Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana did not have a simple relationship, but rather a complex one with many ups and downs.
Diana met the queen in 1980 while dating her son, Prince Charles, before getting married to him just a year after,in July 1981.
The relationship between the Princess and the queen started off uneasy, according to Royal biographer Andrew Morton. In his book Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words,
Morton wrote that “in the early days, Diana was quite simply terrified of her mother-in-law. She kept the formal obsequies – dropping a deep curtsy each time they met – but otherwise kept her distance.”
After Prince Williams was born in early 1982, Diana started to gradually take on roles representing the Royal family, and the bond between the two started to take its form.
According to what royal expert Ingrid Seward wrote in her 2002 book The Queen and Di, Elizabeth was more “understanding of Diana’s difficulties” and they developed a strong bond. Diana even once told Seward that she had “the best mother-in-law in the world.”
Five years later, rumors of Charles’s affair with Camila Parker-Bowles started, and things only got worse from there.