The anger surrounding Charles Spencer’s explosive memoir about his sister Diana is easy to understand. The King already faces a demanding period, from the continuing scandal involving his brother Andrew and Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain to concerns about his own health.
Even if Spencer remains understandably embittered towards his former brother-in-law, many may wonder whether he could not have kept his feelings private.
Three decades ago, Charles Windsor was among England’s most unpopular figures, while his partner at the time, Camilla Parker Bowles, was viewed with similar hostility. But public opinion has changed considerably since then.
To the surprise of many, Prince Charles—whose disastrous marriage had caused immense damage to the monarchy—eventually emerged as a warm, humorous and widely admired King. His conduct during illness has also been seen by many as courageous and dignified.
Camilla, now Queen, has appeared to be a patient and perceptive partner through the years. Most people have made mistakes in their younger days, so perhaps the argument goes that old grievances should finally be left behind. Why, critics ask, should Lord Spencer disrupt that hard-won peace with what they describe as a hostile memoir?
That is the case being advanced by people presented as the King’s allies. They have mounted a fierce campaign against Charles Spencer, attacking his own failed marriages and portraying Swan Song as the product of spite—or even as an attempt to meet financial obligations to his third former wife.
Those reactions may be predictable, but they overlook what seems to be the central issue. In my view, Charles Spencer was justified in publishing the book, and the timing was justified too.
The first reason is that the substance of his account appears to be true. Although the King has expressed his outrage, he has not directly rejected the essential accuracy of Spencer’s memories. I have no doubt that those recollections are genuine.
AN Wilson has met Charles Spencer on several occasions and has stayed at Althorp three times
It is difficult to believe that Spencer fabricated the now infamous telephone exchange in which the then Prince of Wales reportedly concluded: “We’ll forget her soon enough.”
Another memory also rings true. Spencer recounted it to me years ago, not long after the death of his father. On the day of John Spencer’s funeral, Prince Charles is said to have told the young, grieving earl: “You’re so lucky!” Although the prince was attending the funeral of his father-in-law, the moment was interpreted through Charles Windsor’s own sense of grievance. Spencer had inherited his title, while the future King remained in an apparently endless wait for his mother to die and the crown to pass to him.
It is difficult to judge how strong the King’s sense of humour really is, despite his fondness for the notoriously absurd Goon Show. He seems unlikely to have possessed the easy wit of his predecessor, Prince Bertie, who later became Edward VII. After attending a Diamond Jubilee service for his mother, Queen Victoria, Bertie heard an equerry praise the ceremony. “Ah,” he replied. “You have just spent an hour giving thanks to the Eternal Father. But I am cursed with the Eternal Mother.”
Charles Windsor spent much of his life waiting to occupy centre stage. He was eager to become King, yet Queen Elizabeth II lived until the age of 96. He felt neglected by his parents and, after 15 years as an adult and several unsuitable relationships, was married—essentially in an arranged match—to Diana Spencer, who was just 20.
Prince Charles and Earl Spencer speak beside Nelson Mandela following a banquet in Cape Town
Diana captivated the public on an extraordinary scale. After spending three decades in his mother’s shadow, Prince Charles appeared to resent the attention as the world embraced his new wife.
In a display of extraordinary insensitivity, he told Diana on the eve of their wedding that he did not love her, while continuing his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles—the one person, apart from his sister Anne, whom he regarded as a dependable presence.
Diana’s devastation at her husband’s infidelity was therefore hardly surprising, and neither is her brother’s continuing anger on her behalf.
I would describe my relationship with Charles Spencer as that of cordial acquaintances rather than close friendship. We have encountered one another several times, I have stayed at Althorp on three occasions, and for a period we were represented by the same agent.
Our first meeting took place in a small but fashionable Oxford restaurant. Spencer was an undergraduate dressed in the traditional subfusc—white tie and academic gown worn for final examinations—and Diana had arranged a celebratory lunch for him. When I saw her again years later, during a lunch at the Evening Standard, where I worked, she displayed the same warmth, wit and elegance. In private, as in public, Diana possessed an extraordinary charm. Anyone married to her would have risked disappearing completely beside her and would have needed exceptional humility to cope with that.
King Charles, by contrast, has often appeared deeply preoccupied with himself. People who have known him have long been familiar with his defensive flashes of anger—an impression reinforced on the day he became King, when an ink-stained fountain pen reportedly triggered an angry outburst.
He was the worst possible husband for her, and she was the worst possible choice of wife for him. He spent the honeymoon sitting on the deck of the Royal Yacht reading twaddle by Laurens Van Der Post while the bored Diana chatted to the crew.
So, the whole thing is a tragedy. A true tragedy, in that probably all those concerned, flawed and imperfect as they were and are – the grannies who dreamed up the marriage, the bride and groom so ill-matched, their flawed, damaged sons – set out with the hope that they would do good.
As it was, this disastrous marriage very nearly brought the monarchy to an end. And its consequences – two traumatised sons, who are still living with the consequences and making the rest of us live with those consequences, could yet finish off the monarchy itself.
So, these things do matter.
Since I first met Spencer he has gone on to be an excellent historian and a first-rate writer. As an historian, he knows that he must set the record straight.
Although it might sound strange, it is more tactful for Spencer to do so now, while the King is still alive, rather than to wait for Charles III to die. Then it would seem like dancing on his grave.
We need to be reminded of how appallingly not only Charles Windsor, but all the Royal Family, behaved towards Diana. That is why the nation turned against all of them. It was not just the Press and the paparazzi who drove her to her desperate end, it was the callousness of the Windsors. I salute Charles Spencer for his bravery in saying all this.
He is a sensitive man who would know full well what the reaction to his book would be. The ‘friends’ of the King and the stuffpots will try to impugn Spencer’s integrity by smearing his character. But the truth is the truth. And, when you think about it – now Diana is, alas, no longer with us – no one else could have told the true story except her brother.
JAN MOIR: I just can’t accept that Prince Charles practically revelled in the death of his former wife
Something profound and elemental emerges from Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.
It is not how much he mourns his sister Princess Diana, from whom he was estranged at the time of her death. It is how much he utterly despises King Charles, a hatred that has roared away, a bitter furnace in his soul, for more than 30 years.
In the extracts published by the Daily Mail, Spencer’s undimmed malice burns off the page, a heartless corrosion that is awful to behold. In his version of events, we are encouraged to believe that the then-Prince Charles practically revelled in the death of his former wife.
Indeed, he appeared to be quite pleased that 36-year-old Diana, the beloved mother of his two young sons, met her end in a convenient car crash in Paris.
‘I suspect the prince’s first reaction must have been to think more of how this event might free him to marry the woman he loved, rather than appreciating the loss of one he did not,’ writes Spencer.
He recalls that, unlike others who telephoned to give their condolences in the days and hours after Diana’s death, Charles sounded ‘giddily elated – like a lottery winner’. What a terrible and damning allegation, backed up by precisely nothing, least of all the weight of history.
Yet, according to Spencer, the prince also sounded ‘strangely matter-of-fact, given the enormity of the disaster’.
How could he have been both these things at the same time?
Earl Spencer recalls that, unlike others who telephoned to give their condolences in the days and hours after Diana’s death, Charles sounded ‘giddily elated – like a lottery winner’
By Earl Spencer’s account, while his own grief was profound, the brutish prince seemed to regard the death of Diana with all the detachment of a man who has just witnessed a bug being squashed on a windscreen.
Oh dear, how sad, never mind. That is the mood Charles Spencer ascribes to his former brother-in-law at this tragic moment of global import and personal bereavement in both their lives.
Spencer also writes that Charles said the following to him, delivered in true Bond-villain fashion, perhaps while stroking a cat: ‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough!’ Did he really? Not only does it not sound like King Charles, but it is also a remark you could surely put any number of interpretations upon. It is also a remark that could easily be misheard.
Isn’t it far more likely that Charles said ‘they’ll forget her soon enough’ – meaning the public, who were going crazy?
Isn’t it far more likely that Spencer’s own heightened emotional state meant he could have misinterpreted or misunderstood what was coming down the phone line from the royal residences as his own world fell apart?
The Palace responded to this latter allegation by saying: ‘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.’ Recollections may vary, Mark II.
Some argue that the King should not have commented on Spencer’s words – yet I believe that he had to. The slur is so terrible, the smear so profound, that he simply could not let it lie unchallenged.
In writing these incendiary words, Charles Spencer meant to wound and harm, to thrust a dagger deep into the royal ribs, to cause as much damage as possible, to make a 77-year-old man, not in the best of health, look like a heartless, weak adulterer who simply did not care about the tragic death of his ex-wife.
Spencer’s judgment is thunderous and cruel for many reasons but most of all because it does not acknowledge a speck of humanity within the prince, or that at the worst moment in life, many of us do not behave at our best.
Earl Spencer and Prince Charles at the official opening of a fountain built in memory of Diana, in London’s Hyde Park, in 2004
Ultimately, it all boils down to a choice that seems medieval – which Charles do you believe? Spencer or Windsor, the King or the earl, the husband or the brother, the aggrieved or the grieving. Well, I know who I think is the better man – and it is not Earl Spencer.
Is this a choice Prince Harry must also make? One wonders how he can remain on close terms with his fuming uncle while his father is being so viciously traduced and the monarchy attacked. It seems impossible that he can remain neutral, a gingery Switzerland of calm in this bloody war of attrition.
In later chapters, for example, the earl also recounts his version of the row regarding Prince William and Prince Harry walking behind Diana’s coffin at her funeral procession. Are we back here again? I am afraid so.
This is an issue Harry has bemoaned, too, as further evidence of the moral futility and chronic failings of monarchy.
Look. No doubt it was an ordeal; two young boys in their smart suits and neat hair, trying not to cry in front of the whole world. It still breaks my heart just to think about it.
Yet there is a price to pay for the trappings and advantages of being a member of the Royal Family – and here it was, being marched out in funeral lockstep across a city and a nation in mourning.
Perhaps, with hindsight, they could all look at it another way: that walking behind the coffin was a privilege, it was an honour, it was what was expected of them as heirs to a throne that stretches back more than 1,000 years.
She was their mother, this was their destiny – and in the end, what did it have to do with Charles Spencer? He was an uncle, a man whose views were welcomed – but surely those views could only be secondary to the wishes of the boys’ father?
From that day onwards, all four of these men had to learn how to live without a mother, without a sister and without a first wife.
Some of them, of course, have done so better than others. Spencer and Harry have much in common, for both of them are caught in the amber of three decades of hurt and resentment, unable to move on. Compare this to Prince William, whose burden grows heavier by the day but who never complains. And then there is Charles Spencer, a historian who wants to rewrite history.
Back in 1997, Earl Spencer welcomed his sister’s body back to Althorp in a way he did not welcome her presence in life. When she asked if she could live in the Garden House on the estate in 1992, he said no. Now, she lies in her island grave at Althorp but she does not rest in peace. Her brother has seen to that.
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