The Gist
In November 1992, Prince Charles and Princess Diana undertook a royal tour together to Seoul, South Korea—which would ultimately become their last royal tour together.
Ironically dubbed the “Togetherness Tour,” the Prince and Princess of Wales’s frayed marriage was never more evident.
The couple separated the next month after the “dreadful experience.”
On their July 29, 1981 wedding day, the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie famously said of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, “This is the stuff of which fairytales are made.” In hindsight, the ill-fated marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales was never a fairytale, but whatever hope of one firmly died this week 33 years ago, in 1992.
In November 1992, Charles and Diana undertook what would become their final royal tour together, to Seoul, South Korea, ironically dubbed the “Togetherness Tour.” The couple, married for 11 years at that point, would announce their separation the next month.
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Princess Diana and Prince Charles on November 2, 1992
The couple were nicknamed “The Glums” for their clearly miserable facial expressions. Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton wrote (per The Daily Mail) that, by the time the royal tour was set to kick off, “the separation negotiations had reached a critical stage, and the princess was in no mood to continue the hollow charade.”
In South Korea, Morton added, Diana was “determined to show the world what was really going on.”
Though Diana didn’t attempt to hide her disdain at her marriage—which by now involved a third person, Camilla Parker Bowles—it was a miracle that Diana even went on the trip at all, according to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. In August, three months before takeoff, Diana “unexpectedly announced that she was not prepared to go” on the important tour.
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Princess Diana on November 5, 1992
So, as Charles’s “staff contemplated the nightmarish task of explaining to the Korean authorities that the princess would not, after all, be accompanying her husband on the first royal visit to their country,” they threw a Hail Mary pass and enlisted the help of Queen Elizabeth. The whole debacle turned into a “showdown” between Charles and Diana, and “Finally, the prince told her bluntly that she would have to come up with an explanation of her own for staying behind.”
“At this, the princess finally relented, saying meekly that, as the Queen had asked her to go, she would, after all, accompany him,” Dimbleby added.
Though Diana agreed to go, she left her acting chops behind. The couple could not have appeared more miserable on the tour, and Dimbleby described the trip as a “dreadful experience.”
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Prince Charles and Princess Diana in Seoul, South Korea
“The world was quickly collating a narrative that they believed to be true, namely that ‘the marriage was a sham and the couple had come to loathe one another’s presence,’” he said.
Former royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter was there in Seoul for the fateful trip, and “As the door to the aircraft opened, I turned to the protection officer and said, ‘We’ve lost this one.’”
“The prince and the princess were the epitome of Mr. and Mrs. Glum—her expression pinched and pale, his rigid and morose,” Arbiter described. “Their body language was so hostile it was as if they could have killed each other with a single glance. The dark cloud hanging over them would remain throughout the tour.”
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Princess Diana and Prince Charles on November 3, 1992
Indeed, the charade was over. When a reporter asked Arbiter if Charles and Diana’s marriage was okay, he replied, “All marriages have their problems.”
“It was an attempt to deflect the question, but he pretty much gave credence to all the rumors that we had spent months trying to quash,” Arbiter said. “If we hadn’t lost the tour upon arrival, we had undoubtedly lost it now.”
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Princess Diana and Prince Charles arriving in Seoul
Dimbleby said Diana was either “unable or unwilling to hide her sorrow from the public,” and photographer Jayne Fincher said that, while the Princess of Wales “looked lovely,” it was obvious that “she’d been crying her eyes out. She looked awful. My heart went out to her.”
By the end of the tour, one of Diana’s aides said that, based on her attitude in South Korea, she “could no longer endure her marriage and wanted to break free, whatever the consequences.”
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Princess Diana on November 3, 1992
“The strain is immense,” Charles wrote in a letter. “And yet I want to do my duty in the way I’ve been trained. I don’t know what will happen from now on, but I dread it.”
The next month, U.K. Prime Minister John Major announced that Charles and Diana had made the decision to separate. Their divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996, just 368 days before Diana lost her life at just 36 years old in a Paris car crash.
Read the original article on InStyle