Princess Diana Admitted That She Thought About Camilla Parker Bowles “the Whole Time” on Her 1981 Honeymoon With Prince Charles
Princess Diana Admitted That She Thought About Camilla Parker Bowles “the Whole Time” on Her 1981 Honeymoon With Prince Charles
Rachel BurchfieldWed, July 29, 2026 at 4:31 PM UTC
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Lady Diana Spencer and Camilla Parker Bowles in 1980.Credit: GettyThe Gist -
Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer married exactly 45 years ago on July 29, 1981.
In attendance at the royal wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral was Camilla Parker Bowles—the woman who Charles fell in love with in the early 1970s and never stopped loving—who sat in the fourth row.
On Charles and Diana’s honeymoon, Diana told her biographer Andrew Morton that she dreamed of Camilla “the whole time” and was “obsessed by Camilla totally.”
As Princess Diana famously said herself, there were three people in her marriage with Prince Charles—so it was a bit crowded.
It turns out that that extended all the way back to Charles and Diana’s July 29, 1981 royal wedding day and their honeymoon that followed, spent both on the Royal Yacht Britannia and at Balmoral in Scotland.
Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their honeymoon on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1981.Credit: Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images
The former Princess of Wales told her biographer Andrew Morton for his 1992 bombshell book Diana: Her True Story that she even dreamed of Camilla Parker Bowles “the whole time” during her honeymoon with Charles. Camilla—now Charles’s second wife and Queen Camilla—met the Prince of Wales in 1970; they fell in love before Camilla broke Charles’s heart, suddenly marrying Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973. But by the time Charles began courting Diana in 1980, Charles and Camilla were still very much in touch—and likely very much still in love. Diana was aware of it all, even then.
Diana admitted to Morton that she was “obsessed by Camilla totally” during her honeymoon. Two days before the wedding, Diana had discovered a bracelet Charles intended to give Camilla, and while on their honeymoon, Diana saw two photos of Mrs. Parker Bowles fall out of her new husband’s diary, Peoplereported.
And then there were the cufflinks. Camilla had given Charles a personalized set of cufflinks, which the future king wore on his honeymoon. Diana was “well aware” of the gift, telling Morton, “Cufflinks arrive on his wrists—two ‘C’s entwined like the Chanel ‘C’s. Got it in one; knew exactly.”
Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their honeymoon at Balmoral in August 1981.Credit: Getty Images
“‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’” Diana asked Charles while they were on their honeymoon. “He said, ‘Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.’ And boy, did we have a row.”
Royal historian Catherine Mayer told People that she believed the marriage between Charles and Diana was doomed from the start, and that what happened on their honeymoon was a major warning sign of what was to come.
“The thing that is so striking about Charles and Diana is they got married understanding almost nothing of each other—or what they were doing to themselves,” she said.
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Just as Diana was tortured by the thought of Camilla on her honeymoon, so too was she at her wedding to Charles. Camilla—wearing a pale gray ensemble that almost looked white—was in attendance. According to Diana’s former royal butler Paul Burrell, she looked side-to-side on her way down the aisle searching for Camilla.
Lady Diana Spencer walking down the aisle on the arm of her father, Earl Johnnie Spencer.Credit: Getty
“She said, ‘I was looking for her,’” he told Marie Claire. “‘I knew she’d be there. And she was on the fourth row at my wedding.’” Diana later called her wedding day “the worst day of my life” and told Morton over a decade after her wedding that seeing Camilla in the pews at St. Paul’s Cathedral remained a “vivid memory” for her.
By the time she and Charles tied the knot, Diana knew Camilla well. In fact, Charles had chosen Camilla—of all people—to become friendly with Diana and teach her about his ways. Diana, for her part, “interpreted her rival’s overtures of friendship towards her during this period as intelligence gathering,” Mayer wrote in her new book Divide & Rule. But, Mayer added, “Camilla seems unlikely to have taken on such a mission unilaterally.”
“A more plausible theory, suggested by sources with some knowledge of these events, is that Charles saw Camilla as the person best placed to induct his fiancée into his life,” Mayer continued. Camilla, she added, knew Charles “and his ways intimately. If accurate, this is the detail among all others that comes closest to crossing the line from disordered impulses common to such situations to something colder.”
Lady Diana Spencer and Camilla Parker Bowles.Credit: Getty
“Even if Charles, at this stage, lacked the emotional intelligence to grasp how misguided the idea was, you might have expected Camilla to demur,” Mayer wrote.
Diana told Morton that she was, at just 19 years old when she began dating Charles, “Still too immature to understand all the messages coming my way.”
“Eventually, I worked it all out and found the proof of the pudding, and people were willing to talk to me,” she added.
Camilla Parker Bowles and Lady Diana Spencer.Credit: Getty
Charles and Camilla eventually resumed their romantic relationship, and both the Prince and Princess of Wales’s marriage and the Parker Bowles union had ended by the mid-1990s. Diana died in a Paris car crash in 1997, and eight years later, Charles and Camilla married in 2005.
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