By Valentine Ulgu-Servant

Copyright vanityfair

In one section, Burrell recalls that she abhorred one of the royal family’s most ancestral traditions: hunting. “Diana was a city girl. She disliked country pursuits: horses, shooting, mud and particularly hunting, which she thought was barbaric. But she tried so hard to please her husband,” he writes. “I remember her returning from her first stalking party at Balmoral. She hated every moment of it: watching the deer’s belly being slit with the entrails coming out and the ritual blood smeared on her face.”
Horrified by the practice, Diana would have complied with protocol “for Charles.” Burrell previously discussed this episode with Marie Claire, recounting how stifled Diana felt at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where she was forced to spend part of her summers with the rest of the royal family. “She lived in the real world,” Burrell said. “She lived in a world with homelessness, HIV and AIDS, and landmines. They didn’t fit into the walls of Balmoral Castle.” As for the ritual whereby a young hunter must smear his face with the blood of his first victim, she “thought that was like something from a Victorian novel”. In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry himself admitted his distaste for the practice, which he remembered above all for the “infernal smell” causing his stomach to turn.
In his forthcoming book, the former butler recounts that, in private, Diana was not tender when talking about her husband. “He never wanted a lover. He wanted a mother,’ Diana told me once. “She always loved Charles, but she despised Camilla Parker Bowles, the ‘other woman.” He adds that this love was clearly not reciprocated. “Diana once told me that Charles had told her in the middle of one of their epic arguments: ‘I never loved you. I only married you to have children.’”
He describes the royal couple’s relationship as a “war zone”, the outcome of which would have been irreversible when their second son, Prince Harry, was born in 1984. “Charles came into the hospital room, looked in the cot and said: ‘Oh, red hair.’ Diana replied: ‘But Charles, you know that’s the Spencer gene, we all have red hair.’’
Is the former butler insinuating that King Charles doubted his paternity, according to the eternal rumor spread by Diana’s detractors? When Diana reminded him that red hair was prevalent in her family, he reportedly replied, “At least I have my heir and heir apparent now, and I can go back to Camilla.” The princess reportedly found support from her butler. “She told me: ‘I cried myself to sleep that night knowing that my marriage was over.’”
This isn’t the first time Paul Burrell has made startling revelations. The man whom Diana considered “her rock” is certain that she would like him to pass on crucial information to Princes William and Harry, with the hopes “to reunite the two brothers,” who have been estranged since Harry and his wife Meghan Markle became the victims of media harassment and left the royal family. Burrell also said that despite Charles’s enduring love for Camilla, it was his marriage to Diana that “defined” the king’s life.
Original story from Vanity Fair France.