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.

@OneLilacHedgehog what are your thoughts on Martin Bashir and his interview with Diana, btw?

What a chavvy move, Charles Spencer. Not cool.

Does anyone know if there was ever any thought that Charles should not walk behind Diana’s coffin? I’ve heard people say he wanted William and Harry to walk with him so he wouldn’t be booed. But I do wonder why her ex-husband would’ve been in the procession.

The person to ask would be Paul Burrell. He always seemed to know absolutely every minute detail of royal life and according to him, was privy to every private conversation…

It seemed to be a given Charles would be there, but why I have no idea. As you say he was her ex husband.

I think the walk behind the coffin was for the media to get their money-shot and then the boys would be given some space, if that wasn’t done and their faces weren’t filmed at the funeral…the media would still have been in a frenzy trying to follow them an get ‘the first photo’ afterwards.

Maybe, but then couldn’t they have had them join for the last stretch instead of the whole gruelling hour and 45 minutes?

If this did happen, Is it likely the RF (collectively) spoke to the Vicar to say "don't mention Diana because she's getting too much attention??" Or is it more likely "the boys are very upset and perhaps best not to mention".

I don't believe there would be such spite because KC3 would be aware of the impact on his sons. He may be many things but do some posters genuinely believe he was so insecure/ego driven that he forbade her name being mentioned in a church service?

KC3 must have equally been in shock, along with everyone else. It wasn't handled the best but it was such a shocking, untimely and sad loss that I'm slightly more forgiving about actions.

One of the Royal reporters said that at the time, people would just start crying infront of her because she was associated with Royalty. Such was the outpouring if grief at the time that it's easy to say what should have been done, in hindsight but the RF and men in grey were dealing with an unprecedented situation.

I think on the question moral failings, it’s a pretty huge one to marry a young girl while involved with another woman whom you have no intention of giving up.

It seems much more likely that he did it to support W and H. I'm far from a fan of KC but some people seem intent on turning him into some kind of cartoonish villain. He was a bad husband, but he seems to have been a decent father, and Diana and he had clearly reached a point of having an ok relationship before her death.

Ooh I haven’t heard that - who did he propose to and when? Seems unlikely that he would have proposed to multiple aristos given he met his wife at university and they have been together ever since (barring a separation of a few months, surely too short to get to the point of asking several others to marry him).

He may be a bit more PR conscious now he's King, but I don't think he was as clever at the PR image back then TBH.

I often wondered why he was part of the funeral at all. He was no longer her husband, and maybe if he had stayed out of the picture apart from attending the church service, things might have worked out a lot better. The siblings and sons should have walked behind the coffin or maybe no one should have.

Poor judgment all round, the boys would not have been required to walk the walk of sorrow if Charles had not been part of it. The onlookers and the world gawped at them, checking to see if they were crying or distressed, it was awful.

The RF inserted themselves into it. I accept that the public wanted a state funeral, but the RF were not one bit discreet about their presence at it. I don't think any of them have a clue about emotion anyway TBH.

William was engaged to jecca Craig. The media pretend this was a pretend engagement because it was never formally announced

An earlier poster said that Diana's mother was against the marriage,

That was me.

I read it in Tina Brown's the Diana Chronicles.

Maybe not a reliable source?

She took Diana away before the engagement was announced so that she could be sure.

I think 'tantrum' is an overstatement but yes, you can't imagine his late mother getting irritated with an inanimate object on a supposedly solemn public occasion.

During the Dimbleby interview, when directly asked Charles if he had tried to be "faithful and honourable" to Princess Diana when they took their marriage vows, Charles responded: "Yes, absolutely... Until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried."

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Because Harry appears to be close to Charles Spencer and may well have already known what was going to be in the book. His team is already briefing the media to that conclusion. It seems unlikely that if he was hurt by the book that he and Meghan would have spent time at Althorp so recently and posted photos of their children running through the gardens.

Having future King and the current Queen's husband walk behind her coffin was confirmation of her significance. She had a funeral fit for a Queen even though she was no longer HRH.

She didn’t need to. She was the master of the petulant, bored look to get her message across.

Rubbish. If he was engaged, it would've been announced. Where's your source for this?

This is pretty much how I feel. A family full of repressed and damaged people trying to deal with a shocking situation in full view of the press, while doing their (no doubt imperfect) best to support two bereaved children.

I find some people's determination to see every tiny action of KC in the worst possible light quite depressing really- it's 30 years ago, you didn't actually know any of the people involved, it's time to move on.

I think good luck to him that he's happy but when he wasn't happy all those years ago, he was certainly: a) much less nice; b) much more jealous of the attention Diana got.

In the middle of that perfect storm, she died and left him dealing with two heartbroken boys and a huge amount of negative press. He is explosive and does not handle fraught emotions well. Harry gets it from him, they are very similar in those respects, although Harry can also be personable like his mother which Charles never was as a younger man. So he could have said it, I'm sure.

Equally though, Spencer wasn't always Diana's defender.

So who knows? It sells books, that's all we know.

According to the telegraph in an article linked elsewhere (it will be behind a paywall), neither William nor Harry knew what was in the book. So that could be awkward

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

Because he has a book to flog ?

If Charles had been allowed to marry who he wanted in the first place (which he eventually did anyway!) that poor woman would most likely still be alive and well, with children and grandchildren.

Yep. Diana asked for the Garden House on the Althorp estate and there was already a staff member living in it. It was also close to a public road and police security felt that it was too accessible given the media circus which would have followed , and which CS was also very rightly worried about because he had young children. He didn’t abandon Diana, as was reported by that tabloid, but offered her several other properties, which Diana herself turned down.