The late Princess Diana once said that the only thing her ex-husband Prince Charles “learned about love was shaking hands.” Those claims and others are being laid out in a new biography, Prince Philip Revealed, excerpted by the Mail on Sunday.
Royal scribe Ingrid Seward blamed Charles’ parents—Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip—on the fact that he “couldn’t be tactile with his own wife.”
Diana allegedly blamed Charles’ “emotional retentiveness” on his parents.
“Diana reckoned that if Charles had been brought up in the normal fashion, he would have been better able to handle his and her emotions.”
“Instead, she said, his feelings seemed to have been suffocated at birth,” Seward continues. “According to her, he never had any hands-on love from his parents. Only his nannies showed him affection but that, as Diana explained, was not the same as being kissed and cuddled by your parents, which Charles never was. When he met his parents, they didn’t embrace: they shook hands.”
“Even when judged by the standards of the time, Philip and Elizabeth saw remarkably little of their offspring,” she writes.
Philip was often away, and only attended two of his first eight birthday parties. The Queen left Charles, 2, with his sister Princess Anne, 4 months, one year to celebrate Christmas with Philip in Malta.
The book will be published in the U.S. on October 20th.
