Diana's SECRET JOYS and SORROWS

INTIMATE NEW LETTERS REVEAL HER INNER THOUGHTS AS THE WORLD MARKS WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE PRINCESS OF WALES' 63RD BIRTHDAY.

- Martin Bashir

THEY’D only met 13 times before 750 million people around the globe watched their royal wedding on TV in 1981. Princess Diana later detailed how Prince Charles, nearly 13 years her senior, proposed when she was 19. “I laughed. I remember thinking, ‘This is a joke,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, OK,’” she recalled. But Charles “was deadly serious,” she realized. “He said, ‘You do realize that one day you will be queen?’ And a voice said to me inside, ‘You won’t be queen, but you’ll have a tough role.’”

Despite that eerie premonition, Diana never could have imagined just how challenging her short life would really be. Sixteen years after marrying the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and barely a year after their divorce was settled, she was dead at 36 after a Paris car crash — and it was Charles’ longtime mistress, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, 76, who would be queen. Diana’s charity work and her beloved sons, Prince William, 42, and Prince Harry, 39, were her greatest joys, but as the world prepares to mark what would have been her 63rd birthday on July 1, a new collection of bittersweet personal letters from the early days of her marriage are about to hit the auction block. Now Star reveals the People’s Princess’ secrets and sorrow.

SAD START

After 32 of the former Lady Diana Spencer’s letters sold at auction for $175,000 earlier this year, the newly discovered batch of personal missives is also expected to go for six figures at auction June 27. The intimate handwritten notes to Maud Pendrey, a former housekeeper at Althorp, the Spencer family estate, give a rare peek into her thinking at the time. In one, Diana described her honeymoon with Charles, now 75, as “a tremendous success.” In another, she gushed of being an “extremely proud and lucky mother” who couldn’t wait to have “masses more” children.