The marriage between King Charles and Princess Diana marked a pivotal moment in the history of the Royal Family, a royal commentator has argued. Tom Quinn, author of Gilded Youth, claimed the failed union of the then Prince and Princess of Wales and the destructive War of the Waleses in the early 1990s forced the Firm to shift from a centuries-old tradition of either arranging marriages or finding partners only among the aristocrats to allowing high-profile royals to marry for love.
Mr Quinn, who in his book analysed the upbringing royal children have received over the last few centuries, told Express.co.uk: “In a way, the marriage of Charles and Diana was the last gasp of a tradition that went back about 500 years.
“Then in effect, the elder royals, and people like Lord Mountbatten, got together with the Queen Mother and Lady Fermoy, who was Diana’s grandmother, and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to sort something out for Charles, but we need it to be someone who’s definitely not had any boyfriend, who’s extremely aristocratic and is a bit naive’.
“They wanted someone for Charles who wouldn’t dominate him, who would do as royal wives had always done, who would have accepted that if he needed to have a mistress, that was fine.
“And on the face of it, of course, Diana seemed perfect, but she wasn’t the mouse that they thought she was. And the result, as we know, eventually was a divorce.”
Queen Elizabeth II, who had married the man she loved in 1947, but had also been able to find him among the small pool of European royalty, agreed on a divorce for her firstborn that same year, and the split was completed in the summer of 1996.
The crisis in which the Firm plunged as a result of this public war between Charles and Diana showed the royals it was time to change its approach to marriage, Mr Quinn argued.
He said: “I think all across the Royal Family it was seen that if you arranged marriage for dynastic reasons, as they did it in the case of Charles and Diana, the result was going to be disastrous.
“And that’s why they shifted to the modern view where it’s much better if you let younger royals choose their partners. And so it’s almost like the old experiment had failed and they’re trying the new experiment.”
Despite being the heir to the throne, Prince William was free to marry a woman, Kate, from a middle-class background.
Similarly, in 2018 Prince Harry, then sixth-in-line to the throne, was allowed to marry the now Duchess of Sussex, born and bred in California with a past as an actress.
Mr Quinn added: “I think it’s absolutely the case that they felt [with] arranged marriages you get your fingers very badly burnt.
“I mean, the Royal Family nearly, you could argue, came to an end, the whole divorce and then the TV interviews and so on were so destructive. So they’re just trying to avoid that.”
Gilded Youth by Tom Quinn, published by Biteback, is available in hardback (£15).
