Princess Diana's brother, eyewitness to history, sparks royal ruckus
Why Charles Spencer’s new book “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” is sparking a royal rift, with fresh claims about King Charles, Diana’s troubled marriage, and Buckingham Palace’s sharp response
LONDON: Charles Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, is no stranger to writing books about British kings.
His previous bestsellers include "Killers of the King" and "To Catch a King" and, while those two works focused on the 17th century, some might say his latest book is along the same lines.
"Swan Song: Diana, My Sister" will be published on Tuesday, and is his take on his sister's life and her unhappy marriage to the now King Charles. In pre-released excerpts, Spencer claims Charles was "giddily elated" in the aftermath of Diana's death in 1997, reopening a painful episode for the royal family.
Spencer, 62, said he wrote the book because it was his duty "as an eyewitness to history", but his version of events has been rejected by Buckingham Palace in unusually strong terms.
"The pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory," it said, in a statement that added to the publicity surrounding the book.
Godson to Queen Elizabeth
Spencer was born into a British aristocratic family, with close links to the royal family. The late Queen Elizabeth was his godmother.
He was 17 when his 20-year-old sister, fast becoming the most photographed woman in the world, married the then-Prince Charles in a fairytale wedding in 1981. Spencer told CNN in an interview some years later how at the time he was more interested in "exams and playing my sports at school" than the global event.
The wider world, however, was fascinated by the young couple, who went on to have two sons, William in 1982 and Harry two years later. But behind the scenes, the relationship unravelled.
"I didn't fully understand actually how very difficult things were for her at times," Spencer told Good Morning America in an interview before the book was released.
"That's one of my regrets. I wish I could have done more to help her."
By the early 1990s, Diana's unhappiness was making headlines across the world, and she and Charles were using the media to brief against each other. They divorced in 1996.
A year later, she was killed, aged 36, in a Paris car accident as she was pursued by photographers. Spencer used a much-lauded eulogy at her funeral to tell an estimated 2 billion people watching around the world that her "particular brand of magic" meant she would "never be extinguished from our minds".
His words were applauded by the tens of thousands of people who listened on loudspeakers in the streets of London, but some of his comments about how Diana's goodness was "threatening" and how her "blood family" would need to protect her sons, made uncomfortable listening for the royal family.
'Astonishingly provocative'
Whatever goodwill between the two families remained after Diana's death will likely have been lost after Spencer's new allegations about King Charles, which have reignited talk about one of the most damaging periods in the royal family's modern history.
He writes that Charles said of Diana "we'll forget her soon enough", before shouting at Spencer for suggesting the then 15-year-old William and 12-year-old Harry, should not be expected to walk behind her coffin at the funeral.
Spencer, who has seven children from three different wives and married his fourth wife earlier this year, hit back at Buckingham Palace's questioning of his memory.
"It was astonishingly provocative and below the belt because it was essentially trying to say I'd lied without the King being able to deny what I'd said," he told the Daily Mail.
After studying history at the University of Oxford in the early 1980s, Spencer worked for US broadcaster NBC News for a decade, presenting lifestyle and travel programmes.
He inherited the family's 30-bedroom ancestral mansion in central England in 1992, when his father died, and started writing history books in the late 1990s, one of which was shortlisted for an award and many of which were top sellers.
His publishing career has helped pay for the restoration of the Althorp estate, which has been in his family for five centuries and where Diana is buried.
In 2024, he published a memoir, "A Very Private School", that detailed his experience of sexual abuse, neglect and isolation while at boarding school as a child.
"When looking at the wreckage of my first and second marriages, I learned early in therapy that being sent away to boarding school at eight years of age meant that I had next to no understanding of intimacy," he writes in that book.