Prince Philip was ‘incensed’ over Queen’s refusal to condemn Diana

Prince Philip was ‘incensed’ by the Queen’s sympathies for Diana during her marriage to Charles, according to a royal insider. 

• Prince Philip was enraged by the Queen's refusal to condemn Princess Diana during her marital problems with Prince Charles, according to a royal source.
• The Duke of Edinburgh reportedly felt that Her Majesty failed to intervene in their eldest son's troubled relationship with the Princess of Wales by ‘procrastinating’ one too many times. 
• In other royal news, Prince William's parenting to be challenged while Kate's away as he reveals his close relationship with his children.
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Prince Philip and the Queen may have held a united front throughout their 73-year-long marriage, but when it came to private family matters, they weren't always on each other's team. 

The Duke of Edinburgh was reportedly left “incensed” by Her Majesty's delayed intervention in Prince Charles and Princess Diana's troubled relationship—so much so that it began to deeply affect his bond with the British monarch. 

It's understood that Philip, who died aged 99 last April, “accused” the Queen of failing to help their eldest son fix his unhappy marriage to the Princess of Wales—a charge that didn't exactly go down well with the ever-stoic sovereign. 

Her Majesty would offer little practical advice when Diana would come “sobbing” to her about Charles's infidelity in their marriage, according to royal expert, Ingrid Seward. At the time, the Prince of Wales was involved in an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles—a transgression that didn't seem to rattle the steely royal matriarch. 

Rather than take action on the matter, Her Majesty simply advised her daughter-in-law to “counsel patience”. 

"‘Just wait and see,’ said the Queen—her time-honored refrain whenever her children had problems," Seward wrote for the Daily Mail in November 2017. 

Watching from the sidelines, Philip became increasingly frustrated with his wife's attitude towards the Prince and Princess of Wales' crumbling marriage. Seward claims that he even asked the Queen "to bring her considerable authority to bear on an increasingly senseless situation, but she refused to intervene." 

Prince Philip was "incensed" by Her Majesty's lack of action, knowing full well that, as royal consort, he was "powerless" in the predicament. 

"For once in their own long marriage, they were at loggerheads," Seward added. 

The conflict escalated to the point that a family rift began to form, with Princess Anne and Prince Edward backing their father's belief that Charles and Diana should be allowed to divorce. 

Prince Philip attempted to take matters into his own hands by extending an olive branch to his distressed daughter-in-law in handwritten letters. 

According to Seward, he was initially "very sympathetic" towards Diana and even "seemed to place much of the blame" on Charles for their struggling marriage. However, this soft spot quickly hardened when he discovered that the princess had divulged private details about the Royal Family to Andrew Morton for his book, Diana: Her True Story. From this point onwards, he was far less understanding of Diana's discontent. 

Tensions only worsened after the 1992 announcement that the royal couple was separating. 

Philip was furious with Diana after she made a speech about the "depression and loneliness" endured by many postpartum women, believing it to be a direct attempt to "upstage" the Queen on the 40th anniversary of her coronation. He even requested that the princess have her work schedule scaled back, in an effort to curtail her visibility in the Royal Family. 

In 1995, things came to a head between Philip and Diana when the late princess rejected the Queen's invitation to spend Christmas at Sandringham with the Windsors. It's understood that he went “ballistic” and begged Her Majesty to authorize Charles and Diana to divorce, in a final bid to bring a merciful end to the longstanding turmoil. 

Mercifully, the Queen agreed, and the Prince and Princess of Wales were sent a handwritten letter demanding that they legally dissolve their marriage—once and for all.