INVERNESS, Scotland — On Friday the British will mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, with a service in The Guards’ Chapel, Wellington Barracks, London.

In the decade since she died in a car accident in Paris, Britain has been deeply divided over the woman Tony Blair dubbed on her death “The People’s Princess.”

The profound fissures in British society will be on full display on Friday. The guest list has already been pruned of those deemed supporters of her former husband, Charles, Prince of Wales, and the prince’s new wife and former longstanding mistress, the Duchess of Cornwall, as we have learned to call Camilla Parker-Bowles, has decided to stay away for fear of arousing public dissent which might overshadow the event.

Not since Edward VIII announced his intention of marrying the American divorcee Wallace Simpson in 1936 have the British suffered such a crisis in the constitutional monarchy. News of Diana’s premature demise threatened the 56-year grip on the throne of Queen Elizabeth, who was relaxing with the rest of the royal family in her Scottish castle, Balmoral, not far from where I am writing these words, when the tragedy took place.

Queen Elizabeth’s failure to abandon her summer vacation and join her grieving subjects, who had assembled by the thousand outside Buckingham Palace, was not merely considered a political faux pas, it was deemed by many an insult to the nation.

On the advice of her canny prime minister, Tony Blair, Queen Elizabeth was obliged to return hastily to London where, after a few tense moments as she stepped gingerly toward the angry mourners, a ripple of applause confirmed that the public were prepared, albeit reluctantly, to forgive her. She made a point of listening to the distraught Diana devotees before entering the Palace, from which, in an unprecedented act of contrition, she expressed her personal regret at the death of Diana in a television broadcast set against the grieving crowds outside the window.

Rupert Murdoch, who was making a visit to the newsroom of his London Times that evening, proffered a suggestion to the editor of the day: “There’s your headline,” he said. “Queen Saves Neck.”

If their devotion to the institution of the monarchy allowed the members of the vituperative and vocal Diana faction to let Queen Elizabeth off the hook, they had little intention of extending an amnesty to the rest of the royal family.

At Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, the princess’s brother, Charles, Lord Spencer, who had appointed himself chief rebel rouser of what was to become the Diana Party, fired a sheath of vengeful arrows toward the pew containing the Windsors, whom, he suggested, by their callous indifference had driven his beautiful sister to her death. Thus the stage was set for a war between the factions of Charles and Diana that has raged in pubs and common rooms and across snooker and dinner tables that would do justice to a Shakespearean tragedy. Not since the beheading of King Charles I by Oliver Cromwell has the country been so divided by the fate of a member of the royal family. The divisions crisscross the traditional boundaries which separate the British from each other. Even those who witnessed Charles and Diana at first hand cannot agree on who was to blame for the farcical end of what had seemed a fairytale love affair.

Those who back the prince say Diana was a naïve and uneducated young woman who, in her rush to marry the future King of England, failed to grasp that such a position would entail hard work and a loyal devotion to what the Windsors themselves refer to as “The Firm.”

Those who became intimate with the princess, among them pop stars such as Elton John, hold a different view, pointing at the coolness and contrariness of the anguished prince and his inability to give credit to Diana’s virtues.

Those who follow royal matters closely generally dismiss the commonly expressed charge that Queen Elizabeth, her husband the Duke of Edinburgh, the late Queen Mother, and Charles himself all failed to help Diana adjust to her new role and shut her out when she resisted the discipline expected of her.

Those who point to the resumption by Charles of his pre-marital affair to Camilla Parker-Bowles as the cause of Diana’s misery are matched by an equal number who point out that Diana felt little compunction about setting out on her own extra-marital affairs.

Certainly, as Tina Brown’s astute “Diana Chronicles” makes clear, Diana had no inhibitions about spilling the beans on life behind palace doors, nor of expressing her intense irritation at the family she chose to marry into. Nor is there much doubt that in her incessant leaking to the press she reserved her most poisonous vitriol for her husband. Like so much in British life, social class provides clues to how the factions divide. Mr. Blair was aware that the working class, the bedrock of Labour support, found in Diana’s tragic tale another stick with which to beat what they consider to be the haughty, unfeeling, amoral aristocracy, and he was sure to make himself the essential go-between. For the first time the country’s thinking classes and sophisticated urbanites found Prince Charles, who until then had been the butt of jokes about his poor Cambridge degree and his talking to plants, a sympathetic character whose earnest demeanour and lack of worldliness helped make him a victim of Diana’s vicious press campaign.

Patrician Tories tend to favor Charles; Thatcherite Conservatives back Diana. In American terms, the red states support Diana, the blue root for Charles.

Does any of this matter? Will time heal Britain’s open wounds? Oddly, the rift between Charles and Diana and the legacy of her death is likely to reverberate for at least a generation.

Charles and Camilla, herself the great-granddaughter of King Edward VII’s favorite mistress, Alice Keppel, will triumph in the medium term, assuming, which is to assume a lot, that the Prince of Wales outlives his mother. Then, despite the howls of rage from the Diana camp, the People’s Princess’s principal rival will sit on the throne as Queen Camilla alongside King Charles.

But revenge is a dish best served cold. And those who will mourn for Diana on Friday look forward to the day when Prince William, whose doe-eyed good looks betrays his mother’s Spencer genes, succeeds his father. For them, the coronation of King William will be not merely a vindication but a restoration of a shunned royal line.