The late Princess Diana‘s brother, Charles Spencer, claims the loss of her HRH styling following her divorce from then-Prince Charles ultimately had an unexpected silver lining — preventing the royal family from having the final say over where she would be laid to rest, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
Spencer, 62, claims in his new memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, that Queen Elizabeth II had a specific plan for where she wanted her former daughter-in-law to be buried, but the Spencer family was able to take control of her final resting place.
“After Diana’s death, the Queen said she wanted Diana’s coffin to be placed in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle, where princes and princesses generally end up,” Spencer pens about the days following the late Princess of Wales’s death on August 31, 1997, in a horrific Paris car crash.
He continues, “But my family was determined that Diana must come home to Althorp. We knew she would have wanted to do so. Besides, having had her HRH title removed as part of the package of humiliation handed to her at her divorce, almost a year to the day before her death, Diana was no longer eligible for royal Frogmore.”
When Diana and Charles divorced in 1996, she lost her HRH styling as part of the settlement.
She was able to retain her title of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the humiliating downgrade reflected her new reality following the divorce: she was no longer married to the future king and had lost her official role within the royal fold.
“The removal of Diana’s title had hurt her. The loss was designed to emphasize to her, and the world, that her royal days were over,” Spencer writes. “She, who had been recognized around the world as such a singular asset to the Royal Family (apart from by some of that institution’s more jealous members) should, they believed, just accept that she had been returned to the ranks as a commoner.”
Spencer further notes that despite the pain the loss of HRH caused Diana when she was alive, it allowed her family to have more control over her burial.
“At least this pettiness helped to save her from some meaningless burial plot in Frogmore.”
Spencer learned that Diana stated in her will that she wanted her body buried intact and not be cremated.
As for Diana’s final resting place, her brother was determined to find somewhere safe and protected after mourners and sightseers overwhelmed the tiny church near the family’s ancestral Althorp estate, where generations of Spencers had been laid to rest in the family crypt.
“The question remained for me: where to put my much-mourned sister so I could protect her for eternity?” he writes. “I decided that she could most easily be kept safe behind the walls that had given Althorp its privacy for hundreds of years. The site of her grave would have to be somewhere close to the House, for security, and so it could be easily visited by our family.”
Ultimately, Spencer decided on an island in Althorp’s Round Oval lake, which “quickly struck me as the perfect spot. It was Diana’s favorite place in the grounds, and its water formed a ready-made moat.”
The late princess was laid to rest there on September 6, 1997, after her royal ceremonial funeral in London’s Westminster Abbey.
