They met for the first time in 1977.
Diana was 16 years old.
She was visiting her sister Jane at Althorp, the Spencer family estate, and the Queen was a guest for a shooting weekend, the kind of gathering that organised the social calendar of the British aristocracy in ways that seemed casual and were not.
Diana was introduced briefly, shook hands, said the appropriate things.
The Queen was 51, in the 25th year of her reign, a woman who had been performing the role of monarch since she was 25 years old with a consistency and a discipline that had become, over decades, indistinguishable from her actual self.
Diana remembered the meeting.
She mentioned it in later years as the beginning, not of the relationship that would develop, but of the awareness that this person existed, that this woman was the central figure in the world Diana was moving toward.
The Queen almost certainly did not remember Diana from that first meeting.
She met thousands of people.
She was introduced to daughters of aristocratic families at shooting weekends with a frequency that made individual encounters difficult to retain.
Diana was a teenager from a family the Queen knew well.
The Spencers had been connected to the royal household for generations, but not particularly remarkable.
She became remarkable soon enough.
What the Queen knew about Diana when Charles brought her forward as a prospective wife is a question that biographers have explored with varying conclusions.
The official position maintained by those close to the palace for years was that the Queen approved of the match, that Diana seemed suitable, that her family background was appropriate, that she was young enough to be shaped by the role.
What the Queen may have understood about Charles’s interior situation, about Camilla, about the fact that her son was proposing to marry someone while still in love with someone else, is less certain and more debated.
The people closest to the Queen have suggested that she knew about the relationship with Camilla and believed, or hoped, that it was something Charles would put aside, that marriage and duty would do what time and separation had not quite managed to do.
This was in retrospect a significant miscalculation.
But it was a miscalculation made by a woman who had spent her adult life inside an institution where duty consistently overrode the personal, where the roles required of people were expected to eventually become the people themselves.
She had learned this from her own life.
She had watched her father, King George VI, become the role that had been given to him when his brother abdicated, had watched a man who had not wanted to be king become a king who was, by all accounts, genuinely excellent at the job.
The institution had a capacity to shape people.
She believed in it.
She believed it would shape Charles.
She believed it would shape Diana.
She was not entirely wrong about Diana.
The institution did shape her.
It shaped her in ways the Queen had not anticipated and could not control, into a person who was more powerful and more independently dangerous to the institution’s image than anyone who had designed the selection process had imagined possible.
In the early years of the marriage, the relationship between Diana and the Queen was formally correct and privately distant.
The Queen had a way of being that was not cold, exactly, but that operated at a temperature lower than Diana’s natural register.
She expressed affection through action rather than declaration, through the consistency of her presence, through the things she did rather than the things she said, through a steadiness that those who knew her well recognised as its own kind of warmth, but that could be difficult to read for someone who needed warmth to be more explicit.
Diana needed it to be more explicit.
She had grown up with a mother who had left when she was six, a father who was kind but not naturally demonstrative, a childhood organised around the particular loneliness of a family that had come apart at the seams.
She had a specific hunger for being told directly that she was loved, that she was seen, that she mattered to the person in front of her.
The Queen did not operate that way.
She expressed approval through the absence of disapproval, through small gestures that carried significant weight within the palace’s internal language.
She invited Diana to Balmoral, which was the family’s private retreat, and not a place guests were brought without meaning.
She included her in the smaller family gatherings.
She showed her, in the language of the institution, that she was welcomed.
Diana received these signals and understood some of them and missed others because she had not grown up inside the institution and did not speak its language fluently.
What she received as distance may have been, in the Queen’s own understanding, a form of respect, giving Diana room to find her own way, rather than pressing her into a specific shape.
The misreading ran in both directions.
The Queen, receiving Diana’s apparent confidence in public, her quick adaptation to the cameras and the crowds, and the extraordinary visibility of the role, may have concluded that the adaptation was more complete than it was, that the woman who charmed 2 billion people on her wedding day had found her footing, that things were proceeding as they should.
Things were not proceeding as they should.
The first significant rupture, the first moment when the Queen’s understanding of Diana’s situation was forced to become more specific, came in the early 1980s, when the eating disorder became impossible to conceal from everyone.
Diana had been bulimic since shortly after the engagement.
By the time William was born, the disorder had been a daily feature of her life for nearly 2 years, and the physical evidence of it was visible to people who were close enough and paying attention.
She was thin in a way that changed over the course of a day.
She was sometimes unwell in ways that required explanation.
The palace knew in the general sense that Diana was struggling.
The question of what to do about it was handled in the institutional way, managed, contained, provided with resources that were appropriate in form, but not in substance.
Doctors were consulted.
Advisers were informed.
A schedule was provided.
Diana tried to reach the Queen directly.
She has described these attempts in the Morton recordings with a specificity that suggests she returned to them often in her own thinking.
The times she had tried to tell the Queen what was actually happening, to bypass the institutional management and reach the person.
She said she had gone to the Queen’s office and asked to see her.
She said the meetings had happened briefly and that she had tried to explain what she was going through and that the Queen had listened with a quality of attention that was genuine, but also somehow at a distance, as though the information was being received but processed through a filter that softened its urgency.
She said the Queen had told her to try to take each day as it came.
Diana had wanted more than this.
She had wanted someone to say, “I see you.
I understand that this is serious.
I’m going to make sure you get what you actually need.”
She did not get this.
What she got was the institutional response dressed in personal form, the correct words, the appropriate concern, the management of the problem rather than the meeting of the person.
She did not blame the Queen for this.
This is important to say because the account of Diana’s relationship with the palace that became dominant after her death tended toward a version in which the Queen was one of the forces arrayed against her.
Diana’s own account was more complicated.
She understood that the Queen was also a person inside an institution, that Elizabeth had been shaped by the role she occupied for so long, that the two were barely separable, and that what looked like coldness or indifference was the expression of a woman whose emotional life had been conducted according to rules Diana was only beginning to learn.
She felt compassion for this alongside her grief at its consequences.
The public explosion happened in stages.
The Morton book in 1992, the official separation in December of the same year.
The Dimbleby interview in 1994 in which Charles admitted Camilla, the Panorama interview in 1995 in which Diana told her side, the divorce in 1996, the Queen watched each of these stages with an expression that people close to her described as one of controlled concern.
The specific stillness of a person who has understood that something is happening that they cannot stop and are deciding how to respond to each new development as it arrives.
She had never experienced anything like this.
In 43 years on the throne, the institution had faced challenges.
The Duke of Windsor’s abdication was before her time, but its shadow remained.
There had been various controversies and scandals, but none that involved the systematic public dismantling of a royal marriage from the inside by one of the parties.
The palace’s control over the narrative, which had been absolute for generations, was being undone by a woman with a cassette recorder and a sitting room.
The Queen’s response to the Morton book was private fury followed by public impassivity.
The face the institution presented to the world remained composed while the internal communications, as reconstructed by biographers from various sources, showed an institution genuinely alarmed.
The separation was announced with careful language.
The divorce was navigated through the expected channels.
The Panorama interview was different.
The Queen learned about the interview 2 weeks before it aired when the BBC gave notification.
She could not stop it.
Diana had gone around every system available for stopping her and the interview existed and was going to be broadcast and 23 million people were going to watch it.
The Queen wrote letters to both Charles and Diana in December 1995 recommending they divorce.
This was, for the Queen, a significant and unusual step.
She was head of the Church of England.
She had spent her reign as a symbol of marital stability.
For her to actively recommend the termination of her son’s marriage was a measure of how completely the situation had passed the point of management.
The letter to Diana was described by those who were aware of its contents as firm and not unkind.
It acknowledged the difficulty of the situation.
It expressed the Queen’s view that the current arrangement, the separation without divorce, the limbo of a marriage that was officially intact and practically nonexistent, was not sustainable and was damaging to everyone involved, including Diana.
Diana received this as, at least in part, an acknowledgement.
The Queen was telling her that things needed to end, which was a form of the institutional logic Diana had been fighting against for 15 years.
But it was also read differently.
The Queen telling Diana that she deserved a resolution, that the current state of things was not acceptable and should not continue.
Diana chose to read it as both things at once, which was probably accurate.
The divorce was finalised in August 1996.
Diana lost her HRH title.
This detail, the stripping of the title, was understood by everyone who knew the institution as a deliberate signal.
The Queen could have allowed Diana to retain the title.
She chose not to.
Diana would no longer be Her Royal Highness.
She would be Diana, Princess of Wales, still princess, still associated with the family, but no longer inside the formal structure in the way she had been.
Diana said publicly that the title did not matter.
She said she did not need a title to do the work she was doing.
People close to her said privately that it hurt more than she acknowledged.
Not because of the title itself, she was, by 1996, sophisticated enough about the institution to understand titles as the currency of a world she had partly left, but because of what it communicated.
The Queen, with the removal of the title, was marking Diana as lesser.
As someone who had been part of the family and was now formally and definitively outside it.
Diana had spent 15 years trying to be inside it and had been kept at a particular kind of distance.
Now she was outside it and the distance was official.
She went back to work.
The aftermath of the divorce produced an irony that was noted at the time and that has been noted more frequently since.
Diana, stripped of the formal structures of the institution, became more effective without them than she had been inside them.
The landmine campaign, the continued work with AIDS organisations, the visits to hospices and rehabilitation centres, all of this continued and in some ways accelerated after the divorce.
She no longer had to route her engagements through the palace’s approval process.
She no longer had to align her schedule with the institutional calendar.
She was, for the first time in her adult life, actually free to do what she wanted to do.
She was also, for the first time, genuinely independent financially.
The divorce settlement had provided for her.
She had her own staff, her own office, her own operations.
She had the visibility that 15 years in the institution had given her, the most recognised face in the world, and she could now point it in the directions she chose without consultation.
The Queen watched this with what people close to her described as a complicated attention.
The institution had tried to contain Diana and had found her uncontainable.
It had tried to manage her and had found her unmanageable.
It had finally removed her from the formal structure, which should, in the institutional logic, have reduced her power.
Instead, she was more powerful than ever.
The most photographed person in the world, the most beloved public figure of the era, operating independently of any institutional constraint.
This was not a situation the palace had anticipated.
There was no precedent for it and no playbook for responding to it.
The Queen, who had been playing a very long game for 43 years, watched and waited.
The summer of 1997, Diana was 36 years old.
She was photographed on a boat in the Mediterranean with Dodi Fayed, and the photographs showed a woman who looked in the way that photographs sometimes capture something the subject is not consciously presenting, like someone who had found a kind of ease, not happiness in the performed sense, something quieter, something that looked like a person who had stopped fighting the current and was, for the first time in a long time, simply in it.
The Queen was at Balmoral with the family.
William and Harry were with her.
Charles was there.
It was the private summer retreat, the annual gathering at the Scottish estate that the royal family used as a genuine withdrawal from the public world, the place where the institution lowered its guard, the closest it ever lowered its guard.
On the morning of August 31st, 1997, the Queen was informed that Diana had been in a car accident in Paris.
She was informed of the accident, and then she was informed of the severity of the injuries, and then, in the early hours of the morning, she was informed that Diana had died.
She was with her grandchildren.
William was 15.
Harry was 12.
They were asleep when the news came.
The Queen made the decision in the hours that followed to stay at Balmoral, to maintain the family’s private routine, to allow William and Harry to remain in the place they were, rather than rushing back to London.
She ordered that the flag at Buckingham Palace remain at full mast.
There was no precedent for flying the flag at half-mast for a non-working royal, and Diana was no longer a working royal, and the protocol was clear.
This decision, the flag, the Balmoral silence, the Queen’s visible absence from the public grief that was erupting in London, became one of the defining controversies of the week.
But the public, which was pouring into the streets and filling Kensington Palace with flowers and candles and handwritten notes, could not understand why the Queen was not there, could not understand the flag, could not understand the silence.
The gap between the public’s grief and the institution’s response was the gap between Diana’s world and the Queen’s world made suddenly and completely visible.
The Queen came back to London.
She gave a broadcast, a live television address, the night before the funeral, that was unprecedented for her.
She did not give live addresses.
She gave the Christmas message, scripted and prepared.
She did not speak to the nation from a prompter in response to a crisis.
She spoke about Diana.
She said she spoke as a queen and as a grandmother.
She said she admired and respected Diana for her energy and commitment to others and especially for her devotion to her boys.
She said there were no easy answers to the question of how to build a better and more equal society.
But Diana had shown that this was achievable through personal contact.
She said, “I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.”
She looked into the camera and she said these things without the distance that had characterised her public addresses for 45 years.
Not entirely without it, she was the Queen and the distance was part of her in a way that could not be fully set aside, but reduced, visible in its reduction.
People who watched it said it was the most they had seen her, the most of the person behind the role.
Diana would have recognised the distinction.
She had spent 15 years trying to understand it.
The funeral was on September 6th, 1997.
The Queen stood outside Buckingham Palace as the coffin passed and bowed her head.
This was a gesture of enormous significance within the logic of the institution.
The Queen did not bow to anyone.
She was the monarch.
The bowing was done to her.
She bowed to Diana’s coffin.
People who saw it on the streets and on television understood it as something more than protocol.
They understood it as the Queen acknowledging, in the only language fully available to her, that something had passed that deserved to be honoured.
That the woman in the coffin had done something that merited the lowering of the head.
Whatever had happened between them, the 15 years of the marriage, the separation, the divorce, the title, the flag at full mast, The Queen stood outside her palace and bowed.
William and Harry grew up without their mother and were raised in the years immediately following her death within the institution that she had spent her life in tension with.
The Queen was their grandmother.
She was also, in the absence of Diana, a primary female presence in their lives.
She did not become Diana for them.
Nobody could have become Diana for them.
But she was there in the way she had always been there, consistently, steadily, in the manner of someone whose constancy was itself a form of love, even when the love was not expressed in the terms they might have preferred.
William has spoken in the careful way he speaks about these things, about his grandmother with genuine affection, about the stability she provided, the reliability of her presence, the way she was always there.
He has also spoken about his mother with a love that is still raw 30 years after her death, which tells you something about the depth of what was lost and the impossibility of replacing it.
Harry has been more direct about the difficulties of growing up inside the institution after losing the person who had been his counterweight to it.
He has spoken about the grief that was managed rather than met, about the ways the institution handled his loss in the way it handled everything through structure and schedule, through the expectation that composure would eventually become real, through the same silence that had failed his mother.
The Queen had not failed his mother deliberately.
She had responded to Diana with the tools she had, which were the tools of the institution, management, containment, the expectation that duty would prevail.
They had not been the right tools.
She may have known this by the end or come to know it in the years after Diana’s death, when the lessons she had said there were to be drawn began to be visible in the ways they were drawn.
The institution changed in small and significant ways in the years after Diana.
It became more accessible, more willing to address things that had previously been considered too private for public acknowledgement.
Mental health, grief, the interior life of the people inside the family, these things were addressed eventually in ways that would have been impossible before Diana had made it impossible not to address them.
The Queen lived to 96.
She died in September 2022, 70 years into her reign at Balmoral, the place where she had been when Diana died 25 years earlier.
In the coverage of her death, Diana’s name came up often.
The two women were compared, contrasted, placed in relation to each other as representing different versions of what it meant to be a royal woman in the late 20th century.
The Queen who had devoted herself entirely to the institution, the princess who had been unable to be contained by it and had found in the impossibility of containment a different kind of power.
Both things were true.
Both versions had cosTS. Both women paid them.
They met for the first time in 1977 at a shooting weekend at Althorp.
Diana was 16 and the Queen was 51 and the encounter lasted a few minutes and was almost certainly not memorable to the Queen and was remembered by Diana for the rest of her life.
What passed between them in the years that followed, the approvals and the managing and the removals and the bow outside Buckingham Palace, was a relationship that neither of them had chosen and both of them had to navigate inside an institution that had been running for a thousand years and that was changed in ways both small and significant by the woman who had tried and failed and refused to stop trying to make a human.
