Princess Diana described her honeymoon with then-Prince Charles as “blissful” in a newly surfaced letter to a school friend. But years later, she revealed a very different reality.

During the royal couple’s 12-day Mediterranean cruise aboard the Britannia following their July 1981 wedding, Diana later recalled feeling consumed by Charles’ longtime relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.

“At night, I dreamt of Camilla the whole time,” Diana told biographer Andrew Morton in recordings made for his 1992 biography. “I was obsessed by Camilla totally.”

Before the wedding, Diana had discovered a “goodbye” bracelet Charles intended to give Camilla. On the honeymoon, as they compared schedules, Diana watched as two photos of Camilla fell out of her new husband’s diary.

Even more damning, says royal biographer Catherine Mayer, were a pair of cufflinks. Camilla had gifted Charles a personalized set — something Diana was “well aware” of, and the royal was notably “in a lather” when he lost one just before the pre-wedding ball at Buckingham Palace.

Charles then wore a pair of cufflinks gifted by Camilla on the honeymoon.

“Cufflinks arrive on his wrists — two ‘C’s entwined like the Chanel ‘C’s. Got it in one; knew exactly. ‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’ “ Diana recalled to Morton. “He said, ‘Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.’ And, boy, did we have a row.”

The distance between husband and wife was also evident in a letter Charles wrote from the yacht, even though he declared, “Marriage is very jolly.”

“Diana dashes about chatting up all the sailors and the cooks in the galley etc. while I remain hermit-like on the veranda deck, sunk with pure joy into one of Laurens van der Post’s books,” he wrote, revealing that the couple remained separate during the honeymoon period.

Diana put on a similarly brave face. Following their cruise, she and Charles headed to Balmoral in Scotland to visit with the royal family. Asked by reporters bout married life, Diana smiled and said she’d “highly recommend” it.

However, the newly minted Princess of Wales was suffering behind the scenes. She told Morton that, in addition to her loneliness and insecurity about her marriage, she also struggled with bouts of bulimia during the honeymoon.

She shared more about her eating disorder in her infamous 1995 sit-down with BBC One Panorama, calling it a “secret disease” that she dealt with for years.

“It was a symptom of what was going on in my marriage. I was crying out for help but giving the wrong signals, and people were using my bulimia as a coat on a hanger. They decided that was the problem: Diana was unstable,” she said. “The cause was the situation where my husband and I had to keep everything together because we didn’t want to disappoint the public, and yet obviously there was a lot of anxiety going on within our four walls.”

Ultimately, Charles and Diana separated in 1992 and divorced four years later. Both acknowledged relationships outside their marriage, including Charles’s renewed romance with Camilla, whom he wed in 2005. In 2023, when he acceded to the throne, she became his queen consort.

Diana died in a car accident in August 1997, and she did not receive a formal state funeral.

Looking back, Mayer says she believes the marriage was doomed from the start, and the honeymoon was the first major warning sign: “The thing that is so striking about Charles and Diana is they got married understanding almost nothing of each other — or what they were doing to themselves.”