Princess Diana’s ‘Pure-Blooded’ Family Nurses Centuries-Old Disdain for ‘Vulgar’ King Charles and His Kin

The release of Earl Spencer’s memoir, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister,” has been marked at every turn by a sense of lèse-majesté toward King Charles III and the royal family he heads. The roots of Lord Spencer’s refusal to kowtow to the Crown could lie five centuries in the past.The primary source of Lord Spencer’s pique is undoubtedly the treatment of his late sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, and her sons, Princes William and Harry, by Charles Windsor. Earl Spencer reports that the king told him in a telephone conversation, with respect to Diana, that “we’ll forget her soon enough.” The memoir also details bitter clashes between Lord Spencer and the king over the role that Princes Harry and William would play in Diana’s funeral.Buckingham Palace denies those accusations, declaring in a statement that the king is “mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgement and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.”Relations between the Spencers and the Crown, though, long predate the 1981 marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. The House of Spencer, one of the grandest families in the United Kingdom, dates to the 15th century. The family seat of Althorp, which stretches across 13,000 acres, has been the family’s home for some 19 generations, since 1508.Earl Spencer’s father served as an equerry to both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. Princess Diana’s grandmother, Lady Cynthia Hamilton, was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s Lady of the Bedchamber. The Queen Mother, who died in 2001 at 101 years old, was also the last empress of India before the Raj was dissolved in 1947.The Windsors, in contrast, are relative newcomers to le gratin. The House of Windsor was founded on July 17, 1917, when King George V changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha — founded in 1826 — to Windsor amid anti-German agitation during the First World War. There have been five Windsor monarchs. The next one, William, Prince of Wales, will be a Spencer by descent as well.An early Spencer was knighted by King Henry VIII, and in 1601, one Robert Spencer, reputed to be the richest man in England — sheep were his cash cows — was named a Knight of the Garter and a baron by King James I. The Churchill and Spencer families merged in 1699, and one branch of the family still goes by Spencer-Churchill, meaning that Princess Diana and Winston Churchill were not entirely distant relatives.The British politician and journalist Michael Gove reckoned this week, with respect to the memoir, “I know why Charles Spencer is doing this — you have to look back at history. The Spencers are a great Whig family. They believe that the royals — the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as far as they are concerned — are upstarts, vulgar mudbloods as it were, whereas the Spencers are pure-blooded aristocracy.”The Whigs, a political party that arose in the late 17th century, stood in opposition to the Tories and supported constitutional restraints on the monarchy. They favored the powerful Parliament envisioned in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, culminating in the peaceful replacement of Catholic James II with Calvinist Protestant William III. The House of Hanover came to power in 1714 after Parliament legislated that only Protestants could rule. A Spencer who lived during the Glorious Revolution — Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland — was a Whig statesman who served as secretary of state under King George I.Earl Spencer writes in the introduction to his memoir, writing that his family “had traditionally been Whigs, politically: Respectful of the Crown, but not afraid to hold its wearers to account on behalf of wider social and political interests (including their own).” Earl Spencer and Diana grew up at Park House, which sits on the royal Sandringham estate in Norfolk.Earl Spencer says in an interview this week with the BBC that he has “nothing to do” with King Charles now and that the monarch is “just not a part of his life.” Lord Spencer adds that he “tends not to think” of his former brother-in-law and that he is “just not interested” in the royal family.The Spencer scion also explains that while he has one of the most elevated titles in the realm, “titles are not very important to me.” One of the family’s great treasures is the Spencer Tiara, which was created in 1767. Diana wore it at her wedding, and after her death it passed back to the Spencers.

Princess Diana’s ‘Pure-Blooded’ Family Nurses Centuries-Old Disdain for ‘Vulgar’ King Charles and His Kin

Princess Diana’s ‘Pure-Blooded’ Family Nurses Centuries-Old Disdain for ‘Vulgar’ King Charles and His Kin

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