King Charles 'Has Learned to Live' With the 'Stains' on His Reputation: New Book
Decades after the collapse of one of the most scrutinized marriages in modern history, King Charles seems to have made his peace with a version of events that he privately disputes. Not because he agrees with it, but because he has learned there is little to be gained by fighting it. According to a new royal biography, the King lives with a lingering frustration over how his marriage to Princess Diana has been remembered — and how one side of the story hardened into the accepted truth.
In The Windsor Legacy, royal author Robert Jobson looks back on “the long shadow of the so-called ‘War of the Waleses,’” and while Charles is known to “openly admit that he and his wife Diana made many mistakes,” he is very clearly “sensitive about his marriage and its aftermath and uncomfortable with the moral inequality of the way that both he and Diana are perceived by history.”
There is no attempt here to rehabilitate Charles's conduct. His affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, now Queen Camilla, is well-documented and long central to criticism of his character. But Jobson notes that the public narrative often freezes there, omitting inconvenient complexities. "His detractors focus on his neglect of his young bride and his adultery, branding him unfit for kingship, while overlooking her many affairs."
The King, as far as everyone is concerned, has never tried to present a case for the marriage as anything other than a troubled one right from the start. It was an emotional, temperamental mismatch right from the beginning, and it was simply a matter of time and place as to when it was going to fall apart. It is not anger over the blame, but about the story, and how it was told, particularly at a time when the public was already favorable to Diana. "Over time, Charles has learned to live with this distorted image, especially after Diana's death, realising that no amount of effort can erase the stains on his reputation," Jobson writes.
However, long before their marriage became a public cautionary tale, Charles and Diana were bound by a genuine — if brief — sense of promise. Those early months, often lost in the wreckage of what followed, are important to how the King still frames the story. “There was a period of great love between them,” royal biographer Ingrid Seward said, as per PEOPLE. “And she wanted the boys [Prince William and Harry] to know that.” Yet even that early optimism has never gone unchallenged. Other accounts suggest the affection, while real, was uneven and fragile from the outset — sustained more by hope and momentum than by deep understanding. The speed of their courtship, the weight of expectation, and their limited time together before engagement left little room for reality to intrude.
Their story began in 1977, when Diana was introduced to Charles by her sister, Sarah McCorquodale. It gathered pace three years later, when they began dating more seriously. McCorquodale later recalled that “they just clicked,” describing shared humor and overlapping interests. “They have the same giggly sense of humor, and they both love ballet and opera and sport in all forms. It’s perfect, and they are both over the moon about it,” she said.