Here's the Moment Princess Diana Knew Her Marriage Would End

Ten years into their marriage, things were not going well between Princess Diana and Prince Charles—and that’s an understatement. By 1991, their deteriorating relationship had become somewhat of an open secret. Charles was having an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Diana, too, was having her own share of dalliances in response to her unhappy marriage.

But, of course, the marriage still held one bright spot for Diana: her beautiful sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. Her love for them was evident in every picture and video of them together. Maybe for that reason, Diana held out some semblance of hope that she and Charles would work things out. That changed in the summer of 1991 after one dramatic—and traumatic—event. In fact, the two separated the following year.

So what was the proverbial straw that irretrievably broke the royals’ marriage? Read on to find out.

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What moment signaled the beginning of the end for Diana?

On June 3, 1991, Diana was having lunch with a friend at San Lorenzo, her favorite restaurant in London’s Knightsbridge, when her bodyguard urgently interrupted. Eight-year-old Prince William had been in an accident at his prep school in Berkshire, he told her, and was being sent to the hospital. William and a friend had been playing with a golf club at school, when the prince received a severe blow to the head.

Diana raced to the hospital from the restaurant, where she was joined by Charles. There, doctors explained to the worried parents that William needed to be transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. Diana traveled with William in the ambulance, and Charles followed the convoy in his Aston Martin.

Once at the hospital, doctors told Diana and Charles that William had suffered a “depressed fracture of the skull” and needed immediate surgery. Diana was terrified. “They made it clear that there were potentially serious risks, albeit relatively small, both in the operation itself and in the possibility that the prince could have suffered damage to the brain,” biographer Andrew Morton wrote in Diana: Her True Story—In Her Own Words.

The operation took 75 minutes, and Diana later called it one of “the longest hours of her life.” Afterward, she stayed by William’s bedside all night holding his hand, as nurses came in and out to check his blood pressure and reflexes. The following morning, an exhausted Diana was relieved William had made it through unscathed.

Did Charles stay by his son’s side as well?

Uh, no. Charles went to the opera. Yes, that’s right, the opera—and he didn’t even wait until William was out of surgery. “Satisfied in his mind that his son was in safe hands, Prince Charles left the hospital to go to a performance of Puccini’s Tosca (at the Royal Opera House) in Covent Garden,” writes Morton. Charles was hosting a party of officials that night at the opera house.

So, surely he popped into the ward after the show to check in on his wife and son? Nope! While Diana stayed awake all night with William, Charles boarded the royal train for an overnight journey to North Yorkshire, where he was scheduled to attend an environmental study the next day.

Was Diana surprised by this behavior?

Not really, which may be the most damning revelation of all. According to Morton, for whom Diana secretly recorded tapes for the explosive tell-all published the following year, Charles’s “decision to put duty before family may have come as a surprise to the general public, but it was no surprise to his wife. For her it was another example in a continuing pattern.”

One friend who spoke to a worried Diana right after William’s operation said, “She wasn’t surprised. It merely confirmed everything she thought about him. … She got no support at all, no cuddles, no affection, nothing.”

It was a huge turning point, and if Diana had any doubts about ending her marriage, this got rid of them all. “The dramatically different manner in which the couple responded to William’s injury publicly underlined what those within their immediate circle had known for some time: The fairy-tale marriage between the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer was over in all but name,” writes Morton.

Did Charles regret his actions from that fateful night?

Yes, it seems so. In his authorized biography The Prince of Wales by Jonathan Dimbleby, he says that he was told William’s injury was minor; it was a straightforward operation “with negligible risk,” and doctors assured him “there was no point both parents waiting in the ward.” Therefore, in his mind, he thought it was OK to keep his commitments and was surprised and disappointed by the public’s reaction to his decision to leave. The tabloid press, on seeing photos of him in Yorkshire instead of in London with his son, excoriated him. The Sun ran a headline saying, “What kind of dad are you?”

According to Morton, Charles blamed Diana for making “an awful nonsense” about the severity of the injury. And certainly, at the time, he felt his treatment was unfair. When he returned from Yorkshire, Charles immediately visited William in hospital.

However, times have changed, and it’s unlikely William would ever leave his family in a similar situation. And it appears that King Charles also puts family first now. In the new documentary William & Catherine: Putting Family First, royal biographer Ingrid Seward says the king has apologized for how distant he was when William and Harry were younger. “Charles said to William, ‘Please don’t make the mistake that I made’ and ‘I want you to enjoy your family life,'” she says. “And Charles was very insistent about this because he said, ‘I was so dedicated to duty, I couldn’t make way for family life in the way that I should’ve done.'”

Does William have a scar?

Yes! “That was for my Harry Potter scar, as I call it, just here,” he said on BBC’s Newsround in 2009. “I call it that because it glows sometimes, and some people notice it. Other times they don’t notice it at all. I got hit by a golf club when I was playing golf with a friend.”

And as we now know, that accident left an even deeper wound on Diana and Charles’s marriage—one that would never heal.

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