Royal row between King Charles and Earl Spencer

[Viviennemary]

Buckingham Palace said they don't usually comment but they can't stay silent. Apparently Prince Charles said at the time of Diana's death rest assured we'll forget her soon enough. Which is pretty horrendous. Charles has more or less said grief had clouded Earl Spencer's judgement and memory.

I don't know why he has waited nearly 30 years to come out with this.

In a spoken interview Harry said the Press had exaggerated the racism claims and it wasn't said. He was trying to distance himself from the claims because he knew them to be untrue.

There is a big difference between getting annoyed because a pen doesn’t work when you are in public, signing a document as a new king just after your mother has died and probably quite tired and irritable, and bad mouthing g the mother of your children who you seemed to be on good terms with before her death.
Charles Spencer has a reputation for treating women badly, is on his fourth marriage and is estranged from some of his children. So not exactly a paragon of stable emotions, regardless of his intelligence and education

Agree.

I saw a documneatary about Frances Shand Kydd - her mother sounded like her worst enermy TBH.

Also said apparently Charles made some comment about being disappointed that Harry was a son not daughter in front of Frances Shand Kydd who told him sharply to be greatful child was healthy - she'd lost her first son still born I think.

I really hope in his trashy book he admits that the grabby Spencers were at fault in all of this and Diana should never have been served up to Charles in the first place.
Her older sisters should have stopped the whole thing in its tracks well before the second date.

Yours just did and I didn't imagine that !

I can believe Charles said, the royal family and the Queen were hated in the days after Diana's death. They would have wanted it all to be over and forgotten.

Diana was a thorn in their side and she was gone.

He said it wasn’t racism, it was unconscious bias. Unconscious racism is racism, unconscious bias is a different thing.

Don't believe the then Prince Charles said that. Why wait all these years to get that off your chest?

It didn't happen.

This is my memory too. The media reporting changed - literally overnight- from "look at Diana cavorting with middle eastern playboys, what a slut!" to "how could the royal family be so cruel to Diana, our queen of hearts?". It was incredibly cynical, and very weird to watch.

The behaviour of some of the public was equally bizarre. Adults leaving teddies and crying inconsolably for a woman they had never met and knew very limited amounts about (no social media at the time). Public pressure on the royal family to act in publicly approved ways. It was like a mass madness.

Has anyone else wondered why Charles Spencer chose that weird photo of Diana for the front cover? It looks as though it has been through photoshop several times and I reckon if people were shown it out of context very few would recognise her.

He is a nasty man, refused his sister help when she needed it, bullied his vulnerable wife and has now decided to cash in on the lucrative Diana / 30 years/ Christmas book market which probably explains why he is buddying up with HAM and the DM to keep the book on the front pages.

stolen book kerching

row with Palace kerching

Two things can be true. Charles Spencer doesn’t have to be a good man for him to be speaking the truth (and he is not a good man either imo).

Why do people refer to the "King of England"? Have you not heard of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? Harry did this recently and it was incredibly ignorant, and frankly disrespectful that he seemed to be completely unaware of the countries he apparently wants to represent!

Yep, they are Aristos and behave in exactly the same way as they have always acted. Offering up their daughters to the Monarchy in return for favours and influence. It isn't one family good/ one family bad, they are all under the same system. The British aristocracy and the RF have always had this relationship. One doesn't exist without the other.

He said people keep asking him to speak about Diana with the 30th anniversary of her death next year, and he decided to tell the story on his terms.
He published a book last year about his experience of abuse at boarding school, which was well received and I think cathartic for him, and I wonder if he then felt he could confront the trauma of their childhood and then losing his sister. They had a pretty grim time at home with their mother leaving them so young.

She was the mother of his two young sons though, and they would have been at the front of his mind at the time, not his previous relationship with Diana.

Oh come on, that funeral was like something produced for a tacky Hollywood sob story, designed to pull at the heartstrings. The little white envelope with “Mummy” written in wobbly letters, Elton John re writing a song, Spencer’s speech, whose bright ideas were those that I wonder.

I think that has changed @Messedupmyusernameagain - mainly since the aristos saw how Diana was treated.

William tried to get a few aristos to marry him and failed . Don’t blame them at all .

THIS! ^

I can remember watching the wedding with my family (I was 11) and my dad saying 'if that was you, I would have refused you my permission to marry him.'

She was too young, the age gap too big, KC was under pressure to produce heirs, they had been on a handful of dates and he was in love with another woman. Everything was wrong about it but the temptation to go from 'aristocracy' to 'royal' is too good to refuse (on her family's part).

It shouldn't have mattered that Diana's 'face was on tea towels' by then, she should have been listened to and advised to cancel the wedding if she wished not to go ahead with it.

I’ve certainly read this - and IMHO it is quite plausible - but it was a crazy, crazy time.

There was a general feeling ( stoked by the press ) that her late Majesty and the princes should be in London, and almost be seen to be grieving along with the public.

I think Charles probably was cold and unemotional towards Diana during their marriage - he simply wasn’t in love with her, and her emotional nature and huge worldwide popularity probably grated on him.
Not that Diana was totally blameless either , she could be manipulative and became very adept at using the press to her advantage.

It can’t have been an easy childhood for William or Harry - but I cannot stomach how Harry wallows in his grief and whinges about the unfairness of his life - both then and into the present day .

That is true. Although you'd have thought they would have learnt their lesson after Henry VIII had 2 of his Howard wives murdered but better late than never!

Yes, that's what I mean-do you say "oh we'll this bit but have no one walk behind the coffin"

Of course it was something that PP had done albeit not for his mum.

Whether or not that meant it should still be done 60yrs later is another thing.

Charles S seems a very difficult man. His own failed relationships are a train crash in themselves. Is it 3 marriages now? Lost count.

I cannot see why he wants to drag all of this out into the public domain now, and FGS have some kindness towards the King, still battling cancer.

I have no idea what Charles said- none of us do.
I can imagine he might have tried to be sympathetic towards CS and said something like 'Don't worry, this will settle down' - ie the mass grieving, the flowers, the media stuff, that was hard for everyone in the family to cope with.

I believe that it was Charles's idea for his sons to walk behind their mum's coffin. His argument was that he walked behind his great-uncle and mentor Lord Mountbatten's coffin. However, he was 30 when he did that and William and Harry were 15 and 12 and it was their mum.

I was 14 when they announced the engagement and honestly could not get my head around it with all the talk about fairy tale romance. It seemed obvious even to my young eyes that they hardly knew each other. He looked like a middle aged man and she was not much older than my sister.