How Queen Elizabeth Really Felt After Princess Diana’s Tragic Death 

They allegedly didn’t always have the best relationship, especially after her frosty divorce from Prince Charles. However, Queen Elizabeth II still grieved following Princess Diana’s death in 1997.

According to Reader’s Digest, the Queen wrote a letter to her friend Lady Henriette Abel Smith about the tragedy and revealed her true feelings about her former daughter-in-law's death, which were very different from what the public perceived at the time due to her silence as she stayed at Balmoral Castle in Scotland with Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 12, at the time.

“It was indeed dreadfully sad, and she is a huge loss to the country,” she wrote in the letter, reportedly six days after Diana’s death. “But the public reaction to her death, and the service in the Abbey, seem to have united people round the world in a rather inspiring way. William and Harry have been so brave and I am very proud of them. Emotions are still so mixed up but we have all been through a very bad experience!”

As it turns out, the Queen’s public reaction was meant solely to help her grandsons as they grieved their mother, and the decision to head to Scotland was also meant to protect them during their devastation.

“She was being a proper granny. What was the point of bringing the boys down to sit in London with nothing to do but sit there feeling sad about mum?” Margaret Rhodes, the queen’s cousin, told CNN in 2012. “Personally, I think I would have behaved in the same way.”

Still, though she also grieved her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II didn’t necessarily have the best relationship with Diana prior to the end of her marriage to Prince Charles and is even reported to have been the one who encouraged the two to divorce.

Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, revealed that Diana only wanted to separate from Charles, but didn’t want a divorce for the sake of her children. However, in the end, she followed the Queen’s wishes after she wrote them both a letter asking them to end their marriage.

“The Queen wrote to Princess Diana and said for the sake of the monarchy, and the country, and the Church, we think it best if you and Charles and divorce,” he revealed at the time. “The Princess was furious.”

“She said: ‘This is my marriage, not theirs. It’s nothing to do with the Church, it’s to do with me and Charles and the children,’” he added. “In the very end, she had to succumb to a divorce.”