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It’s been nearly three decades since Princess Diana lost her life in a fatal car crash in Paris in 1997, but her death continues to cast a shadow over King Charles III. The British monarch suddenly found himself back in the hot seat after Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, shared some startling revelations in his upcoming book, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.” In an excerpt published by the Daily Mail, Spencer recalled getting into an argument with Charles over whether Prince William and Prince Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin during Diana’s funeral procession. The earl strongly objected to the idea, but Charles wouldn’t budge, reasoning that he had done it for his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, 18 years prior.
When Spencer countered that he was already of age at the time, Charles lost it. “Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped. I assumed the pause signaled an effort to bring himself under control,” Spencer recalls. “[B]ut then he unleashed down the phone 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.” He remembered the future monarch angrily telling him, “‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough!'” The statement shocked Spencer so much, it left him momentarily speechless. “‘I can’t believe you just said that,’ I said flatly, before hanging up.”
The king’s camp urged readers to take Spencer’s words with a grain of salt. As a statement issued by Buckingham Palace noted, “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,” per People.
Charles was reportedly very jealous of the People’s Princess
There have long been rumors that King Charles III was jealous of Princess Diana’s immense fame, which the beloved royal herself publicly acknowledged in interviews both during and after their tempestuous marriage. “We’d be going round Australia, for instance, and all you could hear was, oh, she’s on the other side,” Diana disclosed in her bombshell 1995 “Panorama” interview (via PBS). “Now, if you’re a man, like my husband a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks.” In fact, Charles hated her for it. “He took it out on me — he was jealous,” she alleged in a personal recording from 2017’s “Diana: In Her Own Words” (via Express). “I understood the jealously, but I couldn’t explain that I didn’t ask for it.”
And yet, the future king was reportedly devastated when he learned of the fatal crash that took her life. Royal biographer Tina Brown claimed that Charles took it really hard in “Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors,” also in 2017, according to Town & Country magazine. Notably, his grief was compounded by the realization of what was coming next: “He knew, instantly, that this was going to be a terrible thing, that… he will be blamed, for the death of Diana.”
In light of Charles Spencer’s revelations, Diana’s fans are absolutely infuriated with Charles and they’re letting him have it on social media. “Too bad. [She] is posthumously [more] popular than him,” one user snarked on X. But not everybody was as quick to take the earl at face value. “I’ve never been a huge fan of Charles,” another penned on Reddit, referring to His Majesty. “But I have no doubt whatsoever that he did not say this.”
