Spoilers for The Crown ahead.
Much of what Netflix’s royal drama The Crown depicts in Season 4 plays out like a soap opera: love quadrangles, political turmoil, affairs after dark (and in broad daylight). But perhaps one of the soapiest moments arrives when soon-to-be princess Lady Diana Spencer stumbles upon a design belonging to her fiancé. It’s the blueprints for a bracelet, on which the letters G and F are engraved.
Those two little letters might seem innocent enough, if Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s ex-girlfriend and lover, didn’t just tell Diana that Charles calls her “Gladys” and that she calls him “Fred,” based on characters from The Goon Show. Diana correctly then assumes that the young prince is still in love with his ex.
What might be even more surprising is that this moment wasn’t made for TV; it, in all likelihood, stemmed from actual events. According to author Catherine Mayer, who wrote a biography of Prince Charles, “Curled venomously amongst a pile of wedding presents and cards, Diana had discovered a bracelet bearing the initials ‘GF,’ intended for Camilla.” Author Andrew Morton wrote in his book about Princess Diana: “Despite firm remonstrations from the Prince’s righthand man,” the young Lady Spencer demanded to open a package that had arrived at the palace, and in it, she found the engraved bracelet. According to RadioTimes, she knew of the nicknames not because Camilla had told her, but because she’d picked up on them from Charles’s friends and a note he’d left behind.
There’s some dispute about this, however. According to Jonathan Dimbleby, a former BBC journalist who wrote Prince of Wales: A Biography, the initials actually stood for “Girl Friday,” another nickname Charles had for Camilla based on the film His Girl Friday. (It’s worth noting: Dimbleby was the journalist interviewing Charles when the heir admitted to his infidelity on TV.) Either way, the bracelet was a gift for his ex, and it arrived mere days before he met Diana at the altar.
In the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words, the Princess of Wales reveals the story behind her tearful breakdown upon Prince Charles's departure to Australia and New Zealand, only days before their wedding. "The most awful thing had happened before he went," she said. "I was in his study talking to him about his trip. The telephone rang; it was Camilla...And then someone in his office told me that my husband had a bracelet made for her.
"I walked into this man's office one day and I said, 'Oh, what's in that parcel?' And he said, 'Oh, you shouldn't look at that.' So I opened it and there was the bracelet. I was devastated." She proceeded to tell her sisters she couldn't marry Prince Charles; they told her it was "too late to chicken out."
Charles and Camilla continued their relationship throughout his marriage to Diana, and they eventually married in the years after the Princess of Wales's tragic car accident. However, though the couple seem very happy together, they faced their fair share of backlash when their infidelity went public. According to Slate, Camilla was even “pelted with bread rolls in the supermarket” by passersby, and to this day, Charles has yet to come close to earning Diana’s level of popularity.
