Before Diana, Her Sister Dated Charles — The Spencer Family’s Real Story d
Clusters, Switzerland, early 1978. Lady Sarah Spencer is at lunch with two Fleet Street tabloid journalists, and she is saying exactly what she shouldn’t say. The journalists are James Whitaker of the Daily Mirror and his colleague Nigel Nelson. They have been working this story for months.
The heir to the throne, the eldest daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer, a romance the British tabloids had been running since the previous summer. Sarah had been photographed at polo matches in 1977, spotted at Windsor and Balmoral, pictured on these same Swiss slopes. The social arithmetic was irresistible to the press.
Right family, right background, right age, right pedigree. Lady Sarah Spencer, born March 19th, 1955, daughter of an earl, granddaughter of a baron, ticked every item on the checklist for a future queen. Whitaker later described Sarah as disarmingly frank. He noted that her head seemed to have been turned by the publicity.
Over the course of the lunch, she talked freely. She described having thousands of boyfriends. She disclosed struggles with anorexia and alcohol in her late teens and early 20s, a history that Tina Brown and Sarah Bradford would later document in their respective accounts of the Spencer family.
And then she made the central declaration, the one that ran in the papers and ended the relationship in a single afternoon. She wouldn’t marry Charles, she said if he were the dustman or the king of England. She wasn’t in love with him. She had no intention of marrying a man she didn’t love, whatever his rank. Sarah reportedly realized her mistake almost immediately.
She tried some damage control, suggesting the article had been obtained by foul means, which compounded rather than resolved the problem. She showed the published piece to Charles herself. He was infuriated by it. The relationship dissolved. That lunch, a few hours in a Swiss resort, a journalist with a notebook, a woman who spoke honestly about a prince she didn’t love, is where the most famous royal story of the 20th century actually begins.
Most accounts of the Diana story open in 1980 when Charles noticed a 19-year-old at a weekend house party in Sussex. Some go back a little further to November 1977 when Diana was first introduced to Charles at Althorp. Very few begin where the story actually starts, which is with her older sister 3 years before the famous courtship on Charles’s arm before Diana had left school.
The fairy tale, as the world received it, needed the Spencers to be innocents. A wholesome family, an unlikely match, a shy country girl swept into the palace by royal attention. The evidence, once you look at it clearly, argues against this version at every single point. The Spencers were an ancient, turbulent, and deeply connected aristocratic dynasty.
Diana wasn’t the family’s first encounter with the heir to the throne. She was its most consequential one. The Spencers had been at All Thorp since 1508. Sir John Spencer, descended from sheep farmers who had worked Northampton Sherland since the 1480s, purchased the estate using money accumulated from livestock trading and commodity sales.
He had bought Wormlton Manor in Warikshire 2 years before Althorp. In 1511, he extended his holdings to include the villages of Little Bringington and Great Bronin along with the parish church of St. Mary the Virgin. In 1519, King Henry VIII kned him. He died 3 years later, having established a family seat that would endure for five centuries and 19 generations.
The Spencer House website describes the family as having risen from relatively humble origins in the late 1400s and successfully navigated the turbulent politics of the following centuries to become one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in aristocratic society.
That is institutional language for a 500year run of survival, expansion, and strategic positioning at the center of English power. Within four generations, Sir Robert Spencer, created the first Baron Spencer of Wormatin in6003 under James I was reputed to be the richest man in England. His wealth was prominent enough to generate envy from older noble houses.
During a debate in the House of Lords, the Earl of Arendel, whose ancestors had held their Eerdom since the 13th century, interrupted Spencer mid speech. “My lord, when these things you speak of were doing, your ancestors were keeping sheep.” Spencer’s reply came without hesitation. When my ancestors, as you say, were keeping sheep.
Your ancestors were plotting treason. The Spencers weren’t people who deferred to older money. The Earlddom arrived on November 1st, 1765 when the title Earl Spencer was created in the periage of Great Britain for John Spencer, a major wig grande. Around the same time, the family completed Spencer House in St.
James’s overlooking Green Park, described in period sources as palatial, built to exalt its owners in the heart of London’s most powerful precinct. The first Earl’s daughter, Georgiana, became the Duchess of Devincure, political hostess, campaigner for Charles James Fox, one of the most painted women of her century.
The fifth Earl Spencer, the Red Earl, his long distinctive beard a fixture through Gladstone’s two governments, served twice as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and received a knight of the garter in 1864. The connection to Churchill runs through the same genealogical trunk. Both families descend from Charles Spencer who inherited the Churchill family titles and estates in 1733 and became the third Duke of Marlboro.
His younger brother John received the Spencer family estates in Northamptonshire including Althorp. The Dukes of Marlboro Winston Churchill’s family carried the Spencer Churchill surname into the 20th century. Churchill himself was Diana’s sixth cousin once removed. When the Diana myth portrayed a modest country family encountering royal grandeur for the first time, it was inverting the actual history.
The names Blenham Palace and Althorp map to the same family tree. Here is the fact that cuts most cleanly through the fairy tale. The Spencer Erdom was created in 1765. The House of Windsor adopted its name in 1917 when George V changed it from Sax Cobberg Gotha to shed the German associations of the First World War. The Spencers were Earls for 152 years before the Windsors had a surname.
By 1975, when Diana’s father inherited the Earlddom and became the eighth Earl Spencer, the family had been at Althorp for 467 years. Both of Diana’s grandmothers had served as ladies in waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The Spencer children had grown up at Park House on the Sandringham estate, a house the queen owned and leased to the family.
Diana called the Queen Aunt Liet in childhood. She played with Princess Andrew and Edward as a girl. The distance between the Spencers and the Windsors was never a social gulf. It was a boundary between adjacent rooms in the same very large house. There were three Spencer daughters and they were almost nothing alike.
Lady Sarah Spencer, born March 19th, 1955, was the one who filled rooms. Tina Brown in the Diana Chronicles recorded that Charles found in her a sparkiness and an irreverent wit that they made each other laugh that her manner was the kind that made silence feel improbable. Sarah Bradford, whose biography Diana remains one of the standard accounts, describes Sarah as widely rumored to be the cleverest of the Spencer children.
She attended Riddlesworth Hall and then West Heath boarding school in Kent, both institutions Diana would later attend in different years and with considerably different academic outcomes. And she left with a social confidence that came from inside rather than from effort. After school, she went to London, found work, and entered the circuits of aristocratic social life with the ease of someone raised inside them.
She was good company. She was outspoken. She was constitutionally unable to perform feelings she didn’t have, which is both why Charles was drawn to her and why the lunch at Cloers went the way it did. Lady Jane Spencer, born February 11th, 1957, occupied a different register entirely. Bradford in Diana characterizes her as the least assertive of the Spencer siblings.
The Telegraph, drawing on people who knew all three sisters, describes her as sensitive and quiet, intelligent, and well read. A former Vogue editor who knew all three noted that Jane and Diana had remarkably similar voices, but character-wise, they were different. Jane passed 110 Olevel exams at West Heath, a distinction that places her academic performance about as far above Diana’s as Sarah’s social confidence exceeded hers.
What Jane had across the span of her adult life was a quality of considered loyalty, a willingness to hold positions once taken, even when those positions created their own moral complications. Diana Francis Spencer arrived July 1st, 1961, the youngest of the three sisters and the fourth of John and Francis Spencer’s five children.
A younger brother, Charles, was born in 1964, which makes Diana the youngest daughter, but not the youngest child. She was shy. Her brother, Charles, later remembered her as quite shy up until that time of leaving school. She was musical, a skilled pianist. She swam and danced. She was naturally and deeply good with children.
She failed her O levels twice and left West Heath at 16. She went to London where she cleaned Sarah’s flat, worked as a nanny, and eventually became a nursery teachers assistant at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlo. The description she acquired through these years was good with children, which was both accurate and in the aristocratic social calculus of the late 1970s, significantly less interesting than being witty, brilliant, or already attached to the right man.
She hero worshiped Sarah. Bradford documents this directly. The emotional configuration of the Spencer household, the eldest confident and sparky, the middle steady and private, the youngest shy and admiring, produced a dynamic in which Diana spent her formative years watching her older sisters navigate a world she hadn’t yet entered.
She cleaned Sarah’s flat. She served as bridesmaid at Jane’s wedding. She stood in a plowed field at All Thorp at 16 and was introduced as a courtesy to her sister’s royal companion. She was observing a rehearsal. She just didn’t know what part she’d eventually be asked to play. By 1977, Charles was 29, publicly unmarried, and under sustained pressure from the press, the palace, and the public to change that.
He had been moving through a rotation of aristocratic young women, all vetted by proximity and pedigree, all required to demonstrate the particular kind of discretion the institution treated as non-negotiable. The press had named his social circle Charlie’s Angels. Lady Sarah Spencer fitted the profile precisely. Daughter of an earl who had known the royal family for two generations, educated at the correct schools, socially confident, connected by her family’s long sandum proximity to the palace social world.
They met at the royal ascot house party at Windsor Castle in 1977. Brown records that Sarah enjoyed the prince squiring her around and received a flattering stream of invitations to Windsor and Balmoral through the summer months. They appeared together at polo matches. They were photographed. The tabloids ran the arithmetic.
Eligible prince plus aristocratic young woman equals imminent engagement. That November, Sarah invited Charles to All Thorp for a pheasant shooting party. He came as her guest, and that is how the famous story’s most easily overlooked prologue occurred. Diana, 16 years old, home from West Heath, a girl her brother remembered as quite shy, was introduced to Charles in a plowed field on the family estate.
Charles’s own recollection, given in his BBC engagement interview in 1981, was warmly unremarkable. I remember thinking what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was. I mean, great fun and bouncy and full of life and everything. Brown records that Diana registered on Charles’s radar only as a jolly and bouncy younger sister of Sarah.
Nothing more was noted. Diana later recalled thinking Charles looked like a sad man. He was the man Sarah had brought home for the weekend. The skiing trip to Cloers came in early 1978. A UPI news agency retrospective written in 1981 placed the trip explicitly that year, noting that the resulting press coverage led Sarah to make clear it was not marriage they had in mind.
At the Cloers’s lunch, with Whitaker and Nelson across the table, she made it considerably clearer than that. The anorexia and the alcohol problems Sarah disclosed during that conversation were, according to Tina Brown and Sarah Bradford, both struggles belonging to her late teens and early 20s, a period overlapping with the romance itself.
The Virginia pilot, in a 1997 news piece assessing the Spencer family’s pattern of eating disorders, noted Sarah’s history directly. Tina Brown’s reconstruction in the Diana Chronicles places the disclosure as part of the same candid performance that produced the dustmen or king of England declaration. A single extended act of honesty that violated every rule of the world she was in.
Brown records that Sarah realized her mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth and that she compounded the problem by attempting damage control, suggesting the interview had been obtained by foul means. Charles shown the published article was infuriated by it. The relationship dissolved. The biographers are right to flag the press incident as probably a final straw rather than a sole cause.
The romance had been brief and casual throughout, one of several Charles was conducting simultaneously, never a near engagement in any meaningful sense. But in palace terms, the interview was a categorical disqualification. A future queen required absolute discretion, particularly about the prince.
Sarah had just demonstrated the opposite publicly in print under her own name. The door closed. What followed is what makes the episode genuinely strange. When Charles and Diana’s engagement was announced on February 24th, 1981, Sarah spoke to the Guardian with something close to cheerfulness. I introduced them, she said. I’m Cupid.
She attended the wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral. She became one of Diana’s ladies in waiting, accompanying her younger sister on official engagements through the 1980s and into the 1990s. After Diana died in Paris on August 31st, 1997, Sarah flew to France with Jane and Charles Spencer to bring the body home.
She served as co-executive of Diana’s Will and ran the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which raised more than 112 million for charitable causes for over a decade. Diana during her marriage described Sarah as the only person I know I can trust. Andrew Morton in Diana, her true story identifies Sarah as one of the few people Diana trusted.
The woman who dated Charles first became one of the most dedicated guardians of the woman who married him. that requires a particular kind of self-nowledge and a particular generosity that the tabloid version of the story with its implied competition between the sisters could never quite accommodate.
April 20th, 1978, Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks, London. Lady Jane Spencer, 21 years old, walked to her wedding wearing the Spencer family tiara. Her groom was Robert Fellows, 36, already employed as assistant private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II since the previous year. Diana, still 16, served as bridesmaid.
John Spencer, the eighth Earl, escorted his daughter to the ceremony. Photographs from the day show a composed young woman and a slightly younger Diana at her elbow performing her bridesmaid duties at a wedding that in retrospect would matter more to the shape of her story than anyone present could have known.
The date requires a moment’s attention. This is April 1978, less than three months after the Cloers incident that ended the Sarah Charles romance. While one Spencer daughter’s connection to the palace was officially closing, anothers was formalizing. And unlike Sarah’s, which had depended on a romance that was always casual and ultimately self-terminated, Jane’s was permanent, institutional, and built into the architecture of the Queen’s household.
Robert Fellows wasn’t entering unfamiliar territory. His father had been the queen’s land agent at Sandringham, the same Norfolk estate where the Spencer children had grown up, where Park House stood, where Diana had called the Queen Aunt Liet. Both families had served the royal household in the same geography across overlapping generations.
When Fellows joined the private office in 1977, he was continuing a family tradition in the most literal sense. When he married Jane the following April, the connection between the Spencer family and the palace became not merely social or historical, but structural. His career over the following 12 years was methodical and ascending.
In 1986, he was promoted to deputy private secretary. In 1990, he became private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, the apex of the monarch’s official household. His Times obituary described him as the most influential adviser to the queen during nine years that encompassed the Windsor Castle fire of 1992, three royal divorces, the Annis Horibilis, and Diana’s death in 1997.
The private secretary controls the sovereign’s official program, her correspondence, her information flow, her daily relationship with the prime minister. Fellows held that position from 1990 to 1999. Until her death in 1997, he was Diana’s brother-in-law. The geometry of the Charles Diana separation, two institutions locked in a public battle, each needing to manage the narrative, each carrying conflicting loyalties, ran directly through Jane and Robert’s household.
Multiple sources confirm that Jane and Robert sided with the palace when the formal separation was announced in December 1992. People magazine records that the sisters barely spoke in the last 18 months of Diana’s life. Diana reportedly accused fellows of conspiring with the palace against her interests. The strain between them was real, even if its exact contours remain private.
Jane has maintained extraordinary discretion since 1997, rarely speaking to the media in the nearly three decades since Diana’s death. She read a poem at Diana’s funeral in September 1997 with the composure of someone who had spent a lifetime choosing their moments. She gave a reading at Prince Harry and Megan’s wedding in 2018.
She was among the first family members to meet Harry and Megan’s son Archie before Prince William had done so. When Robert Fellows died on July 29th, 2024, aged 82, leaving almost his entire 1.5 million pound estate to Jane. Her brother Charles Spencer described him as exceptional and a total gentleman, saying he was deeply proud to have been his brother-in-law.
The quietest Spencer daughter had chosen the most durable institutional position of the three, and she held it for the rest of her adult life. By the time Diana married Charles in July 1981, a Spencer had been married to a senior palace official for 3 years. The family, the fairy tale required to be an innocent country household, was already inside.
The household that produced Diana had been fracturing since 1967. John Spencer and Francis Ro married at Westminster Abbey on June 1st, 1954. Queen Elizabeth II attended the ceremony. Francis was 18, the youngest woman to marry at Westminster Abbey since 1893. Their children arrived across a decade of increasing difficulty.
Sarah in 1955, Jane in 1957, a son named John who died within 10 hours of his birth on January 12th, 1960, Diana in 1961, and Charles in 1964. the desperate desire for a male heir and Francis’s accompanying visits to Harley Street clinics to determine the cause of the problem described in Diana’s biography as humiliating by her younger brother added structural pressure to a marriage already straining.
Charles Spencer later told the Sunday Times, “Our mother wasn’t cut out for maternity. Not her fault. She couldn’t do it. She was in love with someone else. Infatuated really, Francis met Peter Shand Kid, heir to an Australian wallpaper fortune in 1966. She left John the following year. Diana was six, Sarah was 12, Jane was 10.
The two oldest sisters were at boarding school when the household came apart most sharply. Diana and her younger brother Charles were home. The divorce became absolute on May 2nd, 1969. John Spencer won full custody of all four children after a custody battle multiple sources describe as bitter and contested.
The detail that makes this particular legal battle more than a private family matter, the detail that places it squarely inside the broader Spencer pattern of turbulence at the center of royal adjacent power is who provided the decisive testimony. Francis’s own mother. Ruth Rosh, Baroness Fermoy, a confidant and lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, testified against her own daughter in court.
The Baroness’s social position built entirely on her proximity to the crown, didn’t move her to protect her child. She sat across the courtroom from Francis and helped John Spencer win. Francis lost her children. She married Peter Shand Kid the same month the divorce became absolute. John Spencer remarried in 1976 taking Rain, Countess of Dartmouth, daughter of the novelist Barbara Cartland as his second wife.
The Spencer children’s response was uniform and intense. They called rain acid rain. Diana admitted later to having pushed her stepmother down the stairs at Althorp. And yet Diana read Cartland’s novels voraciously. The stepg grandmother’s fiction with its virginal heroins and powerful princes, its absolute conviction that love redeems whatever else has gone wrong.
She told MP Giles Brandth, “In those stories was everyone I dreamed of, everything I hoped for.” Brown describes Diana’s addiction to romance novels in the Diana Chronicles as a diabetes of the soul, leaving her spiritual bloodstream permanently polluted with saccharine. Bradford called Cartland’s fiction perhaps the worst preparation for life in general and her own life in particular that Diana could have found.
Andrew Morton reconstructing Diana’s interior life from the tapes she made with his collaborator James Colthurst linked her adult emotional patterns directly to the parental separation and its aftermath, the fear of abandonment, the idealization of love as rescue, the difficulty with marital stability.
Diana herself placed the beginning on those recordings. My first memory is my parents didn’t get on. She was 6 years old when she first understood that the people who are supposed to stay can go. That lesson absorbed at that age in that particular household produced something that the royal institution with its inherited assumption that passion was a private matter to be managed quietly was entirely unprepared to accommodate.
The household was in this precise sense making her specifically for what happened next. Five centuries of proximity to the crown. A mother removed by a custody battle. Her own grandmother helped the other side win. A resented stepmother in the ancestral house. An eldest sister’s royal romance ended by indiscretion at a Swiss lunch.
A middle sister’s marriage into the palace machine. And in every corner of Althorp, the novels of the woman Diana called her stepg grandmother. Stories in which the pure-hearted girl always wins the prince, and love is its own justification. The story the world received position Diana as the beginning of a fairy tale and the end of a tragedy.
It gave her the role of the innocent who couldn’t have known what she was entering. the wholesome country girl overwhelmed by an alien institution that had no use for her humanity. The documented reality was considerably more complicated. Diana was born into one of the grandest families in England. The Spencers had held their Earlddom for 152 years before the Windsors adopted that name.
Their ancestor had been the richest man in England under James I. Their family tree intersected directly with Church Hills through the Spencer Churchill lineage of the Dukes of Marlboro. Both of Diana’s grandmothers had served the Queen Mother as ladies in waiting. Her family had been navigating the royal household for generations before she was born.
When she was a child, she called the queen Aunt Lile and played with princes on the Sandrina estate. the specific shapes of the family’s turbulence, a bitter divorce whose custody battle her own maternal grandmother helped decide, a resented stepmother installed in the ancestral house, an eldest sister’s royal romance ended by indiscretion, a middle sister embedded in the palace machine by marriage, weren’t deviations from some prior Spencer’s stability.
They were expressions of a pattern running through a dynasty that had always operated at the intersection of personal ambition, royal proximity, and the kind of emotional volatility that produces great drama and terrible personal cost. By the time Diana walked into St. Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981, the pattern had been assembling itself for long enough to be legible, if anyone had been looking.
Sarah had entered the romantic orbit of the heir to the throne, conducted herself with the honest disregard for palace convention that was almost perfectly Spencer in its shape, disclosed too much to the wrong people, and exited the whole affair with something close to cheerfulness, appointing herself Cupid, and watching the next chapter from the wings.
Jane had taken the more durable institutional route, marrying inside the palace machine at 21 and spending the rest of her adult life as the hinge on which the Spencer family’s relationship to the crown quietly turned. and Diana, who had hero worshiped Sarah and bridesmaided at Jane’s wedding, who had stood in a plowed field at 16, being introduced as the jolly younger one, while Charles visited as her sister’s guest, walked into a fate her family’s whole pattern had been assembling, one generation at a time, without quite intending to. The world remembers Diana as the shy girl from nowhere who married a prince and was destroyed by a family that was never hers. She was a Spencer first, from a dynasty as old and as grand and as
turbulent as the one she married into, from a household that had been making and surviving scandal in proximity to royal power for five centuries before she was born. Her grandmothers had served the queen mother. Her sister had dated Charles first. Her other sister had married into the palace’s inner circle 3 years before the wedding that made Diana famous.
and the emotional landscape she carried into the marriage. The idealized vision of love is rescue, the fear of abandonment, the hunger for stability from people constitutionally incapable of providing it was assembled piece by piece in the household at Parkhouse and then at all in the years before any of this became the story everyone thinks they know.
Sarah dated Charles first and talked herself out of a royal future with the kind of honest indiscretion that was always going to end the way it ended. Jane married into the heart of the palace and held her institutional loyalty through decades that cost her the closeness she’d had with her younger sister.
And Diana, the youngest of the three, walked into consequences her family’s whole pattern had been rehearsing for generations. She didn’t come from nowhere. She came from the Spencers.
