Tragic Details About Princess Diana's Brother, Charles Spencer
Charles Spencer is best known as the younger brother of Princess Diana. Born into aristocracy, the 9th Earl of Spencer — a title he assumed upon the death of their father — had previously held the title of Viscount Althorp. His sister's accidental death in a horrific Paris car crash shocked the world but understandably impacted him on a far more personal level. In fact, it was then that he found himself in the somewhat unique position of sharing his grief with millions, walking in the funeral procession alongside nephews Prince William and Prince Harry before delivering her eulogy at a funeral that was televised throughout the world. "Obviously, nobody wants to speak at their sibling's funeral, especially one who's so young," Spencer mused in an interview with People.
In another interview, with Ireland's RTÉ, Spencer admitted that the trauma from walking with his nephews in the public procession, surrounded by throngs of mourners, has never left him. "I mean, I still have nightmares about that," he said. "It was really traumatizing. The whole thing was really, really horrible."
The loss of his sister, however, is just one of many tragedies that Spencer has experienced throughout his life. Despite being one of Britain's wealthiest men (he inherited a family fortune estimated at more than $140 million), he's certainly experienced his share of pain, sadness, and loss. To find out more, read on to discover some tragic details about Princess Diana's brother, Charles Spencer.
His parents' marriage deteriorated, leading to divorce
The youngest of four children, Diana Spencer and brother Charles Spencer were born into the life of wealth and privilege typical for British aristocrats. The siblings' childhood, however, was not as idyllic as one might assume. When they were still young, their parents' marriage crumbled, and they witnessed heated arguments about their mother's affair with her future husband, Peter Kydd. In an interview with author Andrew Morton, Diana recalled once seeing her father slap her mother across the face. "I was hiding behind the door, and Mummy was crying," she said (via the Daily Mail). "I remember Mummy crying an awful lot."
Their mother eventually left. Diana was 5 years old, and Charles was still an infant. "Our father was a quiet and constant source of love, but our mother wasn't cut out for maternity. Not her fault, she couldn't do it," Charles told The Sunday Times. "While she was packing her stuff to leave, she promised Diana she'd come back to see her. Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came."
Their parents divorced in 1969. Charles was just 3. Their mother married Kydd in 1969, while they continued to live at Althorp with their father. "And at the same time, I think, there was massive guilt, which manifested itself through alcoholism," Spencer told The Guardian of his mother, who died at age 68 in 2004.
Charles Spencer suffered abuse at boarding school
Like the other Spencer siblings, Charles Spencer was sent away to boarding school when he was a child. In his memoir, "A Very Private School," Spencer recounted the horrific abuse he experienced while attending Maidwell Hall, an upper-crust prep school in Northampton.
At first, he felt an overwhelming sense of abandonment, but would soon discover that would be the least of his concerns. "We were like lambs led to the slaughter," Spencer explained in an interview with The Sunday Times, describing one "sadistic" headmaster who infused "sexual undercurrents" into the beatings he doled out to the boys. "It was all about making the boys as frightened as possible," Spencer recalled. "The whole process of being punished was ritualistic and barbaric." Spencer alleged that he was subjected to regular beatings, and at age 11 was sexually abused by an assistant matron who habitually slept with the boys; he was just 11, estimating she was 19 or 20 at the time. While he's occasionally been met with a thumbs-up seal of approval when discussing his abuse, he offered a response. "What would you say if the genders were reversed?" he pointed out.
The childhood trauma from that abuse, he claimed, came to manifest itself when he became an adult. "It killed a part of me; it killed the gentler part of me," he observed to the Times. "We had demons sewn into the linings of our souls."
His father died unexpectedly at 68
In 1992, John Spencer, father of Princess Diana and Charles Spencer, died after suffering a heart attack while hospitalized in London to treat pneumonia. He was 68. According to his obituary in The Washington Post, he'd been in ill health for some time, having suffered a stroke in 1978; the aftereffects of that stroke could be seen in his unsteady gait when walking his daughter down the aisle during her royal wedding to then-Prince Charles in 1981. In her memoir, "Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words," Diana opened up about how severely the stroke had affected him. "He was one person before and he was certainly a different person after," she recalled (via the Daily Mail).
At the time of John's death, the Post reported, he had allegedly created a rift with his children by selling valuable art, furniture, and silverware from Althorp in order to afford the vast expense of maintaining the massive home and its expansive grounds.
Charles was shocked and shaken by his father's death, believing he was on the road to recovery and would be returning home shortly. "Thinking my father would soon be released — we had chatted on the telephone the night before, and he thought he would be out 'in a day or two' — I was sitting in Althorp's dower house when the telephone rang," Spencer said (via the Daily Mail) of how he came to learn of his father's passing.
Charles Spencer was tricked by journalist Martin Bashir over blockbuster interview with Princess Diana
The British monarchy was rocked to its core by the revelations that Princess Diana spilled in her explosive 1995 interview with journalist Martin Bashir. What the public hadn't known at the time was that her brother, Charles Spencer, had been integral in placing Diana with Bashir.
What Spencer didn't come to learn until years later was that he'd been conned by Bashir. Writing for the Daily Mail about what took place, Spencer claimed that when Bashir contacted him about a potential interview with Diana, he brandished bank statements he alleged were proof that someone on his sister's staff had been leaking confidential secrets about her to British tabloids. However, Spencer became suspicious when he set up a meeting between Bashir and Diana and felt there were "discrepancies" between what Bashir told her and what the journalist had told him. Nevertheless, Diana agreed to the interview. "I feel that I was groomed ... shown forged bank statements; I was told of underhand payments, of spying, and of appalling deception," Spencer wrote. "But all along, I was the one being deceived in order for Mr. Bashir to get to my late sister."
As The Sunday Times reported, a source confirmed Spencer's contention that Spencer would never have set things in motion had it not been for those bogus bank statements. "Without Spencer," the source added, "Bashir wouldn't have got to her."
He was devastated by news of Diana's fatal accident
When Princess Diana died, Charles Spencer was in Cape Town, South Africa. As he recalled during a 1999 interview with "Larry King Live," he received a phone call from his home in England, telling him the news that Diana had been in a car crash. He immediately turned on CNN and breathed a sigh of relief when initial reports at the time — erroneously, it turned out — claimed she'd been able to walk away from the accident.
While he desperately continued watching in hope of an update, one of his sisters called to reveal that the situation was significantly worse than what had been reported; in fact, she revealed, there were fears that the princess had suffered brain damage. He then called his other sister, whose husband worked for Queen Elizabeth II. While they spoke, she told Spencer that her husband was on the other line. "And then she stopped talking, and I'll always remember hearing my brother-in-law say, 'Oh, no,' and then my sister Jane said, 'I'm afraid that's it. I am afraid she's dead.' So I sat up the rest of the night," he recalled.
Spencer then broke the news to his children, who were with him in Cape Town, that their beloved aunt had perished. "And it was awful, and then having these little children crying with me — I mean, it was just desperate, really," he added.
Charles Spencer blamed the tabloids for his sister's death
Charles Spencer has never wavered in his belief that the responsibility for his sister's death lies with the tabloids' relentless pursuit of her. He made that clear in the scathing statement he issued following the fatal accident. "It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana's image, has blood on their hands today," he said, as reported by The Irish Times.
The shaken Spencer was enlisted to play a major role in Princess Diana's funeral, which included delivering her eulogy. Writing in The Guardian, Spencer detailed his preparation, noting that an early draft of his speech contained a vitriolic tirade about the greedy media moguls who profited from Diana's life and death. When some of his advisers read the eulogy, they advised him to delete that part. "I agreed with them: This was to be about Diana," he wrote.
Decades later, Spencer came to the conclusion that Diana's death had positively impacted how tabloids treat celebrities. "I think, if I look back to '97 and Diana's death, I think that was so shocking too — the circumstances of her death were so shocking that it did make the industry that supports the paparazzi really consider more carefully what it could and couldn't do," he said in a 2024 interview with the BBC.
He experienced guilt for not preventing Diana's death
In the days after the tragic death of Princess Diana, Charles Spencer not only experienced overwhelming grief, he went through a full range of emotions that also included rage and guilt, feeling remorse that he hadn't been able to somehow prevent the accident. "I was furious, I wasn't just angry," Spencer said in a 2017 interview with People. "[I thought] what could I have done. But you always think, God, I wish I could've protected her. It was just ... it was devastating." He added, "I always felt ... intensely protective towards her."
Those remarks, however, caused consternation with some former royal staffers. As the Daily Mail reported, those onetime members of the royal household deemed him to be hypocritical, due to a report that he'd allegedly denied his sister when she asked if she could stay in a small cottage at Althorp to escape the nonstop paparazzi barrage. Spencer was vindicated when The Times issued a retraction. "We are happy to report that, having considered his sister's safety, and in line with police advice, the Earl offered the Princess of Wales a number of properties including Womrleighton Manor, the Spencer family's original ancestral home," the newspaper tweeted. "It was wrong to suggest he had refused to help his sister ... We did not intent to suggest that the Earl was to blame for his sister's death."
Charles Spencer's first two marriages ended in divorce
As a child of divorce, Charles Spencer initially didn't have much luck with matrimony himself. That's the takeaway from his first two marriages, both of which ended in divorce. He popped the question to fashion model Victoria Lockwood just six weeks after they met, and they were married in 1989. The couple welcomed four children and moved to her native South Africa. Sadly, the marriage didn't last, and the two divorced in 1997. A few years later, he remarried, tying the knot with Caroline Freud in 2001. They had two children together before they split in 2006; Spencer reportedly walked out on his wife, who'd delivered their daughter, Lara, just four months earlier. She was said to be devastated, with the Express reporting she was granted a fast divorce on the grounds of his "unreasonable behavior."
A few years later, he became engaged to Lady Bianca Eliot, but eventually called it off. He married for the third time in 2011, to Karen Gordon. This time, Spencer seemed to have gotten it right; as of 2024, the two remain married.
Looking back, Spencer believed that the underlying issues that led to his divorces were the result of the psychological damage inflicted when he was sexually abused at boarding school. "Put it this way," he told The Guardian. "I don't think I developed emotionally in those early years as would have been the case in a loving home with actively loving adults."
He's reportedly had difficult relationships with some of his children
During the course of his first two marriages, Charles Spencer became the father of six children. Some of them, however, have reportedly had their issues with him over the years. This reportedly had to do with the aforementioned "unreasonable behavior" behind his second divorce, which the Daily Mail claimed was his extramarital affair with TV journalist Coleen Sullivan (which ended extremely badly when he allegedly dumped her in 2008). According to the Mail, Spencer's four older children from his first marriage were quite fond of his second wife, Caroline Freud, and were reportedly appalled by the way he ended things with her. In fact, upon learning that Sullivan would be joining Spencer while he celebrated Christmas with them in Cape Town, the kids — who were then between the ages of 12 and 15 — refused to come if Sullivan was there; he wound up checking her into a hotel.
Meanwhile, his absence from the 2021 wedding of his daughter, Lady Kitty Spencer, hinted at a rift between father and daughter. "Kitty and Charles were very close when she was growing up, but their relationship has cooled and been more distant since his marriage to his third wife Karen in 2011," a source told the Daily Mail.
Interestingly, Spencer was also a no-show when his other daughter, Lady Amelia Spencer, married Greg Mallett in 2023. Spencer hasn't publicly revealed why he wasn't present for his daughters' nuptials.
Charles Spencer mourned the loss of his beloved aunt
In April 2023, Charles Spencer faced another death in his family when his aunt, Mary Cynthia Burke Roche, died at the age of 88. Spencer took to Instagram to pay tribute to the woman he called Aunt Mary, the sister of Spencer's mother. "Aunt Mary was many things — a free spirit; an intellectual; an adventurer; and, above all, an enormously fun inspiration to all generations of her family," he wrote. "Aunt Mary's endless love of life is summed up by her declaration, the day before she died, that she was going to get on with writing her memoirs," he continued. "It would have been a fascinating tale. I'm immensely proud to have been one of her nephews."
As her obituary in The Sunday Times recalled, Roche had a brief business career — which included owning a small airline serving Kenyan safaris and becoming the British franchisee for Hermès — but was best remembered for being the outspoken aunt of Princess Diana.
In fact, Roche once stated that the real culprit behind the failure of her marriage to then-Prince Charles wasn't his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, but the 13-year difference in their ages. "They were at very different stages of development. Diana was young and had limited life experience, and Prince Charles was already a great thinker. He read a great deal," Roche told the Daily Mail in 2017. "They were, perhaps, different people."