{ "archive_path": "archive/1790091913.827256", "base_url": "tinabrown.substack.com/p/the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain", "basename": "the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-22 15:45", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/tinabrown.substack.com/p/the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=tinabrown.substack.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "tinabrown.substack.com/p/the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain.html" }, "domain": "tinabrown.substack.com", "extension": "", "hash": "15KMCCXB7XTEDPAT968P", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=tinabrown.substack.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:29.878773+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790091913.827256", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:29.289432+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:30.267828+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790091913.827256", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:29.887091+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:39.868735+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790091913.827256", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:36.831171+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpkba45lrc", "https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/the-spencers-vs-windsorsagain" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-22T16:15:36.818255+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Just as King Charles and Prince William are trying to adjust to the awful new reality of constant rogue publicity from the now England-residing Sussexes, the Charles Spencer bomb went off. Princess Diana\u2019s brother, having kept mum for 29 years since his thunderbolt eulogy for his sister in Westminster Abbey, suddenly unleashed the memoir, Swan Song: Diana, my sister, that no one saw coming. In the first incendiary excerpt in The Daily Mail, Spencer renewed his credentials as a flamethrower. He recounted that, in a row on the phone days after Diana\u2019s death, then-Prince Charles \u201chissed, \u2018Rest assured we\u2019ll forget her soon enough.\u2019\u201d Holy moly.The trouble for King Charles is that Spencer is an acclaimed historian, who has the most intimate of qualifications to write about the most adored woman in the world. Diana\u2019s funeral will always be defined by the thrilling impertinence of his eulogy from the Westminster pulpit, in which he pledged to protect the young William and Harry, saying, \u201cwe, 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 immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.\u201d The 33-year-old Earl Spencer\u2019s tribute, hurled at the frozen faces of the entire royal family seated in the front pews, was the nearest thing one could get in the late 20th century to an act of sedition. One congregant I spoke to remembered \u201cthe stunned silence in the abbey, a silence so deep, it was like being wrapped in black velvet, an almost physical feeling.\u201d Then followed the burst of applause from the crowd outside. \u201cIt washed through the Great West door,\u201d I wrote in my 2007 book The Diana Chronicles,\u201dand down the nave until, for the first time in the great church\u2019s history, everyone - except the royal family - was clapping.\u201dNearly three decades later, Spencer\u2019s new literary hand grenade landed on the king just as he was hosting his most significant convening in months at Dumfries House in Scotland with such tech overlords as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. As has happened so often in the last decades, family scandal was the saboteur of seriousness. The headlines that should have been dominated by the statesman king\u2019s leadership on the apocalyptic topic of whether snickering algorithms are on their way to overriding humanity were instead reprising the tattered topic the king dreads most: Diana, and how he treated her. Never explain, never complain, be damned! The king\u2019s fury could be seen in a rushed-out statement attributing Spencer\u2019s depiction to the misremembrance of \u201cfraternal grief.\u201dBrother and sister share a moment at the Birthright Red Ball in London (1985)Anti-Spencer outrage exploded in the comments section of the Mail. The famously sensitive king would surely never have been so hideously callous! But the vivid candor of Spencer\u2019s book is, to me, persuasive. In a work of biography, the writer includes accounts by others who can bring context to a remark that seems unconscionable without it. Swan Song is, as Spencer keeps insisting, a memoir. He is only obliged to record what he personally heard or saw. He tells how, in his first phone call with Charles after his sister\u2019s death, her former husband sounded \u201calmost giddily elated, like a lottery winner,\u201d conjecturing that Charles, perhaps, was focused on now being free to marry his long-time mistress. Here I disagree. In my own reporting for The Diana Chronicles, friends and staffers remembered how Charles, in the days after Diana\u2019s death, was almost out of his mind with guilt, grief, paternal anguish, and self-pity. In his panic, one can imagine him blurting things he now regrets or has forgotten. I was told that the future king believed the tragedy was, in fact, a disaster for his long campaign to win public acceptance for Camilla. \u201cThey\u2019re all going to blame me,\u201d he apparently said to his private secretary, Stephen Lamport. \u201cThe world\u2019s going to go completely mad.\u201d He was right. The finger-pointing did turn on him. And Camilla became radioactive for a time. She had to essentially go underground at her Wiltshire home, while the press bayed for someone other than itself to blame.Charles and Diana Spencer as children at their \u201cexceptionally happy family home\u201dFor his book, Spencer uses his notorious eulogy as an effective framing device, plucking out his memories of Diana to riff on what he insistently calls their happy childhood at Park House in Sandringham, before their father inherited the palatial pile Althorp, on 13,000 acres of Northamptonshire. In the fractured marriage of his parents, Johnnie and Frances, he is clearly Team Johnnie, painting him as a benign, well-meaning father, who did his best after his wife absconded with her lover Peter Shand Kydd, losing custody of her four children. But like a rejected shadow, counterfactuals intrude on the narrative. Johnnie Spencer comes through as a disappointed depressive, staring dolorously out the window of his study as he waited too long for his inheritance. If he was so benign, why did he allow his children to learn by reading it in the newspaper that he had remarried, and to a woman they considered an avaricious fortune hunter, Raine, Countess of Dartmouth? (Spencer is a gifted portraitist. There is no further depiction of Raine needed once you know she shouted \u201cWhere\u2019s my fucking egg?\u201d from the top of the stairs and wore a ballgown for dinner.) At Diana\u2019s wedding, wobblingly infirm after a stroke, Johnnie stumbles in the pew after walking Diana down the aisle and snaps at Frances for \u201ctripping him up.\u201d \u201cOnly later,\u201d writes Spencer, \u201cdid I realize that that was the first time I had registered seeing either parent ever talk to the other.\u201d ShareWho is the Diana we see emerge from this complex skein of fucked-up aristocratic genes? Her brother emphasizes her exuberance, her joyfulness, her extreme sensitivity that he attributes to both ADHD and RSD, a new one to me that stands for rejection sensitive dysphoria. Diana certainly shed bitter tears over criticism in the press, but was also addicted to it. Her learning disability left her with an acute sense of inferiority, at odds with the glowing star power of her emergent charisma. As with Johnnie Spencer, however, there are anecdotes that sound a dissonant note. Charles Spencer observes that Diana had become prone to \u201cexplosive outbursts\u201d early in her marriage but that members of his family were \u201cadamant that she had never exhibited any such behavior before the wedding.\u201d But Spencer himself, in the book, reveals things which undermine that view. What about the brother-sister bicycle ride in Diana\u2019s early teens when she suddenly stopped and pushed him over the edge of a steep incline, after he told her of his fear of it? What about the hard slap she administered to her father\u2019s face as punishment for marrying Raine? What about the moment at her brother\u2019s wedding when she pushed Raine down the stairs at Althorp as payback for excluding Frances? There\u2019s an unsettling \u201csnapshot of an instinctive moment\u201d of Diana\u2019s courage when, on a lobster-potting expedition on Scotland\u2019s west coast with Frances, \u201ca lithe, black muscular conger eel...as thick as my arm\u201d writhed free from the pot. As Frances and Charles Spencer recoiled from its gnashing teeth, Diana \u201creached into the plastic bucket \u2026grabbed the open-bladed pen knife that lay within and brought its point hard behind the eel\u2019s eyes.\u201d Spencer mentions he briefly considered including the anecdote in his funeral oration. Thank god he didn\u2019t.Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer. There have been many howls of condemnation against Spencer for publishing this memoir now. But when exactly would be a good moment to publish it? After the next Epstein file dump on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor? The book is, actually, not gratuitously hard on the king. Camilla gets a free pass. Spencer does not detail the sordid woes of the Wales\u2019s marital war or offer invasive scenes where he was not personally present. He\u2019s good at evoking that dread Windsor chill we know so well and the casual cruelty of her husband\u2019s family dynamics. Diana tells her brother the bizarre anecdote she got from her husband of when Queen Elizabeth was considering having Charles\u2019s Dumbo ears pinned back to fend off school bullies and Philip thought the idea so ridiculous, he had one of her corgis undergo the operation instead. This story and others like them, Spencer writes, \u201cevidently made her [Diana] feel desperately sad for, and protective of, Prince Charles.\u201d Cut to his account of a late 90s lunch at London\u2019s San Lorenzo restaurant when Diana revealed to her brother she was heading for divorce. \u201cYou see, Carlos (her nickname for him), Charles is in love with his valet.\u201d The intervention of libel lawyers seems to have prevented us from learning more.Why should the now 62-year-old Earl Spencer hoard anecdotes as good as this in the name of pussy-footing probity? Without Swan Song , we would not have known about the rehearsal for his sister\u2019s funeral, to which he arrives with his eulogy crumpled in his pocket and notices \u201cfigures emerging from the abbey\u2019s shadows\u201d as he heads for the pulpit to practice. \u201cOh my God,\u201d he writes as he realizes the shadows are probably palace spies, \u201cI thought, they\u2019re here to check what I am going to say.\u201d Rather than risk being vetoed, he claims that he forgot to bring the speech and does his mic check from the Book of Common Prayer. We would have missed too the exquisite memory of his reading that eulogy alone to Diana\u2019s coffin in Westminster\u2019s Chapel Royal before its final journey, and feeling that the sudden gust of wind lifting the leaves outside was his sister applauding. And we would have been deprived of his heartbreaking shoulder-to-shoulder view of 12-year-old Prince Harry, \u201ctiny and slight and bereft\u201d as they entered the \u201ctunnel of grief,\u201d walking behind the horse-drawn gun carriage bearing the body of the young princes\u2019 mother. \u201cEndless waves of emotion crashing in at us from every side.\u201d The phalanx of royal men walk behind Diana\u2019s coffin. Credit:Anwar HusseinCharles Spencer was there for all this history, indelibly present in one of the most iconic tableaux of the late 20th century, watched round the world by more than two billion people. \u201cWe were buffeted by the rawest of emotions on a terrible scale, for the longest time, and we could not process it. We could just feel it.\u201d After holding back for so long, his memoir finally tells us what it was like. The \u201cextraordinary and irreplaceable\u201d Diana is once again applauding.Leave a commentI will be speaking with Charles Spencer about his memoir at St. Peter\u2019s Chelsea in NYC on Tuesday, September 29 at 7pm at an event sponsored by McNally Jackson Books. 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