‘We’ll Forget Her Soon Enough’: Diana’s Brother Accuses Charles of Contempt for Late Princess as Her Ghost Haunts Royals

King Charles’s denial of an explosive charge from Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, underscores how her death nearly three decades ago is reopening old wounds in the House of Windsor.In an excerpt released on Wednesday from a soon-to-be-published memoir, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister,” Earl Spencer details a dispute he had with the then-Prince of Wales. The Spencer scion opposed enlisting Princes William and Harry to walk behind Princess Diana’s coffin at her funeral. King Charles insisted on it and responded with a “stream of anger.”Earl Spencer writes that his brother-in-law unleashed “what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. ‘Rest assured,’ he hissed, ‘we’ll forget her soon enough.’” Princes William and Harry, then 15 and 12, ended up following their mother’s coffin, producing an iconic image of mourning and grief.Some felt the Crown — especially Queen Elizabeth II, who remained silent at Balmoral Castle — was emotionally cold in the wake of the August 31, 1997, death of the royal whom a Sun contributor, Julie Burchill, called the “People’s Princess.” Five days after Diana’s death at Paris, the queen addressed Britain in a televised address from Buckingham Palace, where she eulogized her late daughter-in-law as an “exceptional and gifted human being.” The queen addressed the nation as “your Queen and as a grandmother.”So outraged was Buckingham Palace by Earl Spencer’s account that it responded in a statement: “While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.” King Charles is now married to Queen Camilla, with whom he conducted an affair during his marriage to Diana.That language echoes Queen Elizabeth’s response in 2021 to accusations of racism in the Royal Family made by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. To those allegations, Queen Elizabeth reckoned that “whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.” Prince William responded more bluntly: “We’re very much not a racist family.”Prince Harry visited the Spencer ancestral seat of Althorp — the final resting place of Diana, spanning some 13,000 acres — in July. Some reports suggest that Prince Harry and Earl Spencer discussed the book during that visit, meaning that the Duke of Sussex knew about the disclosures before they were released to the press. Prince Harry told Oprah, with respect to his mother’s funeral, that “For me, the thing I remember the most was the sound of the horses’ hooves going along the Mall.”In the prince’s memoir, “Spare,” he seemed to side with his Spencer uncle, writing that “No child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances,” and relating that Mr. Spencer called King Charles’s insistence that they trail the coffin “barbaric.” Earl Spencer declared to his dead sister in his eulogy at her funeral 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.”Reports indicate that the Sussexes are in talks with Netflix to create a new documentary about Diana timed for the 30th anniversary of her death. That could be one explanation for why Prince Harry and Meghan returned to Britain last month, a homecoming that has gotten off to a rocky start with the decision to pull their two children out of a school due to security concerns.This week also brought news that Diana’s famed “little black dress” — the one she wore in 1994 to a party at the Serpentine Gallery at London on the day that King Charles acknowledged his infidelity — will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in December. She wore it with Manolo Blahnik heels, a pearl-and-sapphire choker necklace, and a Salvatore Ferragamo clutch bag.Earl Spencer’s memoir promises to revive the past. On Thursday, King Charles, who is being treated for an undisclosed form of cancer, looked toward the future as he hosted the co-founders of Nvidia and Google DeepMind, along with leaders from OpenAI and Anthropic, at a summit on artificial intelligence. He warned of the “existential dangers” presented by the rapidly evolving new technology.

‘We’ll Forget Her Soon Enough’: Diana’s Brother Accuses Charles of Contempt for Late Princess as Her Ghost Haunts Royals

‘We’ll Forget Her Soon Enough’: Diana’s Brother Accuses Charles of Contempt for Late Princess as Her Ghost Haunts Royals

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