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Princess Diana’s<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0earliest royal crush may not have been the man she eventually married. A new book claims the late Princess of Wales spent her teenage years secretly sending Valentine’s Day cards to another member of the Royal family long before\u00a0King Charles<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0entered the picture.<\/p>\n Few figures in modern history have been dissected quite like Princess Diana, but author\u00a0Catherine Mayer’s\u00a0upcoming book,\u00a0“Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles,”is shedding light on a surprising chapter from Diana’s youth. According to Mayer, Diana reportedly developed a teenage fascination with Charles’ younger brother,\u00a0ex-Prince Andrew.<\/a><\/p>\n In an excerpt published by\u00a0PEOPLE,<\/a>\u00a0Mayer writes that Diana’s romantic ideals were heavily influenced by the fairy-tale romances she consumed as a teenager.<\/p>\n “If Diana failed to spot that Charles was incapable of giving her the love she craved, it cannot have helped that the love she craved was a fiction \u2014 a modern-day version of courtly love,” Mayer wrote in Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles.<\/p>\n The author went on to reveal a claim from one of Diana’s former school friends. “Before she ever met her future husband, she developed a passion at a distance for one of his brothers,” Mayer wrote. “The schoolfriend says that every year until Diana turned fifteen or sixteen, she sent Andrew a Valentine card, anonymously, of course.”<\/p>\n The revelation even caught Mayer off guard. Speaking to\u00a0The Telegraph,<\/a>\u00a0she admitted, “I was quite startled when I found that out. That was new news.”<\/p>\n Ironically, Diana would later play matchmaker for Prince Andrew. Years after those reported anonymous Valentine’s cards, she introduced her childhood friend,\u00a0Sarah Ferguson,\u00a0to him. The connection ultimately led to Andrew and Ferguson’s 1986 wedding.<\/p>\n Ferguson previously recalled Diana’s enthusiasm when discussing Andrew. “I said to her, ‘Oh, Andrew’s really good-looking.’ And she said, ‘Duh, Fergs!'” Sarah told\u00a0PEOPLE<\/a>\u00a0in 2021.<\/p>\n The book also explores how Diana’s love of romance novels may have shaped her expectations of marriage and contributed to the complicated reality she later faced with King Charles. Mayer ultimately describes Diana and Charles as “two damaged innocents” who entered their marriage carrying “conflicting expectations” and private doubts.<\/p>\n More than two decades after her death, Princess Diana’s story continues to reveal unexpected twists.<\/p>\n TELL US \u2013 ARE YOU SURPRISED TO LEARN THAT PRINCESS DIANA REPORTEDLY SENT VALENTINE’S DAY CARDS TO PRINCE ANDREW AS A TEENAGER?<\/strong><\/p>\n Originally reported by Vanshika Vasundhare Singh on Reality Tea<\/a><\/p>\n The post Princess Diana Had a Crush on This Royal Before Charles, According to New Book<\/a> appeared first on Mandatory<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aol.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Princess Diana’s\u00a0earliest royal crush may not have been the man she eventually married. A new book claims the late Princess of Wales spent her teenage years secretly sending Valentine’s Day cards to another member of the Royal family long before\u00a0King Charles\u00a0entered the picture. Few figures in modern history have been dissected quite like Princess Diana, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2468029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[351160,475618,485549,183315,23299,37936,466719,22946,485548],"class_list":["post-2468028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-andrew","tag-catherine-mayer","tag-divide-and-rule","tag-king-charles","tag-princess-diana","tag-princess-of-wales","tag-royal-women","tag-sarah-ferguson","tag-valentines-day-cards"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Princess-Diana-Had-a-Crush-on-This-Royal-Before-Charles.com2Fen2Faol_mandatory_8132Ff9dbf79bd1c707bb5ceb8343f8b5a23c.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2468028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2468030,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468028\/revisions\/2468030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2468029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2468028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2468028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2468028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Princess Diana’s reported teenage interest wasn’t in Prince Charles, according to Catherine Mayer<\/h2>\n