Prince Charles is now married to Camilla Parker-Bowles, who has been in his life for many decades. However, he was previously involved with Princess Diana to whom he was married for 15 years. According to author Kitty Kelley, Charles took a long time to work out if he wanted to marry the late Diana. “No other Prince of Wales since Charles II, three hundred years earlier, took so long to make up his mind about getting married,” Kelley wrote in her 1997 book The Royals.
While he was still courting Diana, in 1980, Prince Charles travelled on a royal visit to India.
“Diana accompanied him to the airport to say goodbye. As he nonchalantly skipped up the step of the royal plane without looking back, she burst into tears,” said Kelley.
While the Prince of Wales was visiting the iconic Taj Mahal he allegedly made a rather awkward joke.
“Reporters followed Charles on his visit to the Taj Mahal and asked what he thought of the grand monument to passion built by a Mogul emperor in memory of his wife.
“‘A marvellous idea,’ said Charles, ‘to build something so wonderful to someone one loved so very much.’
“An Indian reporter asked about the Prince’s own prospects for a wife, and Charles left him breathless with his odd response.
“I’m encouraged by the fact that if I were to become a Muslim,’ he said, ‘I could have lots of wives.”
“The British reporters glanced at one another uncomfortable, wondering if the Prince was joking.
“None quoted him verbatim. Even Britain’s reporters remained deferential to royalty.
“They softened their stories on the Queen and her heir by withholding newsworthy details and, in this case, ignoring the revealing quotation.
“Instead they wrote as Her Majesty’s obedient servants. They reported that Charles said: ‘I can understand that love could make a man build the Taj Mahal for his wife. One day I would like to bring my own back here.”
A photo captured Prince Charles sitting in front of the beautiful building alone.
Twelve years later, Diana and Charles did go to India together but Charles went to Delhi when Diana visited the Taj Mahal.
Consequently, Diana was photographed standing alone outside the romance monument. She is said to have told Professor Mukund Rawat, who showed her around India’s white marble wonder: “It would have been better if both of us had been here. But my husband has to be in Delhi.”
Charles’s son Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton did succeed in visiting the Taj Mahal together in 2016, however.
Photographs of the royal tour show the couple smiling happily smiling outside the monument.
Kate paid her own silent tribute as she wore the blue sapphire and diamond engagement ring that once belonged to the late Princess of Wales.
Prince William gave Kate the ring, worth more than £300,000, when he proposed to her in November 2010, saying it was his way of making his mother part of the celebration.
