Queen Elizabeth II reportedly made a dramatic offer to reinstate Princess Diana’s royal title on the day of her funeral, according to a new book.
In his memoir, which is being serialised exclusively by the Daily Mail, Earl Spencer recounts being told that the late Queen was prepared to restore his sister’s Her Royal Highness styling. Diana had lost the title following her controversial divorce from the then-Prince Charles.
The offer was relayed to the earl by Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s Private Secretary and Spencer’s brother-in-law, while they travelled on the Royal Train to Diana’s private burial. She was laid to rest at Althorp, the Spencer family’s 13,000-acre Northamptonshire estate.
In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, the 62-year-old writes that Diana had been “dreadfully hurt” when her HRH title was removed the previous year, describing the decision as “petty and vindictive.” Although he regarded the Queen’s proposal as well intentioned, he says he declined what he saw as a posthumous “consolation prize.”
“I felt that I knew in my bones how she would view this posthumous award,” he writes. “That’s very kind of the Queen, of course. But what’s the point, Robert? Now? I mean – Diana’s dead.”
The claim appears as the Mail publishes the first extract from Charles Spencer’s emotional new memoir about the life and death of Princess Diana.
The book has already stirred fresh controversy around the Royal Family. Spencer’s allegation that Prince Charles said, just days after Diana died in a car crash, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough,” sparked a fierce public dispute on Thursday.
His account of the alleged remark prompted an unusual Palace response, with royal aides challenging its accuracy and suggesting that bereavement can “cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory.”
Queen Elizabeth II paid tribute to Diana on September 5, 1997, following the Princess of Wales’s death in a car crash.
Charles and Diana pictured in Venice during their visit to Italy in May 1985.
Earl Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry and then Prince Charles stand outside Westminster Abbey on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral
The response echoed Queen Elizabeth’s famous ‘recollections may vary’ retort to Harry and Meghan after their interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.
Royal commentators said the strength of the intervention showed the King was ‘absolutely incandescent’ with Earl Spencer. In today’s extract, the earl claims:
- Diana told her father she could not go through with the marriage to Prince Charles a month before the wedding – but he told her it was ‘impossible to pull out’;
- The day before the wedding Charles told Diana that while he was happy to marry her, he was not in love with her;
- Diana was so unhappy that she considered suicide and drove herself ‘more than once’ to Beachy Head cliffs in East Sussex;
- Charles sounded ‘giddily elated – like a lottery winner’ shortly after Diana’s death.
Announcing the book last month, Earl Spencer said that, ahead of the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death next year, he wanted to write down his own thoughts and memories ‘rather than having the discomfort of again reading the opinions of others’.
The Mail has learnt that Prince Harry was aware of his uncle’s memoir but has not read it and was not briefed on its explosive contents, despite staying at Althorp this summer.
Diana lost her HRH title after her divorce in August 1996 and was instead styled Diana, Princess of Wales.
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Describing the Queen’s offer, made just hours after he delivered his defiant eulogy at Diana’s funeral, Earl Spencer writes: ‘When we had gone some miles, Robert beckoned me to follow him into a quiet corner of the carriage.
‘I have just received a call from Her Majesty …and she would like to offer Diana her HRH title back.’ Mr Fellowes died in 2024.
The earl later wondered whether he was right to reject the offer, and that ‘maybe Diana would have seen some point in having HRH carved on her tombstone’.
The Earl, Diana and Charles at the Earl’s 21st birthday party in 1985 at the Mirabelle restaurant in London
The front cover of Charles Spencer’s book ‘Swan Song, Diana: My Sister’
But he said he ‘had no doubt that the consolation prize was hollow, however well-meaning the Queen’s gesture’, adding: ‘The title should never have been removed during her life, in which case it would not have been necessary to offer it to her in death.’
The memoir provides, for the first time, Earl Spencer’s insight into his sister’s deeply unhappy 15-year marriage and the then Prince of Wales’s love for her rival Camilla.
He recalls that on the day of Diana’s magnificent wedding in July 1981, he visited her at Clarence House where he found her ‘sitting quietly in front of a mirror’.
‘Only much later would I discover that, as she confided to a close friend, her husband-to-be had told her the previous day that she needed to know that he was very happy to marry her, but he was not actually in love with her,’ he writes.
Royal watchers were stunned by the Palace’s highly unusual response to Earl Spencer’s book.
In the statement, released on Wednesday night, it said: ‘While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.’
One royal aide later described the earl’s account to the BBC as a ‘demonstrably untrue claim’ about a deeply compassionate man.
Julian Payne, the King’s former communications secretary, yesterday said the King had told staff never to criticise Diana for years after her death.
Mr Payne, who worked for the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall for five years from 2016, including during the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘He was absolutely emphatic that we were to respect her memory and not undermine it in any way.’
The Palace declined to comment on the earl’s further claims last night.