Princess Diana’s searing description of feeling ‘excluded totally’ from Prince William’s christening at Buckingham Palace has resurfaced as her life is being revisited on what would have been her 65th birthday. The late Princess Diana, speaking years after the 4 August 1982 ceremony, said the occasion ‘couldn’t have been worse’ for her as a 21‑year‑old new mother battling illness and emotional strain.
The christening of Prince William, now 44, took place in the palace’s Music Room just six weeks after his birth to Diana, Princess of Wales, and the then‑Prince Charles, who had married the previous year. The day carried extra royal weight, timed to fall on the Queen Mother’s 82nd birthday and layered with tradition that had very little to do with how the young woman at the centre of it all actually felt.
The baby heir was dressed in the historic lace and satin christening gown commissioned by Queen Victoria. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, performed the baptism in front of the Queen, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip and senior royals, all lined up for the official photographs that would travel around the world.
Behind those immaculate images, however, Princess Diana later said she was in the grip of postpartum depression and felt stripped of agency over even the most basic details of her son’s big day.
Princess Diana And The ‘Worse’ Morning At Prince William’s Christening
Princess Diana’s account, preserved in her taped conversations with biographer Andrew Morton for Diana: Her True Story, paints a picture of a woman physically depleted and emotionally sidelined by an institution focused on ritual rather than her wellbeing.
‘Nobody asked me when it was suitable for William,’ she recalled of the scheduling. ‘Eleven a.m. couldn’t have been worse. Endless pictures of the Queen, Queen Mother, Charles, and William. I was excluded totally that day. I felt desperate because I had literally just given birth.’
It can be recalled that Diana was only weeks out from labour, and by her own later admission, she was already struggling with serious mental health issues that went largely unrecognised inside the palace. She told Morton she was ‘not very well’ and said she ‘blubbed my eyes out’ around the time of the ceremony.
‘William started crying, too,’ she said. ‘Well, he just sensed that I wasn’t exactly hunky dory.’
Those words, unusually raw for a royal account of such a polished occasion, match what some around her say they saw but could not fully name at the time. According to one source who knew the princess then, she believed major decisions were ‘imposed on her at a time when she was physically and emotionally vulnerable’. Another palace insider told Morton there was a sense that the event became ‘more about royal presentation than her wellbeing as a new mother’.
Nothing about that assessment sounds wildly surprising now, in an era where mental health is discussed far more openly. In early 1980s royal circles, though, a princess saying she felt desperate and ignored at her son’s christening cut against the fairy‑tale narrative the palace preferred to project.
These resurfaced comments are not newly uncovered tapes, but the renewed attention around Diana’s would‑be 65th birthday has pulled them back into public view, as commentators go over old ground that still feels oddly current. The detail about the 11 a.m. start time, for instance, seems trivial until you remember she was bleeding, exhausted and under immense pressure. That is the kind of practical stuff that tells you who holds power in a room.
Princess Diana, Prince Harry’s Birth And A Marriage Under Strain
The news came after another passage from Morton’s work on Princess Diana resurfaced, this time focusing on the birth of Prince Harry in 1984 and the cracks already running through her marriage to Charles.
By the time Harry, now 41, arrived, Diana is said to have hoped that a second child might steady things between them. Instead, she described a cutting reaction from her husband when he learned the baby was not the daughter he supposedly wanted.
In Morton’s account, Diana remembered Charles saying: ‘Oh God, it’s a boy. And he’s even got red hair.’ The remark landed so badly that her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, reportedly confronted him on the spot.
‘Mummy snapped his head off, saying, “You should realise how lucky you are to have a child that’s normal,”’ Diana said. She added that ‘the shutters came down’ in her relationship with Charles after that row, a sharp choice of words that suggests something in him closed, or perhaps in her.
For context, Diana had already been battling bulimia and severe emotional distress by then. In the same set of Morton tapes she described how her illness was routinely used to explain away deeper problems in the marriage. ‘Charles told a lot of people the reason why the marriage was so wobbly was because I was being sick the whole time,’ she said. ‘They never questioned what it was doing to me.’
That line still stings. It frames her bulimia and depression not as conditions requiring care, but as inconveniences that disturbed the royal machine, and by extension became a convenient scapegoat for a relationship that was faltering for far more complicated reasons.
Diana and Charles announced their separation in 1992 and finalised their divorce in 1996. What has resurfaced now are not court filings or palace briefings, but the voice of the woman herself, captured at a moment when she was determined to have her side recorded, however messy.
The tragedy that followed is well known. Diana died aged 36 on 31 August 1997 after a high‑speed car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. French authorities said the car, driven by Henri Paul, collided with a pillar while being pursued by paparazzi. Paul and Diana’s companion, Dodi Fayed, were killed at the scene. Diana was taken to Pitié‑Salpêtrière Hospital and pronounced dead a few hours later.
There is no official Buckingham Palace response to these particular christening and birth recollections, which have been in the public domain since Morton first published them. Royal representatives at the time of publication generally argued that the book gave a one‑sided view of the marriage, though they did not directly dispute each individual quote.
In other words, nearly three decades after her death, it is still Diana’s own voice doing most of the talking. And on the subject of that ‘perfect’ christening day, her verdict was quietly brutal.
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