Prince Charles jokes about needing two wives for working both sides of the street during walkabouts

Prince Charles jokes about needing two wives for working both sides of the street during walkabouts
.
.
.

Once upon a time, a British prince married a beautiful woman in a fairy tale wedding. But the two did not live happily ever after.

We know now that then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana‘s marriage never mirrored a storybook. And a lot of people blamed the breakdown of their relationship on Charles’ current wife, Queen Camilla (formerly Camilla Parker Bowles), who was his mistress for several years. That’s why a resurfaced clip of King Charles joking how it would have been better for him if he had two wives has angered many royal fans.

When Charles made the joke about having two wives and the reaction to seeing it now

Then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana at a reception (circa 1983) | David Levenson/Getty Images

The monarch and late princess tied the knot in 1981. Two years later, they embarked on a major royal tour to Australia and New Zealand. It was Diana’s first tour abroad with her husband and the pair brought their son, Prince William, along with them. They spent more than 40 days in the two countries seeing the sights, meeting with dignitaries, and attending engagements.

One of those engagements was a banquet the two attended at the end of their six-week tour. During the reception, Charles gave a speech in which he joked that it would “be easier if he had two wives.”

In the clip, recently uploaded on Tiktok, the then-Prince of Wales said: “I’ve come to the conclusion that really it would have been easier to have two wives to cover both sides of the street. And I could have walked down the middle directing the operation.”

Princess Diana looking somber during a banquet in New Zealand | Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images

The crowd in attendance laughed at the joke. But of course, hearing it now hits a little differently because of everything that has happened since the day Charles made that comment. It also drew the ire of some fans after seeing Diana’s reaction to the joke.

The video has been viewed more than 150,000 and garnered more than 33,000 likes with hundreds of reactions.

Several people commented on the clip with crying and broken heart emojis, and one user wrote about Diana: “I could see that she wanted to cry.”

The one-minute and 29-second post also shows other occasions in which Diana looked extremely shy or close to tears next to her husband.

What Princess Diana later said about that royal tour

Princess Diana and then-Prince Charles at the official welcome ceremony in Auckland, New Zealand | Tim Graham/Getty Images

Diana spoke about that particular tour in her secretly-recorded tapes which were used as the source for the book Diana Her True Story – In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton.

According to the princess, Charles was jealous of the attention she received from the crowds everywhere they went during their visit.

“Basically our tour was a great success,” she said in the audio tapes. “Everybody always said when we were in the car: ‘Oh, we’re in the wrong side, we want to see her, we don’t want to see him,’ and that’s all we could hear when we went down those crowds and obviously he wasn’t used to it and nor was I. He took it out on me. He was jealous. I understood jealousy but I couldn’t explain that. I didn’t ask for it.”