Charles, prince of Wales

Charles, prince of Wales, in full Charles Philip Arthur George, prince of Wales and earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall, duke of Rothesay, earl of Carrick and Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland    (born November 14, 1948, Buckingham Palace, London, England), heir apparent to the British throne, eldest child of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh.

After private schooling at Buckingham Palace and in London, Hampshire, and Scotland, Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1967. He took a bachelor’s degree there in 1971, the first ever earned by an heir to the British crown. He also spent a term at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, learning Welsh in preparation for his investiture as prince of Wales on July 1, 1969, at Caernarvon Castle. He then attended the Royal Air Force College (becoming an excellent flier) and the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and from 1971 to 1976 took a tour of duty with the Royal Navy. Later he became an outspoken critic of modern architecture. He expressed his views on the topic in A Vision of Britain (1989). In 1992 he founded the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, which later evolved into the BRE Trust, an organization involved with urban regeneration and development projects.

On July 29, 1981, Charles married Lady Diana Frances Spencer (see Diana, princess of Wales), daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer; the royal wedding was a global media event, broadcast live on television and watched by hundreds of millions of people. The couple’s first child, Prince William of Wales, became at his birth (June 21, 1982) second in line of succession to the throne. Their second child, Prince Henry Charles Albert David (known as Harry), was born on September 15, 1984. Charles’s marriage to Diana gradually grew strained amid intense scrutiny from the tabloid press and rumours of infidelity. On December 9, 1992, it was announced that Charles and Diana had decided to separate but would continue to fulfill their public duties and to share the responsibility of raising their sons. The couple divorced on August 28, 1996. A year later Diana died in an auto accident, and popular feeling for her, stronger even in death than in life, served to jeopardize the traditional form of monarchy that Charles represented. He subsequently spent much effort in modernizing his public image as the heir apparent. On April 9, 2005, he married Camilla Parker Bowles (born 1947), with whom he had a long-standing relationship; after the wedding, Parker Bowles took the title of duchess of Cornwall.

Diana, princess of Wales

Diana, princess of Wales, original name Diana Frances Spencer   (born July 1, 1961, Sandringham, Norfolk, England—died August 31, 1997, Paris, France), former consort (1981–96) of Charles, prince of Wales, and mother of the heir second in line to the British throne, Prince William, duke of Cambridge (born 1982).

Diana was born at Park House, the home that her parents rented on Queen Elizabeth II’s estate at Sandringham and where her childhood playmates were the queen’s younger sons, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. She was the third child and youngest daughter of Edward John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, heir to the 7th Earl Spencer, and his first wife, Frances Ruth Burke Roche (daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy). She became Lady Diana Spencer when her father succeeded to the earldom in 1975. Riddlesworth Hall (near Thetford, Norfolk) and West Heath School (Sevenoaks, Kent) provided the young Diana’s schooling. After attending the finishing school of Chateau d’Oex at Montreux, Switzerland, Diana returned to England and became a kindergarten teacher at the fashionable Young England school in Pimlico.

She renewed her contacts with the royal family, and her friendship with Charles grew in 1980. On February 24, 1981, their engagement was announced, and on July 29, 1981, they were married in St. Paul’s Cathedral in a globally televised ceremony watched by an audience numbering in the hundreds of millions. Their first child, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, was born on June 21, 1982, and their second, Prince Henry Charles Albert David, on September 15, 1984. Marital difficulties led to a separation between Diana and Charles in 1992, though they continued to carry out their royal duties and jointly participate in raising their two children. They divorced on August 28, 1996, with Diana receiving a substantial settlement.

After the divorce, Diana maintained her high public profile and continued many of the activities she had earlier undertaken on behalf of charities, supporting causes as diverse as the arts, children’s issues, and AIDS patients. She also was involved in efforts to ban land mines. Her unprecedented popularity as a member of the royal family, both in Britain and throughout the world, attracted considerable attention from the press, and she became one of the most-photographed women in the world. Although she used that celebrity to great effect in promoting her charitable work, the media (in particular the aggressive freelance photographers known as paparazzi) were often intrusive. It was while attempting to evade journalists that Diana was killed, along with her companion, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, in an automobile accident in a tunnel under the streets of Paris.

Though the photographers were initially blamed for causing the accident, a French judge in 1999 cleared them of any wrongdoing, instead faulting the driver, who was found to have had a blood-alcohol level over the legal limit at the time of the crash and to have taken prescription drugs incompatible with alcohol. In 2006 a Scotland Yard inquiry into the incident also concluded that the driver was at fault. In April 2008, however, a British inquest jury ruled both the driver and the paparazzi guilty of unlawful killing through grossly negligent driving, though it found no evidence of a conspiracy to kill Diana or Fayed, an accusation long made by Fayed’s father.

Her death and funeral produced unprecedented expressions of public mourning, testifying to her enormous hold on the British national psyche. Her life, and her death, polarized national feeling about the existing system of monarchy (and, in a sense, about the British identity), which appeared antiquated and unfeeling in a populist age of media celebrity in which Diana herself was a central figure.