The late Queen dramatically offered to restore Princess Diana‘s royal title on the day of her funeral, a bombshell book claims.
Earl Spencer describes in his explosive memoir – being exclusively serialised by the Daily Mail – how Queen Elizabeth proposed handing back his sister’s Her Royal Highness title, which she controversially lost when she divorced Prince Charles.
The earl was told of the extraordinary offer by Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s Private Secretary and his brother-in-law, as they travelled by Royal Train to Diana’s private burial at Althorp, the Spencer family’s 13,000-acre estate in Northamptonshire.
Writing in Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, the earl, 62, said Diana was ‘dreadfully hurt’ by the ‘petty and vindictive’ removal of her HRH title a year earlier and that despite the Queen’s ‘well-meaning’ gesture, he decided to reject the ‘consolation prize’.
‘I felt that I knew in my bones how she would view this posthumous award,’ he writes. ‘That’s very kind of the Queen, of course. But what’s the point, Robert? Now? I mean – Diana’s dead.’
The revelation comes as the Mail today publishes its first astonishing extract from Charles Spencer‘s devastating memoir.
The book has sent shockwaves through the Royal Family. Earl Spencer’s incendiary claim that – days after Diana’s death in a car crash – Prince Charles said: ‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough’, triggered a war of words yesterday.
The earl’s description of Charles’s alleged outburst prompted an extraordinary statement from the Palace, with royal aides questioning the veracity of his account and suggesting that grief can ‘cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory’.
The late Queen Elizabeth paid tribute to Diana on September 5, 1997 – after the Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash
Charles and Diana are seen visiting Venice during their trip to Italy in May 1985
Earl Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry and then Prince Charles stand outside Westminster Abbey on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral
The response echoed Queen Elizabeth’s famous ‘recollections may vary’ retort to Harry and Meghan after their interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021.
Royal commentators said the strength of the intervention showed the King was ‘absolutely incandescent’ with Earl Spencer. In today’s extract, the earl claims:
- Diana told her father she could not go through with the marriage to Prince Charles a month before the wedding – but he told her it was ‘impossible to pull out’;
- The day before the wedding Charles told Diana that while he was happy to marry her, he was not in love with her;
- Diana was so unhappy that she considered suicide and drove herself ‘more than once’ to Beachy Head cliffs in East Sussex;
- Charles sounded ‘giddily elated – like a lottery winner’ shortly after Diana’s death.
Announcing the book last month, Earl Spencer said that, ahead of the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death next year, he wanted to write down his own thoughts and memories ‘rather than having the discomfort of again reading the opinions of others’.
The Mail has learnt that Prince Harry was aware of his uncle’s memoir but has not read it and was not briefed on its explosive contents, despite staying at Althorp this summer.
Diana lost her HRH title after her divorce in August 1996 and was instead styled Diana, Princess of Wales.
Describing the Queen’s offer, made just hours after he delivered his defiant eulogy at Diana’s funeral, Earl Spencer writes: ‘When we had gone some miles, Robert beckoned me to follow him into a quiet corner of the carriage.
‘I have just received a call from Her Majesty …and she would like to offer Diana her HRH title back.’ Mr Fellowes died in 2024.
The earl later wondered whether he was right to reject the offer, and that ‘maybe Diana would have seen some point in having HRH carved on her tombstone’.
The Earl, Diana and Charles at the Earl’s 21st birthday party in 1985 at the Mirabelle restaurant in London
The front cover of Charles Spencer’s book ‘Swan Song, Diana: My Sister’
But he said he ‘had no doubt that the consolation prize was hollow, however well-meaning the Queen’s gesture’, adding: ‘The title should never have been removed during her life, in which case it would not have been necessary to offer it to her in death.’
The memoir provides, for the first time, Earl Spencer’s insight into his sister’s deeply unhappy 15-year marriage and the then Prince of Wales’s love for her rival Camilla.
He recalls that on the day of Diana’s magnificent wedding in July 1981, he visited her at Clarence House where he found her ‘sitting quietly in front of a mirror’.
‘Only much later would I discover that, as she confided to a close friend, her husband-to-be had told her the previous day that she needed to know that he was very happy to marry her, but he was not actually in love with her,’ he writes.
Royal watchers were stunned by the Palace’s highly unusual response to Earl Spencer’s book.
In the statement, released on Wednesday night, it said: ‘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 colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.’
One royal aide later described the earl’s account to the BBC as a ‘demonstrably untrue claim’ about a deeply compassionate man.
Julian Payne, the King’s former communications secretary, yesterday said the King had told staff never to criticise Diana for years after her death.
Mr Payne, who worked for the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall for five years from 2016, including during the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘He was absolutely emphatic that we were to respect her memory and not undermine it in any way.’
The Palace declined to comment on the earl’s further claims last night.
