Miscellaneous: Lady Diana Spencer Her Role in Life And Times
Lady Diana Spencer was born the Honourable Diana Frances Spencer, the fourth child and third daughter of the Earl and Countess Spencer. Lady Diana was born after the birth of a son and heir whose death left the family needing an heir. Lady Jane and Lady Sarah Spencer were already in school at that time. Growing up in a four story “winter home” had its own obligations. The wealthy Spencer earldom had expectations that a male child would continue the family line.
The Spencer family relationship with the Royal Family of Great Britain and the United Kingdom has evolved over centuries of service. A knighted sheep farmer buying a family estate, John Spencer of Warwickshire cemented a dynasty in the time of Henry VIII. The Spencers had become known as something of royal groupies down through the generations. The family estate home, Sandringham, was in fact monumental Royal pile leased from the Crown.
The next child born to the Countess, (nee Frances Shand Kydd) was a boy whose arrival made all things glorious. Diana’s father “Johnnie” Earl Spencer was delivered of an heir at last. The Earldom of Spencer ranged back in history to a descendant of Charles II, and many aristocratic marriages predated the family now living in the huge home at Sandringham Park. The death of Lady Diana’s grandfather in her teen years occasioned the rise in rank of all the children. Johnnie himself had in his younger years been a page at the court of Elizabeth II.
But history did not smile kindly on the marriage of Johnnie and Frances. Married at Westminster Abbey, the jovial earl and the famously attractive lady had seemed suited to last. Johnnie Spencer came into the Earldom and the family repaired to Althorp, a seriously elite country estate home. Unlimited wealth, new cars, hereditary jewelry, and stunning residences were theirs. Britain had emerged from the war years proud of its luxurious (and uxorious) Monarchy despite upcoming Labour strikes and Thatcher government. The upper crust continued though the 1950’s into the 1960’s with stiff rules regarding behavior, stiff upper lip characteristics and acceptable moral codes.
The social structure in the Britain postwar years and the generational mindset of the young Queen Elizabeth had bred a court of propriety and the mores of the late 1960's frowned on divorce. Yet when John Spencer was a very young infant, Diana’s first memory was of her mother’s footsteps crunching outside the gravel walk of their stunning ancestral home. The Countess was leaving the family. The famous scandal grew from a court divorce case where the mother of the children, the Countess Spencer attempted custody of her children.
The Baroness Fermoy, the children’s grandmother and a concert pianist, was Lady In Waiting to the Queen Mother. Lady Fermoy testified against the (Countess) daughter for the benefit of the Earl’s custody of the children. The Earl retained custody of all four children and Frances Spencer went to Australia to live with another man. The Earl in fact later remarried, a troubling fact to the children and an unwelcome intrusion into a splintered family dynamic. Memories of pranks, tantrums, and arguments while at home would become common.
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