On July 30, 2024, a quiet auction listing in the UK sent a jolt through royal watchers worldwide. More than a dozen handwritten letters and cards from Princess Diana were set to go under the hammer at Sorders’s auction house, expected to fetch thousands. But it wasn’t the price that stunned people.
Hidden among polite thank-you notes and Christmas wishes were Diana’s most powerful messages yet — words that reveal how she was secretly shaping the boy who would one day become king.
These weren’t written to a royal aide or palace official. They were sent to Violet “Collie” Collison, the Spencer family’s longtime housekeeper at Park House on the Sandringham estate. Collie had seen it all: Diana’s birth, her chaotic childhood, her transformation into the world’s most photographed woman. She wasn’t staff. She was witness.
And to her, Diana wrote the truth.
The woman who knew Diana before the crown
Collie ran Park House when Diana was a little girl thundering down the corridors with her siblings Sarah, Jane, and Charles. When Diana’s parents’ marriage exploded, Collie followed Diana’s mother to London, staying with the family until her retirement. Even after she left service, the bond never broke.
Decades later, as Diana battled royal protocol, media pressure, and a collapsing marriage, she still wrote to Collie like the girl she once was — not “Her Royal Highness,” not an icon, just “Diana.” The letters are full of warmth, humor, and tiny details no official biography ever captured.
They show a woman clinging fiercely to normality while the institution around her tried to turn her sons into symbols instead of boys.
Three weeks before the fairy tale – and the trap
One letter, dated July 8, 1981, written on Buckingham Palace stationery just three weeks before her wedding to Prince Charles, is almost eerie now.
“Everyone frantically busy here doing last-minute decorations,” she wrote, sounding more like a bridesmaid than a future Princess of Wales. The world was about to watch her walk into St Paul’s Cathedral in front of nearly a billion viewers. The pressure was beyond anything we can imagine.
And yet, she was still writing to Collie — the housekeeper from her childhood — talking about chaos, nerves, and last-minute details like any overwhelmed 20-year-old bride. That’s who Diana really was: a woman trying to stay human as the monarchy turned her into a myth.
It’s what she did next that changed everything.
“An endless supply of hugs and kisses”
The most explosive letters came after William and Harry were born. In a 1984 note thanking Collie for a gift for baby Harry, Diana casually drops a line that hits like a thunderclap today:
William, she writes, “adores his little brother and spends the entire time pouring an endless supply of hugs and kisses over Harry… which is wonderful to watch — if we’re allowed near.”
An endless supply of hugs and kisses. That is not how royal heirs were traditionally described.
For generations, royal children were raised at arm’s length: nannies in charge, affection rationed, feelings hidden behind perfect posture and clipped manners. Diana’s description of William is the opposite — open, tactile, emotional. And then comes the sting: “if we’re allowed near.”
Even in a private letter, she’s hinting at the reality she was fighting: not just for custody in a legal sense, but for emotional access. She was up against an institution that believed the crown came before the child — and she refused to accept that.
In another Christmas letter, she tells Collie how William “found the parcels and dived into them,” like any overexcited little boy tearing into presents. No footmen, no stiff ritual. Just a kid on the floor with wrapping paper everywhere.
Diana was documenting something deliberate: a future king allowed to be a normal child.
A rebel mother inside a rigid machine
Those letters weren’t random. They were part of a full-on quiet revolution in royal parenting.
Diana breastfed William herself — almost unheard of in royal circles. She chose his name. When Charles flew to Australia weeks after William was born, she refused to be the kind of royal mother who left her child behind. She brought William with her, blowing apart protocol.
Instead of locking him away with private tutors, she marched him into nursery school with other children. She took him on the Tube. To McDonald’s. To theme parks. To homeless shelters. To AIDS wards.
In 1993, when William was just 11, she took him to Centerpoint, a charity supporting homeless youth. He sat with teenagers his own age who had nothing — no home, no security, no title. Later he admitted that was the moment he realized not everyone lived like he did.
Those trips weren’t random photo ops. They were lessons. And the letters to Collie were Diana’s way of recording the progress.
Divorce, humiliation — and a 14-year-old’s promise
By the mid-90s, Diana’s marriage had imploded in front of the world. In 1996, the divorce was finalized. She got a settlement, an office, and her apartment at Kensington Palace — but she lost the three letters that hurt most: HRH.
Losing her Royal Highness status meant that, technically, she would one day have to curtsy to her own sons. The woman who fought to raise them as human beings would have to bow to them because the system said so.
She was devastated. According to former butler Paul Burrell, she confided in 14-year-old William. His response became legend:
“Don’t worry, Mummy. I will give it back to you one day when I am king.”
He probably could never have done that in a literal sense — royal titles are almost never restored posthumously, and Diana died long before he came close to the throne. But that’s not the point.
In that moment, he wasn’t the heir. He was the boy she’d raised — the one who saw her pain and instinctively wanted to fix it.
Lies, paranoia, and the interview that broke her
Then came the darkest twist.
In 1995, Diana sat down for the BBC’s famous Panorama interview, watched by hundreds of millions worldwide. She spoke about Charles, about Camilla, about her mental health, about taking William and Harry to see people dying of AIDS so they’d understand real suffering.
Decades later, an investigation revealed that journalist Martin Bashir had used forged bank documents to manipulate his way into that conversation — faking “evidence” that people around her were being paid to spy on her. Everything she already feared was weaponized against her.
Prince William later said it caused “indescribable sadness” to know the BBC’s deceit fed the fear, paranoia and isolation he remembered from his mother’s final years. The woman who had spent her life fighting to protect him and Harry had been pushed further into danger by people chasing a headline.
The crash that ended everything — and the legacy that didn’t
On August 31, 1997, just 368 days after her divorce became official, Diana died in a car crash in Paris. She was 36. William was 15. Harry was 12.
Her HRH was never restored. Her protection was gone. Her promise from William remained heartbreakingly unfulfilled — at least on paper.
But in every way that matters, he has already kept it.
He chose a wife, Catherine, not from the aristocracy but from ordinary life. He speaks openly about mental health. He takes his children out of the royal bubble. He makes homelessness one of his defining causes — launching the Homewards initiative in 2023 and marking 20 years as Centerpoint’s patron.
He has even pledged to take George, Charlotte and Louis to see the kind of work his mother showed him: homelessness, inequality, invisible suffering. The cycle continues — and this time, by choice, not rebellion.
The “lost letter” that was never one page
Those auctioned letters to Violet Collison are being treated as memorabilia, traded for five-figure sums. In reality, they’re something far more powerful.
They are Diana’s case file for the future: proof that she deliberately raised William to be the kind of king the monarchy had never seen before. Not distant. Not aloof. Not untouchable.
When she wrote that William poured “an endless supply of hugs and kisses” over Harry, she wasn’t just sharing a cute family moment. She was documenting the revolution she’d started — a new kind of royal masculinity, one that made tenderness a strength instead of a weakness.
She never got to see the end of the story. But we have.
Every time William kneels to speak to a child at eye level, we see her. Every time he spends a night on the streets to understand homelessness, we see her. Every time he chooses empathy over distance, we hear the echo of her letters to Collie — the real, private diary of a mother who refused to let the crown crush her sons’ humanity.
The “lost letter to Prince William” was never meant for his eyes alone.
It was written for all of us — in ink, in action, and in the son who is slowly becoming the man she always hoped he would be.
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