Princess Diana was not allowed to call Prince Charles by his first name

• Princess Diana was only allowed to speak to Prince Charles as a “gentleman” until they were engaged.
• The princess was not supposed to call her by her first name, writes royal biographer Andrew Morton.
• “In Prince Charles’ circle, this was considered the norm,” Morton added.
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It has been 40 years since Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer announced their engagement on February 24, 1981.

The couple’s engagement interview was watched by royal fans around the world, but some people may not know how formal the couple had been until then.

According to Princess Diana’s biography, “Diana: Her True Story,” by Andrew Morton, she was forced to call Charles “sir” when they dated and was only allowed to speak to him by his first name when they were dating. got engaged.

“It wasn’t until Lady Diana was officially engaged to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales that she was allowed to call her ‘Charles’. Until then, she had addressed him modestly as “Sir,” “Morton wrote in the book, first published in 1992.

While Diana also had an official title – she was officially known as Lady Diana until her marriage – Charles used her first name.

“He called her Diana,” Morton added. “In Prince Charles’ circle, this was considered the norm.”

Morton went on to explain that Diana’s older sister Lady Sarah had just been “so formal” during her nine-month relationship with the prince.

“It was obviously fair to do it because I was never corrected,” Lady Sarah told Morton.

Diana met Charles at the age of 16 and the Prince at 29. However, they didn’t start a romantic relationship until three years later. The couple met a total of 13 times before they were married, the princess later said in secretly recorded tapes for her biography.

In the same tapes, Diana called her royal wedding “the worst day of my life”.

“I don’t think I was happy. I never tried to undo, in the sense of really doing that, but I think [it was] the worst day of my life, ”she said.

She also described herself as “a lamb at the slaughterhouse”.

Images of the tapes were first published in the 2017 National Geographic documentary, “Diana: In Her Own Words.”