In early 1978, a 23-year-old woman sat down to lunch in a London restaurant with two newspapermen and decided to tell them the truth. She was dating the Prince of Wales, and the country believed she would marry him. She told them she was not in love with him. She said she would not marry any man she did not love, whether he were the dustman or the king of England.
She spoke candidly about her drinking, an illness that had nearly starved her, and what she described as thousands of boyfriends. She mentioned almost lightly that she was keeping the newspaper clippings to show her grandchildren one day. Within weeks, the courtship was finished. The crown she refused that afternoon went instead to a schoolgirl of 16, who happened to be her own sister.
Lady Elizabeth Sarah Lavinia Spencer was born on 19 March 1955 at Park House on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. The house was rented from the crown, and the royal residence stood close by, which meant the Spencer and royal children grew up as winter neighbors. The family was already inside the royal world. Sarah’s godmother was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and her grandmother served as a lady-in-waiting to the same queen.
Sarah was the eldest of five children. She was followed by Jane in 1957, a brother John in 1960 who lived only hours, Diana in 1961, and Charles in 1964. When Sarah was 12, her mother left, and after a bitter custody fight, her father won the children, aided by his own mother-in-law, who gave evidence against her daughter in court. Sarah was sent to a preparatory school in Norfolk and then to West Heath in Kent.
She was known for her bluntness and physical fearlessness. Her brother once recalled a childhood row that ended with Sarah riding her horse straight through the front door of the house and halting it in the hall. Asked decades later whether age had softened her, he answered with a single word: “No. ”
Accounts differ on how she left school.
The polite version holds that she passed her examinations at 16 and went to work in London. A Sunday newspaper later reported she was expelled for drinking, a version repeated even by her brother. The drinking itself is beyond doubt because she described it herself, explaining she favored vodka because it was the one the staff could not smell on her. By 19, she had moved to London and taken charge of her own life.
She ran one of her father’s houses and took rent from tenants. Her younger sister Diana later came to work for her in a Chelsea flat, cleaning it for the same wages as the other daily helps. There was one more inheritance waiting for the eldest Spencer daughter: a pearl choker of five rows. Her younger sisters received plainer versions.
Those pearls would return at the exact moment the story turned. In the summer of 1977, Prince Charles noticed her. The introduction was made by his younger brother, Prince Andrew, at a house party. According to one standard biography, the first thing Charles ever said to her was to ask directly whether she had anorexia.
Sarah had struggled with the illness in her early twenties. She described breaking up with a boyfriend and simply stopping eating, toying with a couple of pieces of lettuce and bringing meals straight back up. The same illness would later take hold of Diana as well. The two sisters both suffered from it, a fact that is simply part of the record.
The courtship lasted about nine months. It unfolded at Royal Ascot, polo at Windsor Great Park, the theater, weekends at country houses, and an invitation to Balmoral from the Queen. In February 1978, there came a skiing holiday at Klosters in Switzerland, which the press chased but never fully pinned down. Sarah spoke openly about what life inside that world required.
She described the wardrobe for a single weekend at Windsor: a riding habit for the morning, a day dress for lunch, a skirt for tea, and a long dress for the evening. She said she always, always called him “sir. ” She also told reporters that the prince made his own dates and did not, as some claimed, arrange them through go-betweens. The height of her public profile arrived in mid-May 1978, when Time magazine ran a cover story about the man who would be king and placed her inside it.
The magazine told readers that Lady Sarah Spencer, willowy, red-haired, and 23, had spent a skiing holiday with the prince and insisted the two were only chums. By the time those words reached readers in America, the thing they described was already finished. Sarah had talked, and she had talked to precisely the wrong two people. Sometime in the early months of 1978, Sarah had lunch with two Fleet Street journalists, James Whitaker and Nigel Nelson, founding figures of the royal correspondence trade.
She was candid about the prince in a way no one in her position had ever dared to be on the record. She told them there was no chance of her marrying him. She was not in love with him, and she would not marry anyone she did not love, whether he were the dustman or the king of England. She also talked about the illness she had come through, said she had had thousands of boyfriends, spoke openly about past trouble with drink, and told them she was keeping a scrapbook of the newspaper clippings about her own royal romance so she could show her grandchildren one day.
The men concluded in print that her head seemed to have been turned by the publicity. The interview ran in Woman’s Own. Then Sarah showed the article to the prince herself. What Charles said is reported rather than recorded, and the exact wording is disputed, but by every telling he was infuriated.
The rebuke that has come down in one form or another is that she had done something incredibly stupid. The courtship dissolved within weeks. The usual telling says Sarah blew her one great chance, that she was a silly girl who chatted her way out of a crown she desperately wanted. But she was not cast aside by the palace.
She had walked out of the room herself, in print, saying she did not love him and would not marry him for all the crowns in England. There was also a private cost. A friend put it into words many years later: Sarah never forgave herself. Whenever the prince came up in conversation, she would chime in with the same small wounded line: “Of course, he was my boyfriend first.
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Before that lunch, while the romance was still alive, Sarah did one thing that could never be taken back. In November 1977, she invited Charles to Althorp for a weekend of shooting. Out on the estate, in the middle of a plowed field near a wood called Nobottle, the prince was introduced to Sarah’s younger sister. The girl was 16, home from school for the weekend.
According to Andrew Morton’s account, drawn from Diana’s own recollections, she cut a nondescript figure that day in a checked shirt, cords, and rubber boots, wearing her older sister’s anorak. Diana’s private verdict on the prince was not romantic at all. “What a sad man,” she thought. She was 16 and thoroughly unimpressed.
Within about two years of losing the prince, Sarah found a man of her own: Neil McCorquodale, a former officer of the Coldstream Guards and a farmer from Lincolnshire. The courtship was quick. There was a brief rupture in the middle of it, during which Neil flew to Australia to think things over before returning to her. She announced the engagement to her father while he was distracted by a game of cricket at Althorp.
On 17 May 1980, at the little church by the gates of Althorp, Sarah married her guards officer. It was said to be the first wedding held at Althorp in some 60 years. She wore the family tiara, the same Spencer tiara her youngest sister would wear at a far more famous wedding the following year. Sarah had chosen a quiet life on a farm in Lincolnshire, and she held on to it for the next 46 years.
Only four months after Sarah’s own wedding, the door she had opened in that plowed field swung wide. In the summer of 1980, Charles and Diana began to see each other. The engagement was announced on 24 February 1981. The morning after the whole world learned that Lady Diana Spencer would marry the Prince of Wales, a reporter reached Sarah.
Her answer has echoed for more than 40 years: “I introduced them. I’m Cupid. ” She told another paper the two were just right for each other and that she had known they were in love since just before Christmas, when she spotted an extra sparkle in her sister’s eye. Sarah was not among the bridesmaids at the wedding on 29 July 1981.
She attended as family. She wore her pearls that day, the five-row Spencer choker of the eldest daughter. After the ceremony, as the new Princess of Wales made ready to leave Buckingham Palace for her honeymoon, Sarah reached up, unclasped the pearls from her own throat, and gave them to Diana. The sister she gave them to would be dead within 16 years, and it would be Sarah who was sent to bring her home.
Diana died in Paris in the small hours of 31 August 1997. When the family had to choose who would fly out to bring her body back to Britain, two of the people who went were her elder sisters, Sarah and Jane, along with Charles himself. The details survive because the pilot later wrote them down. There was a standing plan for the grim possibility.
A flat floor was fitted into the rear hold, and ball bearings were set into it so a coffin could be moved without struggle. A separate transport plane flew a lead-lined coffin out to Paris. The Royal plane landed back at a Royal Air Force base outside London in the last minutes before seven in the evening. The most famous woman in the world came home in a specially rebuilt cargo hold, and her elder sister was aboard the plane.
Sarah has never described that flight in public. On the subject of the worst night her family ever passed through, she has kept a silence so complete that all that can honestly be done is note it and respect it. At the funeral in Westminster Abbey six days later, there were two readings given by the two surviving sisters. Sarah gave the first, a poem called “Turn Again to Life” by Mary Lee Hall, which asked the grieving not to keep long vigil by the silent dust but to turn again to life.
Her sister Jane gave the second reading, a different poem entirely. Sarah, according to the funeral’s own planners, had charge of the music, and it was she who asked Elton John to sing. For 20 years after that day, Sarah said almost nothing. Then in 2017, for one documentary and one only, she offered a few short sentences.
She had felt shock, she said, but did not think she had felt much beyond it. Just love and shock. She spoke of putting a barrier up inside herself so she could get on with the practical things. She also spoke of one thing that had never stopped troubling her: her sister had always been religious about putting on her seat belt, and Sarah said she would never know why she had not put it on that night.
Diana had made Sarah one of the executors of her will. When probate was granted, the sworn value of everything Diana left came to almost £22 million. Sarah, the sister who had walked away to a quiet farm, was now the keeper of the most famous fortune in Britain. The work brought trouble.
Diana had left a written note of wishes asking that a quarter of her personal possessions be set aside for her 17 godchildren, but a note of wishes in law is only a wish. Late in 1997, the executors went to court and obtained a variation that handed them full discretion. In the end, each godchild received a single selected keepsake rather than a share of the chattels. When the story surfaced years afterward, the reaction among the families involved was reported as shock and anger.
The court order itself is a matter of fact, and Sarah was one of the people who obtained it. Then came the affair that stands as the single greatest failure of her public life. Sarah was president of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which raised more than £120 million for charity across its life. Some £34 million came from the public and companies, with much more from the sale of the rewritten Elton John single.
The fund gave most of that money away and closed in 2012. But in the middle of its life, it walked into disaster. An American company began turning out Diana memorabilia without the fund’s blessing. The fund, together with the estate, sued the company in American courts to stop it, and lost.
A federal appeals court ruled against it in 2002 on the ground that British law recognized no such right for a dead person’s estate to claim. The company counter-sued for malicious prosecution, naming the fund’s trustees personally, Lady Sarah McCorquodale among them. In 2003, the fund announced it was legally obliged to freeze its grants. Payments to more than 120 organizations were suspended, including the clearing of landmines, the very cause Diana had made her own.
The case was settled in 2004, with the fund paying out something on the order of £13. 5 million to bring it to an end. Sources differ on the precise figures. Through the whole ordeal, Sarah said not one public word.
In 2009, she was appointed high sheriff of Lincolnshire, the old ceremonial county office, for a single year. Her husband had held the same post more than 20 years before her. It is the only public office she has ever held. In the winter of 2008, she was called to give evidence at the inquest into her sister’s death.
She spoke of Diana’s fear that a yacht had been bugged. She spoke of a last telephone call in which her sister was badly upset over a newspaper article about landmines, so upset that Sarah had privately concluded the romance with Dodi Fayed did not have much longer to run. She dismissed talk of an engagement and of a pregnancy. She also answered the suggestion that she had destroyed her sister’s papers, saying she and her mother had got rid of some private letters and notes of a certain kind because she did not want the two boys ever to come across them, but nothing of any history had been destroyed.
In that same inquest, Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, laid out an alleged conspiracy to murder Diana. The list of those he accused was long, sweeping in a prince, a prime minister, an intelligence service, and among them, Diana’s own sister, Sarah. It came to nothing. The inquest found that Diana had been unlawfully killed by the reckless driving of her own car and the cars that chased it, and found no conspiracy of any kind.
But the woman who had flown to Paris to carry her sister home now stood in a courtroom and heard herself named in a plot to kill the sister she had buried. For nearly 50 years, the world has told one story about Sarah Spencer, and the story is wrong. The story it tells is a punchline: the sister who blew it, the girl who chatted her way out of a crown and handed it gift-wrapped to Diana, the one who must have spent her days eaten alive with envy. But read it forward, the way she actually lived it out.
She was the only woman in that entire generation of royal girlfriends who ever told the plain truth about what the whole business was really like from the inside. Her reward for telling it was to be recast forever as the one who failed. The institution that decided Sarah Spencer was not suitable to marry into it never actually let her go. She was made an executor of her sister’s estate, president of the charity built out of her sister’s death, and a witness in a courtroom about her sister’s belongings, and a name in a fantasy about her sister’s killing.
Decade after decade, she performed unpaid, unhonored, and almost entirely silent service to a family that had judged her unfit to join it. There is no title of her own, no decoration of any kind. There is only the work. She dated him first.
She brought him home and introduced him to the girl he would one day marry. She stood in the newspaper the morning after the engagement and claimed the introduction with a smile. And then she spent the rest of her life as the keeper of the marriage she had sparked and of the death that finally ended it. The record leaves one small private line.
Whenever the prince came up in conversation, even in her later years, Sarah would still quietly enter her claim. “Of course,” she would say, “he was my boyfriend first. ” She said it without any pride, in a voice smaller and sadder than a boast. She never wanted the crown.
She said so out loud, cheerfully, at a lunch, and the world has spent the 50 years since refusing to believe a single word of it.