Breaking: Princess Diana “Destroyed” Prince Charles’s Belongings During a “Blazing Row” on Honeymoon….See More

The trip wasn’t as idyllic as it seemed.

Princess Diana may have detailed her honeymoon to the then-Princes Charles as a “tremendous success” in a 1981 letter to her family’s former housekeeper, but behind-the-scenes, the trip was anything than what you’d expect from a romantic couple’s vacation.

According to royal author Penny Junor—who wrote the biography The Duchess—Diana and Charles’s 12-day cruise aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia didn’t go exactly as planned. In her book, Junor revealed that Charles packed novels and art supplies for the couple’s honeymoon, which saw them visit several destinations—including Tunisia, Algeria, Sicily, the Greek islands, Egypt, and Scotland.

He’d taken along his watercolours, some canvases and a pile of books by the Afrikaner mystic and writer Laurens van der Post, which he’d hoped he and Diana might share and then discuss in the evenings,” Junor wrote, adding that Diana, who “was no great reader,” wasn’t pleased.

She hated his wretched books and was offended that he might prefer to bury his head in one of them rather than sit and talk to her,” Junor explained. “She resented him sitting for hours at his easel, too, and they had many blazing rows.”

She continued, “One day, when Charles was painting on the veranda deck of Britannia, he went off to look at something for half an hour. He came back to find she’d destroyed his painting and all his materials.”

Later, Diana admitted that their honeymoon wasn’t perfect after all, revealing that Charles’s ex-girlfriend (and now wife), Camilla Parker Bowles, was another point of contention between them on the trip.

“On our honeymoon, cufflinks arrive on his wrists,” Diana said in a Channel 4 documentary. “Two Cs entwined like the Chanel ‘C.’ Got it. One knew exactly. So I said, ‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’ He said, ‘Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.’ And boy, did we have a row. Jealousy, total jealousy. And it was such a good idea—the two Cs—but it wasn’t that clever.”