There is a particular kind of mother who can wound you in the morning, attend a charity lunch in your honor by afternoon, and write you a letter that evening so cold it could be used to chill champagne. Frances Shand Kydd was that kind of mother, and her famous daughter spent 36 years trying to understand why.
The world that adored Princess Diana liked to imagine her as a young woman whose troubles began the day she married a prince. It was a tidier story that way, with a clear villain in a Savile Row suit and a clearer victim in a wedding dress. The truth was older and more uncomfortable.
Long before Camilla, before Charles, before the cathedral and the cameras and the cufflinks, there had already been one woman who taught Diana what it felt like to be left in a room. That woman was her mother, and by the end of Diana’s life, the daughter who had been called the most loved woman in the world was not speaking to the woman who had given birth to her.
Not for months, not for years. Frances was not, in the simple sense, a monster. Monsters are easier. A monster lets you organize your feelings into clean categories. Frances was something more difficult. She was clever, charming when she wanted to be, glamorous in the country way that involves good tweed and better bones, and capable of behavior so casually cruel that the people who watched her up close learned to brace themselves before she walked into a room.
She was also, by the time she became famous as Diana’s mother, a woman with several lifetimes of disappointment stacked behind her, and disappointment in some people becomes wisdom. In others, it becomes a habit of striking first. If you’re enjoying this deep dive into the story, hit the subscribe button and let us know in the comments from where in the world you are watching from today.
She was born Frances Ruth Burke Roche in January 1936 at the family seat at Park House on the Sandringham estate, which tells you a great deal before you have asked a single question. The Burke Roches were Anglo-Irish aristocracy of the prosperous kind, with the right titles and the right cousins, and the kind of upbringing where children were expected to ride before they were expected to read.
Her father was the fourth Baron Fermoy. Her mother, Ruth, was a woman of considerable social skill, deeply embedded in the inner circle around the Queen Mother. The sort of friendship that does not show up in newspaper columns, but does decide who gets invited to which weekend. Frances grew up in a household that was close enough to royalty to borrow the manners and far enough to keep its own opinions.
Parkhouse itself sat almost in the shadow of the main royal residence at Sandringham. As a child, Frances could look up from the lawn and feel the proximity of a different kind of life, one her family touched but did not occupy. That proximity matters. It makes you ambitious without giving you the keys.
It teaches you that there are rooms you can enter and rooms you cannot, even when the people inside are technically your friends. By the time she was 18, Frances had grown into a strikingly attractive young woman with the confident, slightly impatient air of someone who knew her own value and was waiting for the world to confirm it.
In 1954, the world confirmed it. She married Edward John Spencer, known as Johnny, then Viscount Althorp, heir to the Spencer earldom, one of the oldest and grandest titles in England. She was 18, he was 30. The wedding took place at Westminster Abbey, which is a building that does not host weddings for nobody.
There were 1,700 guests. The Queen attended. The Queen Mother attended. It was the kind of society wedding that newspapers covered as if it were a piece of national news, because in that world it more or less was. Photographs from the day show a young bride who looked composed in the way only very young women can manage, smiling under the weight of a tiara and an entirely new life.
She was 18 years old. He was 12 years older. He came with an estate, a future earldom, a circle of friends she already half knew, and a temperament that would slowly reveal itself to be far less straightforward than the suit suggested. Nobody at the time would have called the match anything other than a triumph.
It was on paper a triumph. On paper, however, is where most aristocratic marriages live their best lives. The trouble began in the bedroom, which is to say it began in the place no one writes about in the announcement column. Frances was expected to produce children, and especially to produce a son. That was not a vague expectation.
That was the entire architecture of the arrangement. The Spencer earldom needed a male heir. Without one, the title would pass sideways to a cousin, which in that world counted as a kind of soft catastrophe. Frances took the work seriously. She fell pregnant quickly, and in 1955, she gave birth to a daughter, Sarah.
Two years later, in 1957, she gave birth to a second daughter, Jane. Two healthy girls. The household was pleased in the polite, qualified way households are pleased when they were hoping for a boy. Then, in January 1960, Frances gave birth to a son, John. He lived for 10 hours. The cause was never fully clarified to her in terms she found acceptable.
He was severely malformed. He died and was buried, and Frances was sent to a London hospital for what was discreetly described as a series of investigations. The investigations were, by her later account, humiliating. She had been treated as if the failure were hers alone. She had been treated, she felt, as if she were the broken machine in a workshop.
The grief of losing a baby was bad enough. The grief of losing a baby while being studied like a specimen was something else entirely. It hardened a part of her that had perhaps already been forming. 18 months later, on the 1st of July, 1961, she gave birth to another daughter at Park House. The baby was named Diana Frances.
She was by every account that survived from those early days, an easy and good-natured infant, which in the context of the Spencer household, meant she had arrived with the wrong equipment again. Another girl, another reminder of what had not been produced. Years later, Diana would say, with that particular flatness her voice took when she was telling the worst truth, that she had been a disappointment from the beginning, that she had not been the boy her parents needed, that she had felt the weight of being not quite right before she could understand what right was. Whether Frances ever said anything cruel in those first days is unknowable. What is knowable is that Diana grew up believing it. Children are sponges for atmosphere, and the atmosphere around her birth had not been triumphant. It had been correct. There is a difference. In 1964, the long-required son finally arrived. Charles Spencer was born, and the immediate family lurched into something
that resembled relief. The title was safe. The architecture held, but the marriage itself was already showing cracks that no son could plaster over. Johnny Spencer was a man of considerable kindness and equally considerable inflexibility. He had been raised in the old way with old views about what wives did and what husbands tolerated.
Frances was 28, beautiful, energetic, and married to a man who had begun to feel like her father in a dinner jacket. The country house life that had seemed glamorous at 18 looked by 30 like a very long Sunday afternoon. Then she met Peter Shand Kydd. This is where the story turns sharp and where the family that surrounded Diana would later use a single word to summarize what had happened.
The word, depending on the speaker, was either tragedy or scandal. Frances would have used neither. She would have used the word freedom and meant it. Peter Shand Kydd was the heir to a wallpaper fortune, which sounds like the beginning of a joke and was in fact one of the great unhappy turning points in modern royal adjacent history.
He was funny, charming, married, and entirely unsuitable in the eyes of anyone who cared about appearances. Frances did not at that point care about appearances. She had spent 14 years caring about appearances and the appearances had given her back grief, isolation, and a husband who liked the dogs more than the conversation.
She and Peter began an affair. It was not particularly subtle. By 1967, the affair had become the kind of fact the household could no longer pretend not to know about. Frances left Johnny. She moved to a flat in London. She took Diana, who was six, and Charles, who was three, with her. This was the first of several decisions that would later be told as moral failures in the family’s official version of events.
The truth was more complicated as the truth tends to be when there is a divorce in it. Frances would later insist that she had not abandoned her children. She had taken them with her. She had set up a home in London. She had assumed with the bottomless optimism of women who have spent 14 years being treated as decorative that her husband would not fight her for custody because her husband had never seemed particularly interested in the daily mechanics of his children’s lives.
She had badly misjudged the situation. Johnny Spencer, advised by his lawyers and supported by his entire social class, fought her with a ferocity that surprised everyone, including possibly himself. And then her own mother, Ruth Fermoy, did something Frances would not forgive for decades. Ruth gave evidence against her daughter in the custody case.
Ruth, the woman who had raised Frances, the woman who had stood beside her at her wedding at Westminster Abbey, sat in a courtroom and testified that her own daughter was unfit to have custody of her children. The judge, faced with a runaway wife on one side and a respectable viscount supported by the maternal grandmother on the other, ruled for Johnny.
Diana, who was barely seven, was returned to her father at Park House. Charles, who was even younger, went, too. Sarah and Jane had already been at boarding school for some time. The four Spencer children would grow up from that point on under the daily authority of their father and the visiting authority of their mother, with the wreckage of the marriage threaded through every weekend and every holiday and every birthday.
Frances married Peter Shand Kydd in 1969. She moved with him to Scotland, then later to a sheep farm on the Isle of Seil on the west coast, an extraordinarily remote place by the standards of London life. The remoteness was for her part of the point. She had grown tired of being on display. She wanted somewhere the wind did the talking.
Diana would visit her there throughout childhood, and the visits would form some of the happiest memories of her young life and some of the strangest. Frances at home in Scotland was a different woman from Frances in town. She was calmer, looser, funnier. She also, with the predictability of weather, could turn cold without warning.
And a daughter who had already learned that adults could disappear was particularly sensitive to that weather changing. Here is the part the official biographies have always struggled to write because the truth of it does not flatter anyone. Frances was not a bad mother in any way that would show up on a checklist. She wrote to her children.
She visited them. She had them for holidays. She remembered birthdays. She sent presents. By the standards of upper-class English motherhood in the 1960s and 1970s, which was a standard in which children were largely raised by other people anyway, she did rather more than many of her contemporaries.
The wound she left on Diana was not a wound of neglect in the food and shelter sense. It was a wound of presence and absence stitched together so tightly that Diana could never quite separate them. When Frances was there, she could be wonderful. When she withdrew, she withdrew completely.
There was no middle setting. And Diana, who grew up to be a woman who needed warmth the way most people need air, had been taught at the age of six that warmth was something that could be packed into a suitcase and put on a train without consulting her. The other children handled it differently. Sarah, the eldest, was prickly and competitive and developed her own troubles, including the eating disorder that would later turn out to run through more than one generation of the family.
Jane was the steady one, the one who kept her head down, married a courtier, and stayed quietly close to the institution that would later devour her sister. Charles, the long-awaited son, grew up adored and slightly insulated, and would in adulthood become both Diana’s most fierce defender and one of the people most willing to say in public what the rest of the family said only in private.
Diana absorbed the family weather like a satellite dish. She felt everything. She remembered everything. And she came out of childhood with a hunger for connection that would later be misread by the entire country as charm. The teenage years brought their own quiet disasters. Johnny remarried in 1976. The new wife was Raine, the daughter of the romance novelist Barbara Cartland, and Raine was nobody’s idea of a soothing stepmother.
She arrived at Althorp, the Spencer family seat, like a wind that meant business. She redecorated. She sold paintings. She rearranged. She did all of this with a smiling certainty of a woman who believed she was rescuing a great house from neglect. And she did it without much consultation with the four Spencer children, who watched their childhood home being repackaged and called it among themselves by names that would not have been printed in the family Christmas card.
Frances, watching from Scotland, was not the kind of woman to weep about a redecorated drawing room. She had her own life. But the introduction of Raine into the children’s daily existence created a new alliance among the Spencer siblings, an alliance against the stepmother. And that alliance pulled them by default slightly toward their mother.
Frances was now in their imaginations the parent who had been forced out, the parent who had lost the case, the parent who deserved a second look. It was not exactly forgiveness. It was something more useful in a feuding family. It was reconsideration. Diana, in particular, began to romanticize her mother during these years, in the way teenagers will romanticize anyone who is not currently telling them to tidy their bedroom.
Frances was glamorous, distant, and married to a man who was not Johnny Spencer. That alone gave her a kind of mystique. The two would write to each other, speak on the telephone, meet up in London. Frances, when she chose on the charm, could be magnificent company. She had the Burke Roche wit.
She had a real eye for the absurdity of the world she had been born into. She could see her own social class with the cold clarity of someone who had walked out of a room and turned back to look at the people still inside it. For Diana, who was beginning to find her own way through adolescence with a mixture of shyness and stubborn brightness, the mother who flickered in and out of her life was a complicated gift.
There were good days. There were also days when Frances seemed to lose interest mid-conversation. When Frances would say something with an edge that Diana could not quite work out. When Frances would compare her unfavorably to Sarah who was prettier in the conventional way or to Jane who was steadier.
Diana who already believed she was not quite enough found in her mother a fluent teacher of that belief. Then in 1980 the Prince of Wales noticed Diana and the Spencer family like a small country suddenly discovering it sat on top of an oil field began to recalibrate. Frances has been variously accused of pushing Diana toward Charles of warning Diana against Charles of being indifferent to Charles and of being secretly thrilled by Charles often by the same biographer in the same paragraph.
The simpler truth drawn from those who were actually in the room is that Frances reacted to the courtship the way a woman who had once been 18 and married a future Earl might be expected to react. She was experienced enough to see the dangers. She was also dazzled enough not to stop the train. She gave Diana advice.
The advice was by Diana’s later account of varying quality. She also notably did not raise the alarm about Camilla despite the fact that the alarm was ringing audibly to anyone in their social set who had ears. This is one of the moments where Frances reveals herself most clearly and least flatteringly. She was not naive.
She knew the world Charles came from. She knew because everyone in that small gossipy ecosystem knew that Camilla had been a continuing presence in his life. She knew that the bracelet existed before Diana found out about it. She knew or could have known that her teenage daughter was walking into a situation that would require more emotional resources than her teenage daughter had been allowed to develop.
She did not stop it. Whether she could have stopped it is another question, but she did not try in any sustained way, and Diana noticed. What Frances did do with energy was write a letter to The Times in 1981 complaining about the press intrusion into Diana’s life. It was an extraordinary letter for the period, sharp and protective and beautifully constructed, and it made Frances briefly famous in her own right as the mother who would not be silent.
It was also in retrospect the high point of the public mother-daughter relationship. From the wedding onward, things between them grew quietly and then loudly worse. The wedding itself in July 1981 placed Frances in a position she did not enjoy. As the mother of the bride, divorced and remarried, she was visible without being central.
Johnny, by then much restored in family rank by Raine’s management, walked Diana down the aisle. Frances watched from a pew. The photographs from the day show a woman in a striking outfit who looked, if you study her face carefully, like someone watching her daughter step onto a train she was not sure was safe.
In the years that followed, Frances became one of the many people in Diana’s orbit who could not quite be relied on. The marriage to Charles deteriorated. Diana’s bulimia worsened. The births of William and Harry brought their own complicated joys and strains. Frances was sometimes present, sometimes absent, sometimes warm, sometimes inexplicably cool.
She would visit Kensington Palace. She would have her grandchildren for visits in Scotland. She would also, with a regularity that Diana came to dread, do or say something that would lance a wound Diana had been trying to keep closed. One of the patterns that became impossible to ignore was Frances and alcohol.
By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Frances was drinking in a way that altered her moods, sometimes spectacularly. She had always had a temper, but the temper now arrived more often and with less warning. Telephone calls would begin warmly and end in slammed receivers. Letters would be written that Diana would read once and place in a drawer she did not open again.
The drinking was treated by the family in the way drinking was usually treated in their world, which is to say with elaborate politeness and no direct conversation. Frances would not have welcomed a direct conversation. She had spent decades resenting people who wanted to fix her. There was, threaded through all of this, the constant low-grade comparison.
Sarah, Diana’s older sister, had once dated Charles herself, briefly. That fact alone would have generated friction in any family, but in this family it became a small permanent stone in the shoe. Frances had complicated feelings about Sarah as well, but in private moments she could be heard wondering aloud whether the wrong daughter had ended up with the prince.
Diana heard about these moments through the back channels of family gossip, which is to say she heard about them within hours. She did not forget. If you find this story engaging, please take a moment to subscribe and enable notifications. It helps us continue producing in-depth content like this. The deeper problem was that Frances seemed unable to recognize the actual person her daughter had become.
To Frances, Diana remained in some essential way the slightly awkward middle child who had been not quite the boy. The fact that Diana had grown into the most photographed woman alive, a figure of genuine moral force in the way she touched people with AIDS and walked through minefields, did not seem to register with her mother in the way one might expect.
Frances treated Diana in moments as if she were still a teenager who needed correcting. She would offer unsolicited views on Diana’s appearance. She would comment on her weight. She would, in one of the most quietly cutting moves in the playbook of difficult mothers, praise other women’s daughters in Diana’s hearing.
Diana, who had spent her adult life trying to extract a clean signal of love from her mother, began in the early 1990s to give up, not loudly, not in a single dramatic break. The withdrawal was gradual, the way a long marriage to the wrong person becomes a long divorce. She would not return calls for weeks.
She would arrange to see her mother and then cancel. She would speak about her mother to close friends in a tone that surprised them because it was not the tone of a woman with mother trouble. It was the tone of a woman who had concluded a long investigation and was preparing to file the report. The separation from Charles in 1992 should have been in a healthier family the moment a mother stepped forward.
Frances did step forward in some ways. She gave interviews. She defended her daughter publicly. She was on the surface supportive. Behind the surface, the relationship continued to fray and the fraying had a specific quality that the public never quite understood. Frances seemed almost to compete with Diana for the role of wronged woman.
Whenever Diana spoke about her own suffering, Frances had her own suffering ready to introduce into the conversation. Whenever Diana spoke about feeling unloved, Frances could produce, with the speed of long practice, the older and deeper hurt of her own divorce, her own custody battle, her own mother’s betrayal in the witness box.
There was a quality of one-upmanship to it that left Diana, who had hoped to be comforted, feeling smaller than when the conversation started. This is the precise mechanism that makes a certain kind of mother so devastating. The mother is not absent. The mother is not silent.
The mother is in fact very present and very vocal, but the presence and the voice are always slightly turned inward, always aimed at the mother’s own grievance rather than the daughter’s current pain. Diana would describe later to one or two trusted friends the experience of being mothered by Frances as being like trying to fill a glass under a tap that occasionally ran clean water and occasionally ran sand and occasionally was turned off entirely without explanation.
You could not predict the water. You could not depend on the glass. In the mid-1990s, Diana made a decision that for any other mother and daughter would have been the alarm bell heard across the county. She stopped speaking to Frances. Not in a temporary sulking way, in the considered sustained way of a woman who has decided she no longer has the strength for a particular relationship.
By the time she gave her famous Panorama interview in November 1995, the line between mother and daughter was not just thin, it was in any practical sense gone. Diana had concluded that her mother, whatever else she was, was not safe. The reasons were several and overlapping. There was the drinking, which had grown worse rather than better.
There was a particular interview Frances had given in which she had spoken in terms Diana felt were both inaccurate and unkind and in which Frances had appeared to side very faintly with the institution rather than the daughter. There was the long sediment of decades of small cuts, which by then had accumulated into something Diana could no longer wave away as motherly eccentricity.
And there was by all credible accounts a remark Frances made about Diana’s relationships with various Muslim men, including Dodi Fayed, that Diana found so offensive she could not bring herself to discuss it with the mother who had made it. This last detail has been disputed and redisputed in the years since, but the people closest to Diana at the time remember it as a real and lasting injury.
Frances, like many women of her generation and class, held views about race, religion, and respectability that she did not always think to keep to herself. Diana, who had spent her adult life learning to see people as people, regardless of where they had been born or what they believed, found her mother’s casual prejudice harder and harder to forgive.
There was no single explosive moment. There was a steady cooling and then a long silence. The silence lasted into the summer of 1997. What this meant in practical terms is that when Diana died in Paris on the 31st of August 1997, she had not spoken to her mother for months. The exact length of the estrangement has been variously reported, with some sources saying 4 months and others saying longer.
The numbers matter less than the fact. The most loved woman in the world, the woman whose face was about to appear on every magazine cover on the planet, the woman whose funeral would draw a global audience the size of which had never been measured before, had died without making peace with her own mother.
It is one of the most quietly devastating facts of her short life. And it is the fact that the official morning narrative could not accommodate. Frances, hearing the news in Scotland, did what the family had always done. She composed herself. She found the right clothes. She traveled south.
She took her place at the funeral as the mother of the bride had once taken her place at the wedding, visible without being central, photographed in the costume of of She walked into the public role that the public required, and she carried it with the bone-deep training of a woman who had been performing in front of cameras since 1954.
What was happening inside her was something only she could know, and she gave very few clues. In the years that followed, she would speak occasionally about Diana, sometimes movingly, sometimes in ways that made the family wince. She gave interviews to a Catholic magazine in which she discussed her faith, her grief, and what she described as the consolation of believing in an afterlife.
She was by then a devout convert to Catholicism, having taken instruction in middle age, and her faith provided her with a vocabulary for the suffering that the Anglican upper class had not. She could speak about sin. She could speak about forgiveness. She could speak about the mother of God, which was a useful concept for a woman who had not been able to be the mother her own daughter needed.
She also, with a particular flash of the old Frances, sued the People newspaper for printing one of her own remarks about Diana on the grounds that the remark had been part of a private conversation and not for publication. She won. She always had been good at lawyers. The final years of her life were quiet by her standards.
She lived on the Isle of Sale. She gardened. She prayed. She drank, in the assessment of those who knew her, less than she had at the height of the troubles, though the drinking never fully released its grip. She maintained her relationships with Sarah, Jane, and Charles.
She saw William and Harry in the careful, structured way royal grandmothers see royal grandchildren when there’s a great deal of family lawyer between them. The boys, who had loved their grandmother in the way children love grandmothers who arrive with presents and a faint scent of perfume, came to understand more about her over time, and the understanding was, the family later admitted, complicated.
Frances died in June 2004 at the age of 68 of complications from Parkinson’s disease and a brain tumor. Her funeral was held at the Cathedral of St. Columba in Oban. Her three surviving children attended. The eulogy was given by her son, Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer, the same brother who would later become Diana’s most public defender.
He spoke about his mother with affection, with humor, with the careful editing that funerals require. He did not, in any sustained way, address the question that had hovered over the family for 30 years, which was whether Frances had been, as one observer put it some years later, the original wound from which Diana’s larger wounds had flowed.
The phrase a nasty piece of work attached itself to Frances late, and somewhat unfairly in the form it took. The phrase usually carries the suggestion of unrelieved malice. And Frances was not unrelieved. She could be warm. She could be witty. She was, in flashes that lasted for whole afternoons, the mother Diana had wanted. The problem was the flashes.
The flashes only emphasized the dark periods between them. A mother who is never warm is a kind of tragedy a child can adapt to. A mother who is sometimes warm and sometimes glacial is a more complicated catastrophe, because the child spends a lifetime trying to identify what causes the weather to change, and the child never finds out because there is no answer. The weather is the mother.
Diana, who in her short life had become one of the great emotional readers of the late 20th century, had identified this very early. She had also identified, by the time she was an adult, that no amount of effort on her part was going to convert her mother into the steady presence she needed. The decision to step back from the relationship was not, as some in the family later suggested, a failure of forgiveness. It was a survival move.
Diana had spent a marriage being asked to tolerate the intolerable in the name of duty. She had decided by her last years that she would no longer tolerate it from anyone, including the woman who had taught her to tolerate it in the first place. This is the harder version of the story, the one that does not produce a nice photograph for a magazine.
The mother and daughter were both casualties of a system that had treated women as decorative assets to be married off, complimented, criticized, and discarded depending on whether they produced the right children at the right pace. Frances had been crushed by that system at 18 and had clawed her way out at 28 with the bluntest tool available, which was an affair.
Diana had been pushed into the same system at 19 and had spent 15 years trying to dismantle it from the inside. They had been more alike than either of them ever quite acknowledged, and the resemblance was finally what neither of them could bear to look at directly. Diana once said, in one of her more candid private conversations, that she felt her mother had never really seen her. The phrasing was almost gentle.
It was not an accusation of cruelty. It was a description of absence within presence. Frances had looked at Diana for 36 years and had seen, by Diana’s account, mostly Frances. Frances had seen her own thwarted youth, her own difficult marriage, her own dramatic exit, her own years on the island. She had seen the daughter through the lens of her own story, and the daughter who had her own story had felt the lens but not the gaze.
Charles, in his eulogy at Diana’s funeral in September 1997, spoke about her with a candor that startled the country. He said things that made the watching royals stiffen in their pews. He did not on that occasion say anything about Frances directly. He said something more pointed than that. He spoke about Diana as someone whose particular intelligence had been formed in part by suffering and who had developed her instinct for the wounded because she had been wounded herself and not, he made clear, only by the marriage. The wider audience took the line as a reference to the royal family. Some in the family took it as a reference to other things as well. The sentence was constructed with the precision of a man who had grown up watching his mother and sister send each other messages they could not say directly. He had become fluent in that language and at the funeral he used it. In the years since both women died, the story of Diana has been retold so many times that the figure of Frances has
receded into a sort of background grief, a sad lady in Scotland with a drinking problem and an unfinished argument with a daughter who became a saint. This is unfair to Frances who deserved a more honest portrait and unfair to Diana whose pain did not begin in a cathedral or end in a tunnel but had been there in older and quieter forms since she was a small girl on a Norfolk lawn watching her mother decide whether to stay.
What makes the relationship worth examining now, decades after both women are gone, is not the gossip of it. The gossip has been chewed thoroughly enough. It is the fact that Diana, the most observed woman of her century, came out of a childhood that had taught her two things at once. The first was that she was capable of being loved by enormous numbers of strangers.
The second was that she could not, however hard she tried, secure reliable love from the one woman who was supposed to provide it as a baseline. The combination was not a coincidence. It was, in the saddest sense, her engine. She needed the strangers because the mother had not been steady. She gave warmth to the dying because she had learned what it felt like to wait for warmth that did not come.
The thing that made her extraordinary in public was in private the wound that never fully closed. Frances would not, if asked, have accepted this analysis. Frances would have said, with the Burke Roche flick of the head that her grandchildren remembered well, that Diana had been a difficult, sensitive child who had grown into a difficult, sensitive woman, and that no mother could have done much about either.
Frances would have added, possibly, that she had loved Diana. The complicating fact is that this would have been true. Frances did love Diana in her own particular weather. The further complicating fact is that love, in the form Frances offered it, was not what Diana had needed, and Diana, by the end, was no longer willing to pretend it was.
The estrangement of those final months has often been described as tragic, and it was, but there is another way to see it. Diana, who had spent her life accommodating, had at last decided not to accommodate this one relationship. She had drawn a line. The line cost her, and the line cost Frances even more, because Frances had to live with it for seven more years without the chance to revise it.
But the line was Diana’s, and she had earned the right to draw it. She had, for the first time in her life perhaps, treated her mother the way her mother had so often treated her, which was as someone whose love came with conditions, and whose presence could be withdrawn. The country never quite forgave Frances in the diffuse way countries do not forgive the difficult relatives of dead saints.
The biographies treated her with a chill that bordered on dismissal. The documentaries used her sparingly. The family closed around her memory with the protectiveness that families reserve for members they cannot fully defend but will not abandon. She lived and died as the mother of Diana, which was both her largest title and the smallest possible description of who she had actually been.
She had been a Burke Roche of Park House. She had been a Vicountess at 18. She had been a woman who walked out of a marriage when walking out of a marriage cost you your children. She had been a wallpaper heir’s wife. She had been a sheep farmer’s neighbor. She had been a convert to a faith that gave her language for things her birth class had not allowed her to name.
She had been a mother who had given her famous daughter both the gift of complicated intelligence and the wound that fueled it. She had been in the words that one of her oldest friends used at her funeral, more interesting than she had been allowed to be. What she had not been in the end was the mother Diana needed.
Diana had known this since she was 6 years old and had watched her own mother pack. She had spent the next 30 years trying to make the knowledge wrong. By the time she gave up trying, she did not have very long left to live. There is a particular cruelty in this arithmetic that nobody in the family has ever quite been willing to discuss in public.
If Frances had been a steadier mother, Diana might have been a less hungry public figure and the world might have been deprived of the woman who changed how royals were allowed to feel in front of cameras. The wound made the work. The mother made the wound. The world inherited the work and never properly understood the mother.
It is the kind of equation that does not balance and was never meant to. Frances Shand Kydd, born Burke Roche, died in 2004 in a Scottish farmhouse having lost the daughter who had once been the most photographed woman on Earth and having never, by her own private admission, quite worked out what had gone wrong between them.
The truth, which she did not want and Diana could not deliver, was that nothing had gone wrong in the dramatic sense. It had merely never gone right. The two women had failed each other in the steady, unspectacular way that mothers and daughters in difficult families have been failing each other for a very long time.
And the public, which prefers its tragedies cleaner, had filed the whole arrangement under the heading of a sad story and moved on. Diana, before she died, had said one thing about her mother that the friends she said it to never forgot. She had said that she had loved her and that loving her had been like learning a language nobody else in the family spoke.
She had said it without bitterness in the slightly tired voice she used in her last year for the truth she had stopped fighting. She had said it the way a woman speaks about a country she once lived in and would not be returning to. It was in its way the kindest verdict Frances was ever going to get.
It was also more accurate than the obituaries. Diana had loved her mother. She had also stopped speaking to her. Both of those things were true at once and Diana, who had spent her life being asked to pretend that contradictions did not exist in the houses she had lived in, had finally allowed two contradictory facts to sit beside each other without forcing them to apologize. She had grown up.
She had grown finally into the woman her mother had not quite known how to raise. And then, with the appalling timing that ran through her whole life, she had run out of time to enjoy it. Frances outlived her by seven years. She spent some of those years grieving, some of them gardening, some of them arguing with newspapers, and some of them by the account of the priest who knew her best in those final years, sitting very quietly in the small church at Oban and trying to work out what to say to her daughter the next time they met. It was the only conversation she still had ahead of her, and she had stopped being in a hurry to rehearse it. She was in the end the same woman she had been at 18, sharp and proud and capable of great warmth and capable of withdrawing it without notice. The same woman who had walked down the aisle at Westminster Abbey believing the architecture would hold. The architecture had not held. Neither had she. Neither in the end had
Diana. But Diana at least had told the truth about it before she died in interviews that her mother had watched in Scotland with a glass in her hand and a face that did not move. And that for a family like theirs was the closest thing to peace anyone was ever going to get. Thank you for watching.
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