A renowned royal biographer is speaking out this week to claim that Prince Charles blamed his father Prince Philip for his marriage to the late Princess Diana.

Ingrid Seward, author of the new book Prince Philip Revealed: A Man of His Century, told US Weekly that Charles, 71, “felt he’d been very pushed into marrying” Diana in 1981.

“He told some of his friends that he felt pressurized into marrying Diana because Philip said, ‘You’ve either got to marry her or let her go. You can’t string a … young girl [along]. She’s only 19. You can’t string her along,’” Seward said. “And all the press is saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be the next queen.’ You’ve got to take a stand and say that this is not going to work, or you marry her.”

“Charles … he was frightened of his father and he probably thought, ‘Well, OK. I’ll marry her if that’s what you want me to do,'” she added.

Seward also revealed that prior to Diana being linked to Charles, there were talks of her being a better fit for his younger brother, Prince Andrew.

“I think some of Diana’s friends thought that Andrew would be more fun for her than Charles, because he was very much her age and he was full of fun and everything else,” the longtime royal biographer explained. “But Diana wasn’t interested in Andrew. It was Charles she was interested in. She had been around the royal family ever since she was a little girl because her father and her family lived on the Sandringham Estate and her father was what’s called an equerry to the queen. So, he sort of was in the royal household.”

She added that as a child, Diana would go to the royal house at Sandringham and “watch movies and things with [Prince] Edward and Andrew.”

Charles and Diana had two children together, Prince William and Prince Harry, before they separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. One year later, Diana was tragically killed in a car crash in Paris, France when she was only 36 years-old. Charles would go on to marry his current wife Camilla in 2005.

Seward has written various books about the royal family, but she felt drawn to the 99 year-old Philip for her latest one.

“I’ve always been interested in Philip and he seems a bit of an enigma,” she explained. “He had bits about him, but not a great deal about him. I just knew that he’d always be in there in the background. He likes to stay in the background.”

“If you look at any pictures of him and the queen, you’ll see that he’s always two steps behind,” Seward added. “I’ve met him a lot of times and I thought, ‘You know, he’s someone that’s sort of a bit of an unexplored person.’”

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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