famous family.
That controversy has a very simple cause: when Charles married Diana, he was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles, the man he is now married to. His heart couldn’t be with two women, and by all accounts, Charles caused young Diana plenty of strain. Eventually, these two divorced, and most consider that the end of their story. But have you ever wondered what life was like for these two afterward? No need to wonder. Keep reading to discover the shocking way Charles and Diana lived after the divorce.
Diana wanted to fix things (until she didn’t)
It really seemed like marriage to Prince Charles was a living hell for Princess Diana. During their engagement interview, they were asked if they were in love. She said yes; he said, “Whatever ‘in love’ means.” Ouch, Chuck! From the very beginning, his love for Camilla Parker Bowles disrupted his marriage to Diana. And Diana knew it, too: in her infamous interview with Martin Bashir, she bluntly described what went wrong with her relationship: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Because of this, you might think that Diana was overjoyed to finally be divorced from Charles. But royal author Tina Brown claims that the princess told her that “she would go back to Charles in a heartbeat if he wanted her.” However, it seems like she eventually got over this feeling. Two years after Diana separated from Charles, she wore her infamous “revenge” dress. What’s the revenge, exactly? Simple: she was showing both Charles just how sexy she was and how many would kill to be with her!
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Successful coparents
You know what always complicates marriages? If you just said “having kids,” then give yourself a gold star. When children are in the picture, divorced parents sometimes try to turn the kids against their ex. This is tragic, of course: divorce is already guaranteed to send shockwaves throughout a family. When parents keep fighting long after a divorce, it can often be enough to destroy whatever is left of their old family dynamic.
As you can tell, Charles and Diana didn’t have a very great marriage. But did they end up bickering in front of the kids after the divorce? Surprisingly, they were really great co-parents to young William and Harry. The terms of their divorce gave each of them equal access to the children, and each moment was precious; thanks to boarding school, the parents would only see their heir and a spare about 50 days of the week. But they made it work, and by all accounts, they made far better coparents than they ever made spouses.
Diana got rich(er) from the settlement
When she was alive, Diana had a reputation as the “People’s Princess.” After all, she spearheaded numerous charitable efforts around the globe, and she’d do anything to comfort someone, including embracing a man with AIDS back before anyone knew how it was transmitted. Since Diana was such a woman of the people, many assume that she was very poor when she married into royalty. However, this wasn’t the case: she had inherited money from her wealthy royal family, and she supplemented that with income from some very savvy stock investments.
Regardless of her existing wealth, though, divorcing Charles pushed Diana into an entirely new tax bracket. She got a very healthy settlement out of the divorce. How healthy are we talking? She received a cool $23 million upfront, and she continued to get a little over half a million each year after that. By the time the People’s Princess died? She was worth a cool $31.5 million. That means that, even in her final years, Diana could live as much within the lap of luxury as she wanted to!
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Both Charles and Diana moved on
The most controversial aspect of life after divorce is the answer to the big question: Will you be able to move on? Some people rebound right away; others take a break of weeks, months, or even years before they move on. The longer they are together, the longer it usually takes divorced couples to move. But there are exceptions to every rule, and Charles and Diana managed to reboot very shortly after their split.
It was less surprising that Charles moved on. His marriage imploded in large part because he was focused on Camille Parker Bowles, the affair partner he fell in love with before marrying Diana. He continued to date her, though he didn’t go public with their relationship until one year after Diana’s untimely passing. As for Diana, she began dating a surgeon named Hasnat Khan. After they broke up, she began dating Dodi Al Fayed, who died in the same car crash that took her life.