King Charles burst in tears talking about princess Diana after confirming divorce with Camilla

It was in 1977 that a young Lady Diana Spencer, then 16 years old, was first introduced to 29-year-old Prince Charles. Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, was hosting Charles at Althorp, the Spencer family estate, for a grouse shooting party.

At the time, Charles was briefly dating Sarah. However, their relationship came to an abrupt end after Sarah reportedly told two reporters about her royal romance, revealing that she had an eating disorder, had thousands of boyfriends, and wouldn’t marry Charles “if he were the dustman or the King of England.” When Charles saw the article, he told her, “You’ve just done something extremely stupid,” leading to the end of their relationship.

Diana’s experience with Charles was quite different from her sister’s. Unlike Sarah, Diana did not feel immediately swept off her feet. Tina Brown, in *The Diana Chronicles*, wrote that Diana apparently told her friends that she would marry Charles one day and that he would be the “one man on the planet who is not allowed to divorce me.” However, Diana later told biographer Andrew Morton, author of *Diana: Her True Story*, that her initial thoughts about Charles were more reserved. She recalled thinking, “God, what a sad man,” rather than being overly impressed.

In their engagement interview in 1981, Charles recalled his first impression of Diana, saying, “I thought what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was. I mean, great fun, and bouncy and full of life.”

Despite this, Charles and Diana didn’t meet again until three years after their first encounter. They were both invited to a weekend barbecue at Philip de Pass’s house in Sussex in July 1980. Diana later recounted the event to her speech coach on a tape that was used for the Channel 4 documentary *Diana: In Her Own Words*. She said, “I hadn’t seen him in ages. I was asked to stay with some friends in Sussex, and they said the Prince of Wales is staying. He’d just broken up with his girlfriend, and his friend Lord Mountbatten had just been killed.”

Reflecting on their reunion, Diana admitted she was not particularly impressed at first, but when Charles walked in, she thought, “Well, I’m quite impressed this time around; this is different.” Charles, according to Diana, was also struck by her. On the tapes, she said, “He was all over me. I added, ‘You must be so lonely,’ and we were talking about Mountbatten and his girlfriend. I said, ‘It’s tragic to watch you walk up the aisle with Mountbatten’s coffin in front of you—it’s dreadful. You need someone beside you.’” Diana continued, “I thought, ‘This is not what people do,’ as he leapt upon me and began kissing me. He followed me around like a puppy for the rest of the evening and was all over me.”

Diana also shared the challenges of beginning a relationship with a prince. She noted that Charles wasn’t consistent in his courting. After calling her every day for a week, he suddenly stopped calling for three weeks. She found this behavior “very odd,” but decided, “Okay, I thought, if he wants me, he knows where I am.” Diana remembered the excitement that surrounded Charles’s calls, which drove the other three girls in her flat “mad with jealousy.”