When Diana put her foot down (or tried to). She was NOT going to continue living at Highgrove House, which Charles had chosen with the help of… Camilla!
Everything could have been completely different. Well, maybe!
Just a few months after her wedding to Charles, Princess Diana made up her mind. She did NOT intend to continue living at Highgrove House – she wanted their family home to be a place the couple chose together.
And definitely NOT in Royal Gloucestershire. In fact, the further the better.
Sheep graze at Highgrove House, Prince Charles’s country home in Gloucestershire. Despite her beauty, Diana wanted the family to move elsewhere.
The Princess of Wales leans against the sundial at Highgrove House. Camilla had a hand not only in choosing the house, but also in decorating it.
Diana is pictured at Highgrove with her maid of honor Anne Beckwith-Smith.
Princess Diana’s old family home, the magnificent Althorp House in Northamptonshire. It was considerably more spacious than Highgrove.
Bolehyde Manor in Allington, Wiltshire, where Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles lived when they married. It’s near Highgrove.
Why? Her reasons were too many to count: Camilla suggested Highgrove, the home of former cabinet minister Maurice Macmillan, to Charles as the ideal country house to get away from it all.
Camilla helped him decorate the place while he was dating Diana.
And conveniently, it was a 30-minute drive from her Wiltshire home, Bolehyde Manor. This was her place, not Diana’s.
The princess, according to her family, wanted to take Charles away from his one true love – and set about keeping him away from temptation.
Through her sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who lived nearby, she learned that Belton House in Lincolnshire – the luxurious former home of the sixth Lord Brownlow – was empty and would be put up for sale.
Brownlow had close royal connections: he was King Edward VIII’s lord-in-waiting and was the man who escorted the Duchess of Windsor out of Britain when Edward abdicated the throne.
His house, Belton, has been in the family since the 17th century. King William III slept here.
It was just the right place for Diana to raise her children, as she was used to the 15,000 acres surrounding her family home at Althorp rather than Charles’s meager 348 acres around Highgrove.
Belton boasted nearly 5,000 acres of land, and the house was filled with Old Masters, fine silver, fine antique furniture, and countless rooms.
The library, containing 6,000 volumes, overlooked extensive formal gardens. Perfect!
Highgrove was not okay with this – and Diana wanted to leave anyway.
She advised Charles to check out the place, and in early 1982 the couple went to check out the mansion.
On the way, she claimed that Belton was a short drive from the royal estate at Sandringham, very close to her sister Sarah and much more impressive than little Highgrove with its only nine bedrooms.
She was so convinced that her children should grow up in Belton that, according to Lord Brownlow’s nephew Peter Hus, the couple visited the house three times.
Diana’s preferred location is Belton House, a Grade I mansion near Grantham, Lincolnshire.
Described as a jewel of Caroline architecture, Belton boasted almost 5,000 acres of land. Its countless rooms were filled with works of old masters, exquisite silver and antique furniture.
The Prince and Princess of Wales with Prince Harry near Highgrove
Diana wanted to leave, but Charles could not be persuaded, and in the end he firmly decided to remain at Highgrove.
Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, with sons William and Harry
Princess Diana leaving Highgrove with William and Harry behind in 1992.
But Charles could not be swayed, and in the end he firmly decided to remain at Highgrove.
There, Camilla’s shadow hung over the house (from Diana’s point of view) and indeed Highgrove turned out to be an unlucky home for the royal couple.
Who knows, if Diana could have walked a couple of hundred miles between her husband and his mistress, perhaps (but only perhaps) she could have held him.