Prince Charles and Princess Diana headed on what should have been a romantic honeymoon aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia following their July 1981 wedding. But, as the world would later learn, the trip was anything but the loved-up vacation either of them had planned.
The couple embarked from Gibraltar on a whirlwind trip including destinations like Tunisia, Algeria, Sicily, the Greek islands, Egypt and Scotland. According to Penny Junor, author of The Duchess, Prince Charles, who—like his grandkids today—has always enjoyed art, took plenty of supplies with him on their honeymoon.
"He’d taken along his watercolours, some canvases and a pile of books by the Afrikaner mystic and writer Laurens van der Post, which he'd hoped he and Diana might share and then discuss in the evenings," Junor wrote in the book.
However, the plans didn’t exactly go over well with Princess Diana, who "was no great reader."
"She hated his wretched books and was offended that he might prefer to bury his head in one of them rather than sit and talk to her. She resented him sitting for hours at his easel, too, and they had many blazing rows," the author wrote.
One such argument resulted in Diana throwing such a fit that she actually trashed his artwork and everything that went along with it, Junor penned.
"One day, when Charles was painting on the veranda deck of Britannia, he went off to look at something for half an hour. He came back to find she'd destroyed his painting and all his materials," the royal biographer added.
While she was likely bored and frustrated with her husband’s choice of activities, the other problem that reared its head during their honeymoon was Prince Charles’s ex-girlfriend (and now wife), Camilla Parker Bowles.
"On our honeymoon, cufflinks arrive on his wrists," Diana later said in a Channel 4 documentary (via the Daily Mail). "Two Cs entwined like the Chanel ‘C.’ Got it. One knew exactly. So I said, 'Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?'"
"He said, 'Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend,'" the royal continued. "And boy, did we have a row. Jealousy, total jealousy. And it was such a good idea—the two Cs—but it wasn’t that clever."
Decades later, Diana's former butler Paul Burrell went on to tell Marie Claire that giving the princess anything with the Chanel logo on it "would have been a bad mistake."
