PRINCESS DIANA’S Bold REFUSAL to KING CHARLES’ CONTROVERSIAL Request BEFORE the Engagement — What Was He THINKING?

Royal romances often don’t come to light until weeks or months later, with the likes of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and Princess Diana and King Charles keeping their early relationships away from the public eye.

The latter met in 1977 when Charles was visiting Diana’s older sister Lady Sarah (his then-girlfriend) at the Spencer estate, Althorp House. Charles reportedly saw his future bride as a “jolly” girl before romance blossomed several years later in 1980.

Before the couple announced their engagement in February 1981, they had reportedly only met 13 times – and one of those saw Charles make a request that Diana found “rather improper.”

The late Queen Elizabeth II’s son was already looking to the future with his then-girlfriend, taking her on a tour of his beloved home, Highgrove House, which he purchased in 1980.

“During that first weekend, Prince Charles showed Diana around High grove, the 353-acre Gloucestershire home he had bought in July – the same month he had started to woo her,” wrote Andrew Morton in his biography, Diana: Her True Story — In Her Own Words, which was written with Diana’s cooperation.

When Edward VIII proposed to American socialite and divorcee, Wallis Simpson, in 1936, it caused a royal crisis and the abdication of the monarch. He asked for her hand in marriage at Slogarie House in Mossdale in a secret garden during a party.

“As he took her on a guided tour of the eight-bedroom mansion, the Prince asked her to organize the interior decoration. He liked her taste, though she felt that it was a ‘most improper’ suggestion as they were not even engaged.”

Charles and Diana got married on 29 July 1981 at St Paul’s Cathedral, before moving into Highgrove in the Gloucestershire countryside. It is here that their sons Prince William, born in 1982, and Prince Harry, born in 1984, spent many of their childhood years.