How the Passage of Time Softened the Fury Over Diana’s Death

It also put a temporary bandage over festering family tensions when Prince William and his wife, Catherine, were unexpectedly joined by Charles’s other son, Harry, and his wife Meghan, in a 40-minute walkabout outside Windsor Castle on Saturday. Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are virtually persona non grata in Britain, at least in the popular imagination, since moving to California and lobbing criticisms at the royal family from across the Atlantic. But the two couples shook hands with star-struck civilians and inspected bouquets of flowers left at the gates.

In another floral inspection at another royal palace, Prince Andrew, the second of Queen Elizabeth’s three sons, emerged briefly from his disgraced near erasure from the family and walked amicably alongside his siblings.

As she stood in Green Park near Buckingham Palace the other day, bouquets of flowers strewn every which way, Janet Ratcliffe, 75, said that after the unpleasantness of the Diana era, she had come to believe that the monarchy could thrive under Charles, and even under Camilla.

“People were very sad, and it was very traumatic,” she said of Diana’s death. She mentioned Camilla, who by now had driven past (or not driven past) in the possibly royal car. She said that Charles had, as far as she could tell, grown into his new role.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/sports/princess-diana-camilla-queen-elizabeth.html