Did Princess Diana fancy one of King Charles’ brothers when she was young?

Author Catherine Mayer makes the claim in the new book Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles, out June 23.

As seen in PEOPLE’s exclusive excerpt of the text, Mayer writes that Princess Diana sent Valentine’s to his younger brother, the former Prince Andrew, for a time as a young woman.

“If Diana failed to spot that Charles was incapable of giving her the love she craved, it cannot have helped that the love she craved was a fiction — a modern-day version of courtly love. Before she ever met her future husband, she developed a passion at a distance for one of his brothers,” she writes. “The schoolfriend says that every year until Diana turned fifteen or sixteen, she sent Andrew a valentine card, anonymously of course.”

Lady Diana Spencer’s family had several connections to the royals, and she was born at Park House on the Sandringham Estate. Her grandmother Ruth Roche, Baroness Fermoy, was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and her brother-in-law Lord Robert Fellowes worked in the royal household, eventually rising to the role of Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary.

Diana’s older sister Sarah briefly dated then-Prince Charles in the late 1970s and introduced the pair during a shoot at Althorp House, the Spencer family’s ancestral home, in 1977. Sarah and Charles’ fling didn’t last long, and he began courting Diana in 1980, then a whirlwind engagement and marriage followed.

Diana became the Princess of Wales when she married the future monarch, and she eventually set up her childhood friend and fourth cousin Sarah Ferguson with then-Prince Andrew.

“I said to her, ‘Oh, Andrew’s really good-looking.’ And she said, ‘Duh, Fergs!’ ” Ferguson told PEOPLE in 2021 about Diana connecting them.

Ferguson, nicknamed Fergie by friends and the press, married Andrew in 1986. Years later, she and Diana would both separate from their royal husbands in 1992 before getting divorced.

Princess Diana died following a car accident in Paris in 1997 at age 36, and King Charles stripped Andrew’s princely title in October 2025 as his ties to Jeffrey Epstein came under renewed scrutiny. The former Duke of York has long denied any wrongdoing regarding his links to Epstein and his ex-wife Ferguson lost her Duchess of York title in the same sweep.

Divide & Rule follows the lives and times that shaped eight women in the British royal family, including Princess Diana, Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Camilla.

Source: https://people.com/princess-diana-sent-ex-prince-andrew-anonymous-valentines-day-cards-teenager-new-book-claims-12003122