When the Spencers met the monarchy, it should have been the ideal union of two noble families. The Spencers were perfect royal in-laws. They were blue bloods, British aristocracy. On paper, they couldn’t have been better. When they became engaged, the Queen said, “Oh, she’s one of us.” But these two blue-blooded families were on a collision course.
The Spencers and the Windsors, it’s been at times the clash of the titans. This film will shed new light on the colorful, controversial Spencer family. Diana’s stepmother, Raine, was an absolute force of nature. Two families, both very similar and very different. The Windsors wouldn’t express their emotions, whereas the Spencers expressed it in volumes, catastrophically sometimes.
Featuring insider accounts and recently unearthed footage. I’ve never seen her show her dissatisfaction on camera before. It’s a most remarkable piece of footage. We go behind the scenes of the ultimate family fallout. Emotions were running very high. It was unconventional. It was rebellious. It was all the words that you come to associate with the Spencers.
The rift between the Spencers and the Windsors had become a gulf. And reveal how the Spencer family changed the House of Windsor forever. Without the Spencers, the Windsors wouldn’t be the family they are today. >> >> When Charles Spencer went to the pulpit, we expected it to be emotional, but his eulogy was explosive.
I stand before you today, the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning, before a world in shock. In front of the royal family and a global television audience of billions, Diana’s younger brother launched into a devastating attack on the House of Windsor. I thought, “Oh my goodness, he’s actually damning the royal family.
” I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men. He was critical of the monarch to her face, critical of the royal family to their faces. So that their souls are not simply amassed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as he planned.
Earl Spencer’s eulogy was an extraordinary act of rebellion. For centuries, there had been a strong alliance between the Spencers and the Windsors. Charles Spencer making this eulogy was looking across the coffin of his sister towards the Queen. And the Queen is his godmother. That’s how closely bound the Windsors and the Spencers are.
Earl Spencer’s emotional eulogy laid bare the differences between the Spencers and the royals. Differences that had existed from the moment the families first met. >> >> Back in 1980, the press were desperate to find out anything they could about a young English aristocrat called Lady Diana Spencer. From the moment she was pegged as a girlfriend of Prince Charles, Diana’s life had been turned completely upside down.
She’d gone from being just a regular girl about town, albeit a very upper class one, to suddenly the center of media attention. It was absolutely overwhelming. While the world might have only just learned her name, the royal family knew the Spencers well. Very well. And as a Spencer, Diana would make more than a suitable spouse for the heir to the throne.
Diana came from a truly aristocratic family. The Spencers go back uh centuries, you know, and had been uh part of the the nobility of this country for a very long time. The Spencers of Althorp came to prominence in the 15th century, when their enormous fortune brought them an earldom from Charles I. The First.
Advertisements
For the next 300 years, the Spencers were regulars at the royal palaces. You can look to almost every generation and you’ll see that there’s a connection between the Spencers and the Windsors. Both of Diana’s grandmothers served the Queen Mother in one way or another. In many ways, Diana was more royal than the royals.
She could trace her ancestry back to the first Tudor king, Henry VII, she could trace her ancestry back to James I. The First. Her blue blood was absolutely impeccable. Diana was proud of her heritage. She always used to refer to the House of Windsor as the Germans because her family, the Spencers, had been in Britain for many, many years before the Windsors moved from Germany.
So, there was that kind of generational snobbishness that her family was, if not as grand, grander than the uh royal family. Centuries later, the Spencers and the royal family remained close. So close, in fact, that Diana wasn’t even the first of her sisters to date the prince. In 1977, the prince was dating her elder sister, Lady Sarah, and had been invited by Sarah and her father to join a shoot on the Althorp estate.
Sarah had that the Spencer red hair. She had the most fiery temperament. She knew exactly what she wanted. She certainly gave Prince Charles a bit of a runaround. But Sarah had soon blown her chances when she gave a candid interview to the press. What goes on within palace walls stays within palace walls.
And to break that rule so openly was was a fatal mistake by Sarah. While Sarah and Charles’s budding romance was over, the relationship between the Windsors and the Spencers ran much deeper. Diana’s father, Johnny Spencer, had been an equerry in Australia when the Queen made a very long tour early in her reign. Johnny Spencer was about as dim as an aristocrat can possibly be.
Uh his commanding officer in the army had said that if you set his trousers on fire, it would take him 10 minutes to realize that his bottom was burning. But that was not a big disadvantage because he knew how to behave. He was extremely polite. His manners were impeccable and he revered the royal family. For the majority of Diana’s childhood, the Spencers were the Queen’s nearest neighbors.
Diana had lived at Park House, which is next door to Sandringham, so she was part of that world. Diana used to go and play at what they called the big house with Prince Andrew, who was almost the same age as her. And one of the nannies actually remembers seeing the Queen on her hands and knees playing hide-and-seek with uh >> >> with Diana and uh Prince Andrew.
The Queen Mother and Lady Fermoy, Diana’s maternal grandmother, plotted to see if they could get uh Charles to marry Diana. The Spencers were perfect to become royal in-laws. They knew royal protocol. They were friends of the royal family. They were British aristocracy. On paper, they couldn’t have been better.
But while the Spencers had all the right credentials to make this the perfect match, their characters were the polar opposite of the Windsors. The Windsors kept everything to themselves. They wouldn’t express their emotions, whereas the Spencers expressed it in volumes, catastrophically sometimes.
They argued and fought and were quite dysfunctional. Diana’s parents, Johnny and Frances’s marriage, was particularly volatile. Johnny Spencer was always seen as a gentle sort of figure. That was his public image. But behind closed doors, he did have a temper on him. And Frances, too, was very forthright. And the two clashed.
This very early on damaged Diana, as it would any child. No child wants to see their parents screaming at each other. >> >> By the time Diana was 6 years old, her parents’ marriage was over. The divorce was one of bitterness and acrimony. The family was split. >> >> Diana’s grandmother testified against her own daughter in favor of Earl Spencer.
He won custody of the children, which was very unusual in those days. And Diana was deeply affected by it >> >> to the point where she almost stopped speaking. And it’s something which stayed with her all her life. Then in 1976, Althorp House gained a new, suitably extrovert resident, Diana’s stepmother, Raine. Raine was an absolute force of nature.
Um >> >> she was a remarkable creature in many ways, famous for this sort of quaffed helmet of hair. She was a massive social climber. Her mother was uh a very colorful character. She was the uh the Mills & Boon writer, Barbara Cartland, who really turned Raine into a sort of a a project, really.
Raine, she was determined, was to marry well. She set out not just to marry Johnny Spencer, but to marry a house. She really wanted to be chatelaine of Althorp. >> >> The latest member of the Spencer family did not receive a warm welcome from Diana and her siblings. They used to hum the old nursery rhyme, “Rain, rain, go away. Come back another day.
” Very much in her hearing. Acid rain was a was a a later variant of uh “Rain, rain, go away.” Um acid rain was was very apt for for Raine in many ways because she had a very sharp tongue on her. There were a lot of clashes between Raine and Johnny’s children. Diana had a fantasy of how she would escape the unhappiness of Spencer family life, inspired by her new step-grandmother, Barbara Cartland.
Diana as a child often had her head buried in these very romantic stories of the girl who’s whisked off her feet handsome prince. Now, age 19, Diana’s fairytale ending was within reach. The loud and emotional Spencers and the discreet Windsors would soon be brought together for good. By February 1981, after just 13 dates, Prince Charles was ready to pop the question to the eminently suitable Lady Diana Spencer.
Charles invited her down to Windsor Castle and they were in the nursery and he just asked her, you know, “Would you like to marry me?” And she said, “Oh, yes, please.” It was just the ultimate dream for her. The beginning of a day to remember for Prince Charles, Lady Diana, and for quite a lot of other people, too.
The long-awaited, much-written-about engagement had happened. Diana had aristocratic blood, so when they became engaged, the Queen said, “Oh, she’s one of us.” The Spencers were respected aristocrats, but this royal union would propel the family to global fame. Johnny was taking one picture after another. It was um very sweet.
Very happy for Diana. Very happy. Diana is looking beautiful. She looks beautiful. >> Diana is lovely. Very very I’ve never seen her look better. I think that a lot of people suggested that he was enjoying a drink or two, but of course he’d had a stroke in 1978, which had impacted upon the way he spoke. It was the ultimate recognition of the aristocracy and the um amazing family the Spencers were that >> >> uh the heir to the throne would want to marry his daughter.
For Diana’s stepmother, Raine, this was the moment in the spotlight that she had been waiting for. Raine wanted to make herself known and so wore a white mink coat so the cameras could focus on her straight away. She was now irretrievably linked to the royal family. She certainly had arrived. People wanted to hear not just from the Queen and the royal family, but from the Spencers.
Lady Spencer, what what what are they going to do now? What are their plans now? Where are they going to When are they going to get married and where will they go and and have their honeymoon and where will they live? Well, I think so much has got to be decided. You know, the thing many imponderables.
The The wedding’s I think been announced will be in July, but no date has yet been fixed for the obvious reasons. There’s so many people’s engagement books to uh rearrange. >> >> While Diana’s father was over the moon his daughter would be a royal bride, her mother, Frances, was wary. 12 years on from her acrimonious divorce from Diana’s father, it felt like history was repeating itself.
Frances, Diana’s mother, uh was terrified that her daughter was going to make the same mistake that she had made. She, Frances, had married very young. She was only 18 when she married Johnny Spencer. There was a big age gap, about 12 years. Isn’t that familiar? >> >> The same as that between Charles and Diana.
Diana’s mother’s concern was about to be proved well-founded. Following the official announcement of their engagement, Charles and Diana spoke to the press together for the first time. It would become one of the most prophetic interviews in history. I I I’m amazed that she’s been brave enough to take me on. >> [snorts] >> And I suppose in love? Of course.
From Diana’s point of view, it’s very straightforward. We’re going to get married. Why are you asking me if we’re in love? Of course we are. But then Charles gave his answer. Whatever in love means. He was baffled as to how to answer a question that was about his emotions. Don’t forget he’d been brought up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to hide what they felt.
Normally, the clip cuts when he says, “Whatever in love means.” But in this recently unearthed extended clip, you can see the full force of Diana’s reaction. Whatever in love means. Well, I hope it puts your own interpretation It means two very happy people. Yes. Well, from us, congratulations. Thank you very much. Be kind.
>> >> God, it’s incredible looking at that now. I haven’t seen that before. The expression on her face is so eloquent. I’ve never seen her show so clearly her dissatisfaction with him on camera before. It’s it’s a most remarkable piece of footage. The silence between the two of them hangs terribly heavily.
Diana really she couldn’t be a Spencer and show what she felt. She had to be a Windsor and keep it all under wraps. You can actually see the light go out behind her eyes. She felt almost her world collapse. Now the Prince of Wales’ fiance, the royal family felt Diana needed their protection from the press. And so for her last few months as Lady Spencer, Diana stayed at Buckingham Palace.
It was the perfect opportunity for the Spencer who was soon to be a Windsor to get to know her future in-laws. Diana has talked about being traumatized by her own parents’ divorce. She saw getting married and belonging to the Windsor family as an opportunity for her to create a stable, loving, secure family for herself.
Moving into Buckingham Palace would have been quite a shock to the system. Prince Andrew was away in the Navy. Prince Edward was away at school. The Queen and Prince Philip, of course, were in residence, but royals don’t just drop in on each other. Diana complained about her life at Buckingham Palace as being very lonely.
Uh she felt isolated. Diana had serious cold feet. She said to her sisters that she was going to call the wedding off and the sisters said, “Too late, Duch.” Which is their nickname for Diana. “Your face is on the tea towels now, so you can’t chicken out.” While the world got ready for the wedding of the century, the fractured Spencer family became a national talking point.
One of the issues was over whether uh Barbara Cartland, she was the mother of Diana’s stepmother, would receive an invitation. In the end, Diana’s step-grandmother watched the wedding at home along with 750 million others around the world. Really is a lovely Cinderella story, isn’t it? You know, exactly Barbara Cartland’s story.
Couldn’t be better. >> >> Just let me say a word. May I say a word? Yes. Um >> >> the Spencers have through the centuries fought for their king and country. Today, Diana is vying to help her country for the rest of her life. She’ll be following in the tradition of her ancestors. And she will have at her side the man she loves.
He was identifying the Spencers and the royals and saying that to bring them together, to unify them, um was an act of um patriotism. Are you at all apprehensive about today? Not in the least. I’m looking forward to every moment of it. Johnny Spencer could barely contain himself on Diana’s wedding day.
As Diana said to me, he was waving himself stupid. He loved it. There were two reasons why everyone was looking forward to the moment Diana emerged from that carriage. One, of course, was to see Diana in the wedding dress. And the other was to see how Johnny Spencer, her father, would cope with that walk up the aisle.
>> [cheering and music] >> Earl Spencer’s stroke greatly affected his mobility. Now, the steps at St. Paul’s Cathedral are precarious on a normal day. >> [cheering] >> Once they’d navigated the stairs, then it was about a 3 and 1/2 minute walk down the aisle. It was a superhuman effort by Lord Spencer and you can see the concentration on his face.
He said that Diana walked him down the aisle. And it was incredibly moving. >> [gasps] >> They get to the altar where Prince Charles is and Johnny Spencer kind of sort of stays there. I imagine for the poor television cameras it must have been a nightmare. Here was the one of the prime shots and Lord Spencer was sort of blocking it.
Just over an hour later, Diana Spencer became a member of the royal family. Prince and Princess of Wales. The Spencers and the Windsors, two families so close throughout British history, were at last officially tied. What a moment for any parents. >> >> The happy couple headed off on honeymoon. They spent a very great deal of their honeymoon at Balmoral.
Six weeks with your in-laws. I’m afraid it wasn’t the best start to married life. It wasn’t long before the differences between the Spencers and Windsors began to reveal themselves. Diana showed how unhappy she was. The Queen really had no time for what she regarded as a sort of self-indulgent emotional stuff that Diana was pulling on the royals and she said that Diana would have to buck up.
Then on the 21st of June 1982, the Spencer and Windsor families were irreversibly joined together forever. By royal proclamation, the birth of Prince William was announced. For the Spencers, their blood is in the future King of England. So, their place in history is is assured. Diana’s mother Frances and her sister Jane rushed to the hospital where they were the first of the extended family to see the new royal baby.
Minutes later, the other happy grandmother arrived, the Queen. The Queen was delighted as the whole family were. Um, allegedly she said, “Well, at least he hasn’t got ears like his father.” And then the final verdict from the Earl Spencer. Good morning, sir. Can you tell us how your >> Good morning.
How is she? Very well indeed, thank you. Johnny Spencer was absolutely exuberant. Lovely baby, very super baby, you know. Not a little packet of face to already good one. Hello, how are you? He was, of course, now grandfather to a future king and an aristocrat would understand exactly what that meant. It’s good news. There was even better news in store for Diana’s stepmother Raine.
The Queen was coming to Althorp for tea. Raine was a real perfectionist and she wanted to make sure everything was done right. There was a full-blown dress rehearsal a day before. She had the whole outside of the house repainted. The visit was in November and and not best for for painting and decorating and and and the poor old painters, they had to use a sponge to sort of dry all the stonework before they could slop the paint on.
It all turned out to be a complete waste of time because the Queen arrived arrived after dark. To Raine’s relief, the meeting between the monarch and the Spencers at Althorp ran smoothly. It was a a triumph for Raine because here she was hosting the Queen, pouring the tea. The Spencers and the Windsors relationship seemed to be going from strength to strength.
The House of Windsor and House of Spencer were forever linked with the birth of Prince William. >> >> When Prince Harry came along on the 15th of September 1984, the Spencer family blood was suddenly coursing through the veins of the second and third in line to the British throne. Like any father, Prince Charles was keen to introduce his two sons to each other at the first opportunity.
And so it was that Prince William was led by the hand back to the room where he was born two years ago. Unlike his brother, Harry seemed to have inherited those striking Spencer looks, something Prince Charles clocked straight away. He’s alleged to have said, “My goodness, you know, he’s got red hair.” And that was clearly a remark aimed at the Spencer family.
Their distinctive hair was already visible. At the entrance to Kensington Palace, the Prince and Princess and their baby arrived from the hospital at speed, inspecting without stopping. Then less than an hour later, Prince Charles left to play polo, something most new fathers would hardly dare to suggest. The news that he had more or less dumped Diana and Harry at Kensington Palace and hurried out to play polo seemed astonishing, but that was often the royal way.
This couldn’t be further from the family life young Diana Spencer dreamed of when marrying her prince and joining the House of Windsor. I think that Diana had completely different views of what being a Windsor wife was to her husband. To Charles, it was all about duty.
It was about producing the heir and the spare, which she had done. I think she felt that perhaps her life was was very much of secondary importance at this stage. >> >> On December the 21st, 1984, the Spencer and Windsor families came together to celebrate Prince Harry’s christening. In true Windsor style, any problems Charles and Diana were having were pushed to the side.
It was all smiles for Harry’s big day. The guy was christened in this. Mhm. Looks remarkably well despite the But away from the cameras, there was a clash between the two sides of the family. Charles made a comment to Diana’s mother and said, “Oh, it’s a shame Harry’s not a girl.
” Frances took this like a knife to her heart because she lost a baby boy. She was furious that someone could not be totally grateful for a baby who was healthy and and vigorous. So, when she retorted, “You should be very happy you’ve had a a healthy boy.” He was taken aback because Prince of Wales is not used to being spoken to like that. >> >> It was an extraordinary outburst because most people I feared trepidation of very senior royals and don’t want to get into an argument in company.
Confrontations like this were not the norm for the reserved Windsors. As Diana struggled to find her feet as a Windsor wife, the royal family hoped she could maintain a stiff upper lip. But as a Spencer, that did not come naturally. Diana was very troubled at this stage of her marriage.
She was deeply suspicious about Camilla Parker Bowles. She believed that Charles still loved Camilla, was probably seeing Camilla and this forced her even further into her eating disorders, I think. Diana would scream and shout and get hysterical and cry and Charles absolutely had no idea how to deal with a person like that.
The Windsors found Diana’s fiery Spencer temperament completely alien, too. I mean, the Queen Mother allegedly once said, “The Spencers The Spencers are very difficult.” Um, and Diana was proving that she was indeed uh quite troublesome to the royal family. The young woman they remembered from the courting days who had charmed the royal family was a dim dim and distant memory.
The royal family don’t do sick. And if if you’re cold, you put on a sweater. If you’re sick, you take an aspirin. And Diana’s moods, uh staying in her room, not coming out down for breakfast, running out of the room during dinner, that these were baffling aspects of behavior as far as the Queen was concerned.
It wasn’t long before the Queen had a Spencer knocking on her door for marriage advice. I think Diana would have felt it was quite normal to go to your mother-in-law and say, “Look, things aren’t working out. You know, what should I do with your boy, with Charles? How should I How should I treat him?” Um, and the Queen just replied, “I don’t know.
” >> [clears throat] >> And as Diana then said, “What sort of help was that?” The Queen was a bit of an imperial ostrich who didn’t want to be burdened with Diana’s emotional baggage. I wonder whether she would have felt trapped inside, you know, the palace walls. Here I am on my own. Um, I don’t feel that there’s anyone I can particularly turn to.
Both families encouraged Charles and Diana to keep up appearances throughout the ’80s. The Spencers and the Windsors were were united in trying to keep the the Wales’ marriage together. There was very much a sense on all sides that that the marriage of the heir to the throne could not fail. But eventually the cracks started to show.
All the press attention was focused on the couple’s attitude to each other as the gloomy winter evening closed in. Rumors of marriage problems put their relationship under intense public scrutiny. I think it must have been horrific for Diana actually to continue this this public persona when her inside she was falling apart and her marriage was crumbling.
By the early ’90s the union that joined the two families was publicly falling apart. It was a difficult period for the Windsors with two other royal marriages in trouble. An unhappy Diana turned to her own family more and more. But the Spencers also had a terrible year. I mean 1992 really um were was bookended by by sadness and tragedy.
The death of of Diana’s beloved father in March that year. That was a a huge blow for Diana and in many ways it may have precipitated the things that were to come down the line. Diana was really hit for six >> >> and it also coincided with the kind of epoch of the war of the of the Wales’ she got little support from Charles. Her wreath said, “I miss you dreadfully, darling daddy, but will love you forever. Diana.
” I think she relies on on Sarah, Jane, and Charles, her her three siblings as as you would at a parent’s funeral. Then just 3 months later the release of Andrew Morton’s now infamous book rocked the royal family. For a year and a half Diana and I worked together on her biography, Diana Her True Story. And when it was published in June 1992, people were saying, “Well, was Diana behind it?” Or “What’s what’s going on here?” This would have sent shockwaves through the royal family because what this book was doing was opening up the family
secrets. The tour of South Korea was really the last hurrah, I suppose. It was a picture of unhappiness, of marital turmoil. On the 9th of December, 1992, the inevitable announcement was made by Prime Minister John Major. It is announced from Buckingham Palace that with regret the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate.
Within days the Spencer family took sides. As the marriage completely unraveled and the awful years that followed, they were immensely loyal to Diana. When Diana separated from uh Prince Charles, she became she came to rely a lot more on her big sister, Sarah. Sarah becomes a sort of de facto lady-in-waiting and she trusts Sarah uh to be at her right hand side when she’s on official visits abroad.
She feels very safe with Sarah. On the 28th of February, 1996, Diana agreed to a divorce. The 15-year relationship between the Spencers and the Windsors was all but over. One of the rare occasions when the Queen intervened because she does try to stay out of the private affairs of of her family, but this time she wrote to Charles and she wrote to Diana and she said, “Get a divorce.
” She’s said to be inside Kensington Palace very sad and very pensive, according to friends. A royal divorce for the second in line to the throne. This is monumental. You know, this is the breaking up of the fairy tale marriage that they had delivered to the nation. In many ways there was a sense of relief um on from the Windsors that the divorce had come about.
For Diana’s siblings there was a relief, too, because they had sort of been drawn into the vortex of the uh the Diana-Charles saga for so many years. I think everyone was was worried about her, how she was going to cope in this sort of post-divorce world. Um you know, she’d been stripped of her royal title.
What was she going to do? She had to find a new role for herself. And as the families began to slip apart, Diana embraced her freedom from the Windsors. No one could have predicted the tragedy that would force them back together. By the summer of 1997, both the Spencer and Windsor families faced the fallout of Diana’s new-found freedom.
The Spencers and the Windsors were horrified. There was Diana going out with an Egyptian playboy. She was off the rails as far as they were concerned at this time. Diana’s own mother was absolutely furious. She wasn’t in fact on speaking terms with her mother at all. But one person stepped forward to listen in the unlikely form of an old family foe, Johnny Spencer’s widow, Raine.
Diana was full of surprises throughout her life and there were few surprises to compete with her decision to change Raine Spencer from being the the hated wicked stepmother to becoming a close confidante. Raine was an outsider. Diana considered herself an outsider and she found great comfort and consolation in Raine.
Raine was appointed to one of Harrods boards by Mohamed Al-Fayed and that cemented really um the connection between Diana’s Spencer family, if you like, with Mohamed Al-Fayed. At the end of August 1997, Dodi Fayed took Diana to Paris. The events that followed pushed the already strained relationship between the Spencers and the Windsors to breaking point.
>> >> The Mercedes in which the princess had been traveling with Dodi Fayed The driver lost control. The car spun, overturned, and hit a pillar. News leaked out slowly to the Spencer family and it wasn’t clear whether Diana was alive or dead. Diana’s mother was sitting at home in Scotland waiting.
She gets one phone call. Uh Diana’s been injured. Doesn’t get another word. It was a terrible ordeal for the whole family to go through. Just this gradual seeping under the door of information. At 4:00 a.m. Diana was officially pronounced dead. The British ambassador phoned Balmoral to tell the royal family the news. As far as Prince Charles was concerned when he heard the news at first, he was absolutely horrified and he said everybody was going to blame him.
But more than that, feeling this was going to have a a disastrous effect on the monarchy itself. Prince Charles had made a decision against the Queen’s wishes to go to Paris with Diana’s sisters, Sarah and Jane, to bring Diana home. Charles fought for Diana more strongly after her death than he had done in her life. It was a strange irony.
Thrown together in grief, the Spencers and the Windsors had less than a week to make arrangements. There was quite a tussle uh between the Spencers and the Windsors as to uh what kind of funeral they wanted. Is she a member of the royal family? Is she a member of the Spencer clan? Is she royal? She’s no longer HRH.
She’s divorced. I mean, who is she? There was a huge falling out certainly between Charles Spencer and the Prince of Wales and they had a big verbal altercation on the telephone. So much so the Prince of Wales ended up hanging the phone up on Charles Spencer. Charles Spencer was too Spencer-like and Prince Charles was too Windsor-like so they never connected.
The planning for the funeral was extremely fraught, but it was largely kept in the hands of the palace. After one of the most astonishing weeks in British history the funeral was a chance for both families to put their differences aside and grieve together. It was attended by a million mourners in London and billions more around the world.
There was a sharp intake of breath at seeing these terribly young boys looking up at the carriage that carried their mother’s coffin. Royal tradition is that the male members of the family do accompany the funeral cortege. Prince Harry told me looking back it was absolutely terrible that they would do this for a 12-year-old boy.
This is of course a Windsor decision, not a Spencer one, to make him walk behind his mother’s coffin. The division between the Spencer and Windsor families was there for all to see. It fell to Charles Spencer to deliver the funeral address. I stand before you today the representative of a family in grief in a country in mourning before a world in shock.
Earl Spencer’s eulogy was one of the most astonishing speeches of the 20th century. >> On behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply amassed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.
It was devastating in its assault on the royal family in the sense that it was suggested that the boys had been constricted by these old-fashioned fuddy-duddy traditions. >> I was reporting it sort of opposite the Abbey, and when we heard that eulogy, I thought, “Oh my goodness, he’s actually damning the royal family.
” It was an extraordinary kind of act of rebellion. >> [bell] >> After this scathing attack, could the Spencers’ relationship with the Windsors ever recover? The death of Diana was the death of the very long-term relationship between the Windsors and the Spencers. There was such bad feeling. The relationship between the two families was very much broken for a long time.
After the funeral, Diana was taken back to the Spencer family estate at Althorp to be buried. Charles Spencer, you know, said, “She’s a Spencer, she’s come back home.” On the way to Althorp, the Queen’s private secretary offered to reinstate Diana’s HRH title in an attempt to reconcile their differences.
Sir Robert Fellowes did offer to reinstate that title, Her Royal Highness, for Diana, but Charles Spencer refused that offer. The Spencer and the Windsor families will always be linked by William and Harry. The Spencers have been more closely involved with Harry and William than than we know about. They do it quietly behind the scenes.
There is a very close relationship between the boys and their aunts and uncles. >> >> In 2004, the Diana Memorial Fountain was unveiled in Hyde Park. The Spencers and the Windsors were there en masse for the first time since Diana’s funeral. The event was a chance for the two families to rebuild their troubled relationship.
Of course, there were difficult times, but memories mellow with the passing of the years. It was a sort of truce between the two families that let’s move on. We will try to repair the damage as much as we can. The relationship between the Windsors and the Spencers has been strained over the years, but both families are now invested together in the British monarchy.
Both families have put the past behind them. They did have to bury the hatchet because William is the future king. He is part Spencer and part Windsor. The Spencers and the Windsors have been at times the clash of the titans. They’ve they’ve been two families who with a deep relationship and without the Spencers, the Windsors wouldn’t be the family they are today.
