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Princess Diana's friends' real reaction to her engagement to Prince Charles
If you've been watching The Crown season 4 (and let's face it, if you're here then you probably have been), you'll be familiar with Princess Diana's flatmates' reaction to her getting engaged to Prince Charles.
The hit Netflix show's highly anticipated fourth season shows Diana's transition into the royal family as she weds the then 32-year-old Prince Charles.
In the episode, 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer (her pre-marital name) returns home to tell her three friends — and flatmates — Carolyn Bartholomew, Anne Bolton, and Virginia Pitman the news, and they all celebrate by driving around London and going to a club afterwards.
While this season of the show has been met with some backlash over inaccuracies, it turns out this particular recreation is actually a pretty accurate representation of what really happened when Diana returned back to the Earl's Court flat — given to her by her father, Earl Spencer — and told her flatmates.
In fact, the three women were actually some of the first to know about the engagement, and continued to live with Diana until she moved to Clarence House to begin 'princess training'.
As Diana describes in Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words, 'I came back [to the flat] and sat on my bed. 'Girls, guess what?' They said: 'He asked you. What did you say?' 'Yes please.' They screamed and howled and we went for a drive around London with our secret. I rang my parents the next morning.'
While we don't see a lot more of Diana's flatmates in the series, they all continued to be a big part of her life even during her time in the royal family. She was pictured in 1991 attending Pitman's wedding, and Bartholomew would also go on to become Prince Harry's godmother, as well attending his wedding to Meghan Markle in May of 2018.
We wonder what they think about The Crown? Sadly, we might never find out, but we do know what Princess Diana's former butler Paul Burrell thinks.
He served as Diana's butler until her death in 1997, and also worked for her and Prince Charles at Highgrove from 1987.
Speaking on ITV's Lorraine, Paul revealed, 'I've watched already the first three episodes of The Crown, and I think it's the best series yet.'
He continued, 'It's a peek behind the doors of Buckingham Palace, that perhaps the palace don’t want you to see because this is the truth in many ways. It's a fair and accurate dramatisation of what happened.'
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