Charles Spencer remembers the exact moment at his sister Princess Diana’s funeral that he realised his duty towards her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
Speaking on Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud podcast, the 9th Earl Spencer reflected on the lead-up to his unforgettable eulogy at Diana’s 1997 funeral, sharing that he initially didn’t plan to speak.
“I wrote something very different,” he said. “I flew back — I was living in South Africa — I flew back from Cape Town overnight. Very, very sweet stewardess helping me because I was in bits.”
After failing to find someone else to give the eulogy, Spencer said he called his mother from Heathrow and admitted, “I can't think who's going to give the eulogy. And I've got an awful feeling it's going to have to be me.” His mother replied, “Well it is going to be you. Your sisters and I have decided it.”
Spencer recalled scrapping his first “very traditional” draft and realising “my job actually wasn't to do that, but it was almost to speak for her.”
He added, “I knew she left me as guardian of her sons. Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me. That sort of duty, I think. And then I wrote it in an hour and a half.”
Spencer has previously opened up about how difficult delivering the eulogy was. Speaking to People magazine on the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, he revealed he was “looking directly at William and Harry across her coffin” as he read the speech.
“In the final paragraph I had run out of energy, almost out of oxygen. I had to punch each syllable out of the base of my stomach,” he recalled.
But that feeling paled in comparison to the half an hour before that, where Prince William and Prince Harry had to walk behind Diana’s coffin at her funeral procession.
“It was the most horrifying half an hour of my life. It was just ghastly,” he once said on Radio 4’s Today programme.
