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Althorp was tall, good-looking and, although no intellectual, amusing company. He
was older than Frances, but she was brighter than he was and, when they were first
married, richer – her grandmother had been a New York heiress – and instead of living
on the Althorp estate they lived at Park House, which was Frances’s. Friends described
him as becoming boring after his marriage, utterly devoted to his wife and obsessed with
his children to an unusual degree. They were married in 1954; over fifteen years later
the marriage deteriorated to a bitter divorce. The strain of producing a Spencer heir had
not helped. Frances, after the birth of two daughters and the death of a weakly son, had
been subjected to humiliating fertility tests; Diana was the third daughter, followed
three years later by the longed-for son. Diana was only six when her parents’ marriage
fell apart in painful circumstances in 1967 after a series of bitter rows, some of which
she witnessed. Frances Althorp had become infatuated with a married man eleven years
her senior, Peter Shand Kydd, whom she later married. In the subsequent divorce case in
1969 Frances was denied custody of her children; her own mother, Lady Fermoy (some
people said out of snobbery) testified against her and did not subsequently speak to her
for thirteen years. The children were left deprived of their mother and in the company
of their father, who, relations say, was ‘utterly destroyed by Frances’s bolting’. His
bitterness against his former wife never left him and he spent his time in virtual silence,
speaking only to his chauffeur and his gamekeeper. The youngest of his children,
Charles, sobbed his heart out every night crying for his mother; Diana, the next oldest,
tried to mother him. All the children felt responsible for their father, left alone and
lonely. Diana was his particular favourite. They were also very posssessive of him,
regarding any pretty woman who came near him as an interloper who might usurp their
mother’s place. Girls employed as nannies for the children might find pins stuck in their
chairs or their clothes thrown out of the window. This possessiveness was to be carried
to extreme lengths when, in 1976, their father married Raine Dartmouth. While Charles
Spencer wrote a letter from Eton calling his prospective stepmother a ‘prostitute’,
Diana, in a fit of rage, hit her father across the face. Later, on a family occasion at
Althorp, she seemingly caught her stepmother from behind and sent her crashing down
some stairs in full view of astounded Spencer staff.
The divorce affected all of them, except apparently the second eldest, Jane, the
‘sensible’ member of the family, who has been described as ‘saintly, good with everyone,
kind and thoughtful’. Diana, according to sources both hostile and sympathetic, was a
compulsive liar or, to put it more kindly, a fantasist. Her brother, Charles Spencer, told
Diana’s biographer, Andrew Morton:
I don’t know whether a psychologist would say it was the trauma of the divorce but she had real difficulty
telling the truth purely because she liked to embellish things. On the school run one day the vicar’s wife
stopped the car and said: ‘Diana Spencer, if you tell one more lie like that I am going to make you walk
home’. 2
‘Leopards don’t change their spots,’ a Norfolk neighbour commented cryptically of the
adult Diana, while her grandmother told a friend of a school report on Diana aged six: