In November 1977, a young woman took her boyfriend to her family home at Althorp for a shooting weekend. The boyfriend was the Prince of Wales. Somewhere in a ploughed field near Nobottle Wood, she introduced him to her 16-year-old sister. That sister was Diana.
Three years later, on the morning after the engagement was announced, she told a newspaper reporter exactly who was responsible. The words she chose were: “I introduced them. I’m Cupid.”
She had him first. She lit the fuse herself. And she would live long enough to fly to Paris in the dark and bring her sister’s body home.
This is the story of Lady Sarah Spencer, the woman Charles loved before Diana.
The house their mother left
Sarah Spencer was 12 years old the year her mother packed a bag in Norfolk and did not come back. She was born on 19 March 1955 at Park House on the Sandringham estate. That address is the first thing to understand about her, because it explains why almost nothing in this story is ordinary.
Park House belonged to the Queen. The Spencers rented it from her estate. The family lived there because the Crown allowed it, in a 10-bedroom house close enough to the big house that the Spencer children and the royal children were neighbours before any of them could read.
Her full name was Elizabeth Sarah Lavinia Spencer. Her godmother was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth Roche, Baroness Fermoy, was a lady-in-waiting and close friend of that same Queen Mother. Her brother Charles, born nine years after her, would be a godson of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Spencers were not a family that entered the royal orbit by marriage. They already stood inside it, holding the coats.
Her father was Edward John Spencer, known in the family as Johnny, then Viscount Althorp and heir to the earldom of Spencer. Her mother was Frances Ruth Burke Roche of the Fermoy family. It was a perfect marriage by every measure that counted in the 1950s.
Sarah was the eldest surviving child. Jane came in February 1957. Then on 12 January 1960, a boy named John was born and died within about 10 hours. Diana was born on 1 July 1961. Charles arrived in May 1964.
The house Sarah grew up in had produced an heir who lived as long as a working day, then two more daughters, and only then the son the estate required. Four surviving children in nine years. One dead infant in 1960. Two daughters before him, two children after.
In 1967, when Sarah was 12, Frances left. She left for Peter Shand Kydd, heir to a wallpaper fortune, whom she had met the previous year. She went to London and took the two youngest children with her for a time. At Christmas that year, her husband refused to let them return with her.
The divorce came in 1969. Custody of all four children was granted to the father. It was granted partly because Ruth, Lady Fermoy, went to court and testified against her own daughter. The children’s grandmother helped strip them from their mother.
There are accounts of why Frances left, and they must be taken as claims rather than proven facts. Biographer Penny Junor wrote that Johnny was violent and that Frances felt she and the children would be safer outside the home. Diana’s own memory, told years later and repeated endlessly since, was of seeing her father slap her mother’s face and hiding behind the door while her mother cried.
Neither claim has ever been verified. Both have haunted the family for half a century.
What is not in dispute is what the separation did to the house. Charles Spencer has described the aftermath in blunt terms. He and Diana, the two youngest, clung to each other and were often left in that empty house while the older sisters were at school. He said Diana would wait at the door, hoping.
That was not Sarah’s position. She was not the child left waiting at the door. She was the child old enough to understand exactly what had happened, and old enough to be kept away from it. She was 12 when her mother left, still a schoolgirl when the court decided, and away at boarding school during most of both events.
Sarah Spencer never gave a personal account of any of it. Not 1967, not the custody case, not her grandmother’s testimony. In nearly 70 years, she has never described in the record how it felt to be the eldest Spencer child in the year the family fell apart.
What can be known is what she did next. What she did next was behave for a decade like a girl who had decided no one would control her again. She drank alcohol at school and said so later. She ran a house at 19 and collected the rent herself. She met the heir to the throne and told a magazine exactly what she thought of him.
The girl the staff could not smell
She drank vodka at boarding school for one reason, and she stated it out loud years later: the staff could not smell it. Her education followed the pattern every Spencer daughter followed. First Riddlesworth Hall in Norfolk, a preparatory school for young girls. Then West Heath, a girls’ boarding school near Sevenoaks in Kent, which Jane attended after her and Diana after that.
Three sisters, one school, one set of teachers who watched all three pass through in turn.
How Sarah left West Heath is the first real fork in her story, and both versions are in circulation. The tidy version is that she left at 16 after passing O-levels and went to work in London. Clean, unremarkable, an ordinary departure for a girl of her class.
The other version comes from a newspaper investigation published on 20 July 2003, which stated plainly that she was expelled from West Heath for drinking vodka, and that by that time she was not touching anything stronger than cola. That is one source, a popular journalistic one, and it should be classified as such. But it has been repeated for more than 20 years. In October 2025, her brother referred in passing during a podcast to her expulsion from school. When the current Earl Spencer treats something as fact about his sister, it stops being gossip and becomes family memory.
What is beyond dispute is her own account of the drinking, because she gave it herself. Asked about her school days, she said she would drink anything. Whisky, Cointreau, gin, sherry, and often vodka, she said, because the staff could not smell it.
That sentence sums up her entire personality. There is no shame in it and no apology. It is a technical explanation, delivered with delight, of how she solved a problem. A schoolgirl in Kent worked out which drink left no trace, and years later told a journalist about it because he asked and because she saw no reason to lie.
Her next step is documented and striking for a girl of her background. She moved to London at about 19 and started working. Her own description of that period survives, given to a biographer years later. She said that by 19 she was living in London and working at a very good job. Her father owned a house that she managed, and she had tenants. She took the money from them. Not an estate agency. Not an agent. She collected the rent.
A viscount’s daughter, 19 years old in London in 1974, managing a property, renting rooms, chasing rents, paying bills. Her class did not encourage that. Girls like Sarah Spencer were expected to take a cookery course, work briefly for a family friend, then marry. She was running a house and describing it decades later with visible pride.
There is one detail from that period no screenwriter could invent. In the late 1970s, Sarah shared a flat in Chelsea, and her younger sister Diana worked for her as a cleaner. Diana was paid the same wages as the other daily women. The future Princess of Wales was cleaning her older sister’s floors for an hourly rate, and Sarah, as ever, saw nothing strange in it at all.
That is the domestic dynamic on which the rest of this story rests. Sarah was nine years older than Charles and six years older than Diana. Practically speaking, she was the adult among the siblings long before any of them were adults. She had the flat. She had the job. She had the tenants and the confidence and the vocabulary. Diana had a bucket.
Do you have anorexia?
The first thing the heir to the throne ever said to her was a question about her body. The reason he asked it goes back to the two years before that party, because a great deal changed in the Spencer family between 1975 and 1977. Almost none of it was good.
On 9 June 1975, Sarah’s grandfather, Albert Spencer, the 7th Earl Spencer, died. Her father succeeded to the earldom the same day. The children’s titles changed with his. The Honourable Sarah Spencer, 20 years old, became Lady Sarah Spencer.
The family left Park House and the Sandringham estate for Althorp in Northamptonshire. Althorp is not a house in the sense Park House was. It is the Spencer seat, standing since 1508, with about 90 rooms set in a 550-acre park, approached through the village of Great Brington. It came with tenants, agents, staff, a parish church at its gates, and five centuries of obligations.
Then on 14 July 1976, her father remarried without telling his children. Raine, Countess Dartmouth, was the only daughter of the novelist Barbara Cartland from her first marriage. The relationship with Johnny Spencer had begun in 1973. The wedding took place at a London register office. None of his four children were invited. None were told. They read about it in the newspapers.
Sarah, the eldest daughter, was the one who confirmed to the press that they had not been invited. That single act tells you everything about her position in the family. She was 21. She was the eldest sister. When her father publicly insulted his children, she was the one who spoke about it officially.
Meanwhile, in the same period, illness arrived. Sarah suffered from anorexia nervosa in her early twenties. This is documented. The most detailed account exists in only one place: a 2003 newspaper article. It must be treated as the only source that exists. According to that account, she had just come out of an intense relationship with Gerald Grosvenor, later the 6th Duke of Westminster, which sent her into depression and anorexia. The article stated that her weight dropped to under six stone, about 38 kilograms. Within weeks of meeting Charles, she entered a clinic for eating disorders.
Under six stone means under 84 pounds. For a woman described in the press of the time as slim, that is a hospitalisation number.
Her own words about it survive from the following year, and they were blunt and unsparing. She said she broke up with her boyfriend, then simply stopped eating. She would toy with two pieces of lettuce, and if she forced herself to eat a meal, she would vomit it immediately.
There is no date for the diagnosis. No name for the clinic. No duration for the stay and no date for recovery. No statement from her about the illness at any time after 1978. One contemporary disclosure and one retrospective reconstruction written a quarter of a century later. Everything else is silence.
This, then, is the young woman who walked into a party at Windsor Castle during Royal Ascot in June 1977. She was 22, recently and seriously ill, publicly humiliated by her father’s marriage, intelligent, funny, spontaneous, and interesting in a way the polished girls around her were not.
Prince Andrew introduced them. His elder brother was 28, turning 29 that November. The first thing Charles said to her, according to biographer Sarah Bradford, was a question. “Do you have anorexia?”
Whatever that exchange was, it was not a conventional beginning. He asked on meeting about the illness her entire world knew she had. The record does not preserve her reply. What the record preserves is his opinion of her afterwards.
Bradford records that Charles enjoyed Sarah’s vitality and her daring sense of humour, and that they laughed together. Tina Brown, writing later, described what Sarah got out of that relationship in equally clear terms. She enjoyed being escorted everywhere by him and enjoyed the glittering invitations to Windsor and Balmoral.
For nearly nine months, from mid-1977 to spring 1978, Lady Sarah Spencer was the most watched young woman in Britain and the favourite in the only race the British press cared about. She was also, unknown to anyone including herself, five months from taking him home to meet her family.
A suitcase for one weekend
One weekend at Windsor required riding clothes for the morning, a day dress for lunch, a skirt for tea, and a long dress for dinner. That inventory is not a historian’s reconstruction. It is Sarah Spencer herself, in her own voice, and it is the most valuable thing she ever said because no other woman of that generation of royal friends left a description of the machinery from the inside.
The season began in mid-June 1977 at a house party during Royal Ascot. Within weeks, photographers had her. There she is in June of that year at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park. Charles stands beside her in riding clothes, both squinting slightly in the sun. There she is again in the garden later that summer.
The photographs are not intimate. They are the standard product of a standard arrangement, which was that the Prince of Wales played polo on summer afternoons and any young woman he was dating stood at the rail and was photographed doing so.
What she did with her season was unusual. She was forthcoming. Then she described it. She said he made his own dates, and she was careful to correct the other prevailing belief, that the asking was done for him through third parties. He did it himself.
She said a weekend at Windsor Castle required a full suitcase. Then she listed the contents, morning to night: riding clothes, a day dress, a skirt, a long dress. And she said, almost in passing, that she always called him “Sir.” Always, she said.
This was a young woman who hid vodka from her boarding school teachers, confirmed to the press that her father had excluded his children from his wedding, and cheerfully admitted to dating thousands of men. Yet she called the man she was dating “Sir.”
That detail should stop you, because it is the precise point where romance meets the royal institution. He was not just a boyfriend who happened to be royal. He was the Crown in riding boots, and every woman who approached him had to handle that fact in her own way. Sarah’s way was one syllable of deference she never dropped.
The season had a shape and a calendar. Polo through the summer, theatre in London, a round of country house parties through the autumn, and the great weekend circuits of that world, where the same families took turns visiting each other’s houses for shooting, dining, and marriage. An invitation to Balmoral from the Queen herself, which in that house was not merely a social gesture but a signal. Invitations to Windsor. And in February 1978, a skiing holiday in Klosters, Switzerland.
She was 22. He was 28, heir to the throne, unmarried, under national pressure to change that. The British press had formed its first real royal pack around him, assigning reporters on expenses whose only job was to determine which of these women would become queen. In June 1977, for the first time, the pack settled on Spencer.
They settled on her for a reason that had nothing to do with romance. Theoretically, no young woman in England was better positioned. Her family had lived on the Queen’s own estates for years. Her grandmother had served the Queen Mother. Her godmother was the Queen Mother. There was no gap between the Spencers and the Crown for anyone to jump.
Nothing in the records suggests he was in love with her. Published accounts describe amusement rather than passion. He enjoyed her wit. She made him laugh. She enjoyed being escorted by him and accepting the invitations. Time magazine, reporting the following spring, described the skiing holiday with the careful qualification that she had been there with Charles and other friends in a Swiss chalet, and noted her insistence that they were just companions.
And yet there is the plain fact that she received an invitation to Balmoral from the Queen. In that family, such invitations were not casual. There is also the assessment, written years later, that at 23, Sarah, not the 17-year-old Diana, was the one who looked like a future bride for the Prince of Wales. She was the one he was courting.
Both things appear to be true. She was the favourite, and there is no evidence he loved her. In that world, in that decade, there was no contradiction between those two statements at all. Marriages of this kind were still arranged in substance if not in form, and being suitable mattered more than being loved.
The stepmother nobody told them about
Her father remarried in July 1976, and his children learned of it from the newspapers. Nothing that happened between Charles and Sarah can be understood without grasping the war going on inside her own house at the same time. The two ran in parallel, month by month.
The register office wedding in London on 14 July 1976 was the first step. Johnny Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer, married Raine, Countess Dartmouth, without informing any of his four children. Sarah was 21, Jane 19, Diana 15, Charles 12. They learned of it from the press.
Raine was a formidable woman, and she was not remotely ashamed of it. Her mother was the novelist Barbara Cartland, who lived to 98. Her first husband had been the Earl of Dartmouth. She arrived at Althorp and set about restoring it. The way she did it was what the children never forgave.
To fund the restoration, the contents of the house were sold. Van Dycks and Gainsboroughs, furniture, silver, family documents left the house, replaced by gilt paint and new wallpaper. Charles Spencer judged the result, years later, as vulgar as a wedding cake in a five-star hotel in Monaco.
The children’s nickname for their stepmother was “Acid Raine,” and they used it for the rest of her life. One house guest who stayed at Althorp in 1977, when Sarah, Jane, and Diana were at home, described the atmosphere to a biographer in a single sentence. At the family dinners he attended, the sisters did not speak one word to their stepmother. Not one word.
Three young women in their teens and twenties, in a 90-room house, enforcing a silence so total that a guest who witnessed it was still describing it decades later. That is the family Sarah invited the Prince of Wales to join.
Then, in 1978, the war produced a casualty. The Earl Spencer suffered a severe cerebral haemorrhage. At one point he was not expected to survive, and he spent eight months in hospital. Raine nursed him, and the nursing gave her control of the door to his room. Diana’s account of that period is one of the harshest things she ever said about her stepmother. “Raine basically prevented them from going into the hospital. She wouldn’t let them see their father.”
Look at that year from Sarah’s perspective. She is 23. Her love affair with the heir to the throne is ending or has just ended. Her father is unconscious on a hospital bed and may not live. The woman standing between her and the bed is the stepmother the family sat through dinners in silence with. Her mother has remarried and lives elsewhere, having lost custody nine years earlier. Her youngest brother, the boy who will inherit the house, is barely a teenager.
The records do not say how she felt about any of it. She never described that year. What is documented is the year itself, and you can do the maths.
Her mother’s position in all this deserves a sentence because it explains why there was nowhere for the children to go. Frances Shand Kydd lost custody of all four children in 1969. She was not an absent mother by choice after that. She was excluded by court order, and the person whose testimony helped exclude her was her own mother. So when Raine arrived at Althorp in 1976, there was no alternative home for the Spencer children and no adult woman in their lives with the standing to object on their behalf. There was Raine, and there was the silence at the dinner table, and that was all.
The ploughed field
In November 1977, she invited him to Althorp, and her sister came home from school for the weekend. This is the scene around which all of modern royal history turns, and it took about a minute.
The occasion was a shooting day on the estate. November in Northamptonshire is pheasant country. The beaters work the coverts, and the guns walk the edges of the fields. The Prince of Wales was there as Lady Sarah Spencer’s guest. He was 28, turning 29 that month. She was 22. It was, in every respect, an ordinary piece of that world’s furniture. A girl showing her boyfriend the family home.
Her sister Diana was 16, home from West Heath for the weekend.
The fullest account of what happened comes from Andrew Morton, written with Diana’s cooperation years later, and his phrasing is the one to use. That historic meeting in November 1977 was not auspicious. Diana, on holiday from her school, was introduced to the Prince in the middle of a ploughed field near Nobottle Wood in the Althorp estate during a shooting day.
Morton wrote that she looked like an ordinary character in her checked shirt, her sister’s jacket, corduroy trousers, and wellington boots.
Her sister’s jacket. The most photographed woman of the 20th century met her husband wearing a coat borrowed from the woman he had come to see. It is the kind of detail no screenwriter would dare invent. It is in the record. It is exact.
Diana came home from school for the country weekend and wore what hung by the door. What hung by the door belonged to Sarah.
Diana’s own verdict on him, in her reported words, was four clipped words. “God, what a sad man.” No excitement. No teenage swoon. A 16-year-old looked at the heir to the throne standing in a wet Northamptonshire field and felt sorry for him.
That evening there was dinner in the house. Afterwards there was dancing. Diana’s account of it is one of the most quoted things she ever said. She stayed out of sight, she said. She remembered being a fat, podgy girl, no make-up, not smart. But she was noisy, and he liked that. He came over after dinner and they danced a long dance. He loved it.
Charles’s own memories, given publicly when he and Diana announced their engagement, mirror that. He remembered thinking what a jolly, amusing, attractive girl she was at 16. Great fun, he said. Bouncy and full of life and everything.
Now put those two accounts side by side and bring Sarah into the room. She brought him. She was the reason he was in the house at all. She was 22, recently seriously ill, in the middle of the most watched courtship in Britain, in a house where she and her sisters did not speak to their stepmother. And after dinner, in front of everyone, the Prince of Wales crossed the room to dance with the noisy 16-year-old in the borrowed coat.
Set the ages, because the maths of that field is the maths of everything that followed. Sarah was 22, born March 1955. Diana was 16, born July 1961, still at school. Charles was 28, turning 29 on the 14th of that month. Jane, the middle sister, was 20, five months from her wedding. The house they stood in had belonged to the family since 1508. Within four years, one of the three sisters would marry the man in the field, the second would marry the Queen’s assistant private secretary, and the third would marry a Lincolnshire farmer.
What Sarah felt in that moment is the most tempting blank in this entire story, and it should stay blank. She never described that evening. Not in 1978 when she was talking freely to journalists. Not in 1981 when she spoke to the Guardian. Not in 2017 when she sat for a documentary about her sister’s death. No quotes. No testimony from anyone else who was in the room. The most emotionally charged moment of her life is entirely silent in the record.
What can be said is what she did next, which was nothing. There is no hint in any account that she objected or intervened or thought about it at all. Diana was a schoolgirl. Charles was 28. The idea that a dance after dinner with a 16-year-old was the beginning of anything would have seemed absurd to any adult in that house.
For nearly three years, it was. Because that is the part the retellings always miss. Nothing happened in November 1977. Charles did not fall in love in a ploughed field. He kept seeing Sarah into the next year. He went skiing with her in February. Diana went back to school and then to Switzerland. That meeting did not become a fact of family history until 1980, when it was summoned from the past and turned into an origin point.
But it happened. And it happened for one reason. A young woman wanted to show a man her family, her house, and the fields her family had owned for 500 years. There is no calculation in that. It is the most ordinary motive there is. She opened the door herself.
Klosters and the lunch that was booked in advance
In February 1978 she went skiing with him in Switzerland, and within weeks she sat down with two journalists. The Klosters holiday is the last documented moment of Charles and Sarah together, and the photograph taken then is what printed her in the public mind for the rest of her life. Snow, a group of friends, a chalet in the Swiss Alps, and the Prince of Wales on holiday with the red-haired Spencer girl.
The records of that trip are thinner than its fame. Time magazine, reporting three months later, described her as slim, red-haired, and 23, and noted that she had spent a skiing holiday with Charles and other friends the previous winter in a Swiss chalet. The magazine added that she insisted they were just friends.
Just friends. In February she was with him on a mountain. By May, a national magazine was telling its readers, on her word, that there was nothing between them.
The names of the rest of that group are not recorded in any available source. Neither is the name of the chalet. Neither are the exact dates. Who exactly was in that chalet in February 1978 is simply not on the record.
What matters about Klosters is timing, because the interview that ended everything took place in early 1978, which means it happened within weeks of that holiday and possibly right after it. That chronology is worth sitting with.
The comfortable version of this story, circulated for 40 years, is that the romance was already dying and the interview was merely the formal announcement of its death. The evidence does not support that. The evidence shows them photographed together on a mountain in February, and shows her sitting with Fleet Street journalists in the same season. Nobody has produced a source saying it was over before she spoke.
So the question this chapter has to ask is the one nobody has ever answered. Why did she do it?
Whatever the answer, the result is that Sarah Spencer is the only woman of that entire generation of royal girlfriends who left a personal account of what the courtship was actually like. Every other young woman photographed beside Charles in those years said nothing at the time and has said nothing since. The surviving details of how the heir to the throne ran a courtship in the 1970s, the dates he made himself, the suitcase, the single syllable of deference, exist because one of them talked and was destroyed for it.
The mechanics of how it happened are documented. She agreed to lunch with two journalists at a London restaurant. They were James Whitaker and Nigel Nelson, and neither’s presence was an accident. Whitaker was one of the founding figures of the modern royal press pack, a man who spent his entire career chasing that family. In 1978 he worked for the Sun. He would later join the Daily Star at its launch the following year, then the Daily Mirror after that. He died in 2012. Nelson was a Fleet Street political and royal correspondent.
Here is an important correction, because the story is almost always told wrong. The interview did not appear in a tabloid. It appeared in Woman’s Own magazine, which Time confirmed in May 1978, introducing its excerpts by saying that in an interview with Woman’s Own she had given a rare and intimate look at the bachelor Prince.
The magazine matters as much as the men. Woman’s Own was a women’s magazine. Of all the publications a young woman of her class might choose to speak to, it was the most respectable, the most domestic, the least threatening. That is probably why she spoke. She was not selling a story to a tabloid. She was chatting to a nice magazine that her mother’s friends read.
That is the trap modern journalism had just finished building, and Sarah Spencer was one of the first people to fall into it. The distinction she was relying on, between a respectable women’s weekly and a serious news operation, no longer existed by 1978. Once a quote was in print anywhere, it reached the wire services within hours, every national newspaper by the next morning, and the permanent record forever. The two men at the table knew that. She did not.
The Spencers had been close to the throne for generations precisely by saying nothing. Her grandmother had served the Queen Mother for decades. The entire survival technology of that world was silence. Sarah, who had spent her adolescence proving no one could control her, had never learned to use that silence.
The lunch went ahead. She was, in the phrase of one of them later, impressively frank about her boyfriend. The name of the restaurant is not recorded in any surviving account. The exact date is unrecorded. The publication date is unrecorded. What is recorded is what she said, and she said it in sentences that have outlived every other word spoken about that relationship by anyone.
She was about to explain, for the benefit of the readers of a weekly women’s magazine, her exact opinion of the future King of England. Whether he was a dustman or the King of England, she told them, she was not in love with him. Then she told them exactly how little the throne had to do with it.
The words survive because Time printed them on 15 May 1978, in a cover story about the man who would be king, and contemporary publication is the best evidence anyone has.
Sarah said: “Charles makes me laugh a great deal.” “I really enjoy being with him.” Then, firmly, she finished the rest. “There is no chance of my marrying him.” “I am not in love with him.” “And I will not marry anyone I do not love, whether he is a dustman or the King of England.”
A great deal has been built on those three sentences, and most of it is wrong. The first expresses affection. She liked him, and she said so plainly, in print, in a women’s magazine. The second is a categorical denial of the one thing everyone wanted to know. The third is the one that has outlived her. It is not a rejection of Charles at all. It is a statement of principle about marriage, made by a 23-year-old woman in 1978, that she would not marry a man she did not love, regardless of what he owned or would inherit.
Read as evidence of character, it is impressive. Read as an act of public relations, it was suicide.
She did not stop there. In the same conversation, she discussed her anorexia nervosa and confirmed she had been diagnosed with it. She said she had been involved with, in her phrase, “thousands of boyfriends.” She talked about a previous problem with alcohol. She described the school drinking, the whisky, Cointreau, gin, sherry, and the vodka she chose because the staff could not smell it. She told them about the scrapbook she kept to show her grandchildren.
She also handed them information about him. That he made his own dates, not through third parties as some said. That a weekend at Windsor Castle required a suitcase: riding clothes for the morning, a day dress for lunch, a skirt for tea, and a long dress for dinner. That she always called him “Sir.”
And her assessment of the man himself, which is the smartest sentence anyone said about the Prince of Wales in that decade. She said he was a romantic who fell in love easily.
Count what she put on the table in one lunch. One eating disorder. One drinking problem. Thousands of boyfriends. One scrapbook. One denial of love for the heir to the throne. One description of the inside of Windsor Castle. One personality assessment of the future king, published in a women’s magazine three years before he married her sister.
Every single item was a disqualifier under the rules then in force. She delivered all of them in one afternoon, voluntarily, without appearing to realise what was happening.
The two journalists’ verdict on her state of mind, given later, was brief. She seemed, they said, to have been carried away by fame. That may be true. It is also the most convenient explanation for two men who had just taken a young woman to lunch and let her talk herself out of a marriage.
There is a second explanation available, and the record supports it just as fully. She meant what she said. She said, in plain words, that she did not love him and would not marry a man she did not love. That is not the statement of a girl carried away. It is the statement of someone refusing, publicly and in advance, in a magazine her mother’s generation read.
Then she did the thing no biographer has ever explained. She took the article to Charles herself. She did not hide it. She did not send a friend to warn him. She did not wait to be summoned for an apology. When the article appeared, Sarah Spencer took the magazine to the Prince of Wales and put it in front of him. It is either the bravest or the least aware act in this entire story, and possibly both.
He was furious. The rebuke attributed to him survives in two forms, and the wording does genuinely differ between accounts. In one he said: “You have just done something very stupid.” In the other: “Incredibly stupid.” There is no recorded transcript. Both versions carry the same meaning, which is that the heir to the throne of the United Kingdom told a 23-year-old woman she had destroyed herself, and he was right.
The relationship ended shortly after. There was no announcement because there was no engagement. There was simply an absence of further photographs.
The price she paid is documented and lasted the rest of her life. A newspaper investigation published 25 years later put it plainly. At 23, Sarah, not the 17-year-old Diana, was the one who looked likely to marry Prince Charles. She was the one he was courting, and she was the one who, in an act she personally admitted she regretted to this day, blew it with one moment of folly.
A friend, quoted in the same article, went further. “She has never forgiven herself for it,” the friend said. “To this day, when the Prince is mentioned in conversation, she chips in: ‘Of course he was my boyfriend first. Of course he was my boyfriend first.’”
A sentence said at Lincolnshire dinner tables for decades by a woman in her forties, fifties, and sixties about a marriage that ended and a sister who died. That is the whole price in one sentence, a friend says she never stopped repeating.
But in spring 1978 she was 23. The love affair was over. Her father was about to collapse with a brain haemorrhage, and she had nowhere specific to go. Within 18 months she was engaged to someone else, with a five-week courtship.
Lady Hurricane
Within 18 months of losing a Prince, she accepted a Guards officer after five weeks of dating him.
Neil Edmund McCorquodale was born in 1951, making him four years her senior. He was educated at Harrow, commissioned as an officer in the Coldstream Guards, and was a farmer in Lincolnshire. He was, by every surviving description, the exact opposite of everything Sarah Spencer had been for the previous three years.
A Spencer family friend, quoted by biographer Sally Bedell Smith, described him as solid, very steady, taciturn, quiet, with a sense of humour. The same passage describes Sarah as his opposite: ebullient and daring, with an unpredictable streak.
His family was interesting in its own right. His father, Alistair McCorquodale, was a Harrow-educated sprinter who competed in the 1948 London Olympics, finishing fourth in the 100-metre final and winning a silver medal in the relay. His mother was Rosemary Sybil Turner of Stoke Rochford in Lincolnshire, and the land the couple would live on belonged to her family.
And, as established, Neil’s great-uncle was Hugh McCorquodale, Barbara Cartland’s second husband, whose daughter from her first marriage was Raine, Countess Spencer. Sarah was marrying into the family of the stepmother she and her sisters did not speak to.
The courtship was, in her own phrase, distinctive. “I am a whirlwind-type lady,” she said. She was not exaggerating. She had known him for about two years. They went out for five weeks. Then they decided to marry without delay.
The engagement was announced in August 1979 when she was 24. She told her father while he was distracted during a cricket match at Althorp, and he gave his blessing absent-mindedly. That is the whole scene as it has come down to us. The 8th Earl Spencer, a year after the haemorrhage that nearly killed him, watching cricket on his own lawn, told by his eldest daughter that she was getting married, agreeing without listening properly.
Then, almost immediately, it all fell apart. The couple separated, and Neil went to Australia to think about it. That is not a small gesture in 1979. It is the other side of the world, undertaken by a former Guards officer to decide whether he wanted to marry the woman who had spent the previous two years in the newspapers as the Prince of Wales’s girlfriend.
He came back from his travels and they got back together. Then they changed the wedding date. It had been planned as a big London wedding, the kind expected for an earl’s eldest daughter, in a fashionable church with a long guest list. They moved it from London to a small country church.
Her mother’s comment at the time is one of the few contemporary quotes from anyone inside the family about Sarah’s private life, and it was careful and kind. Frances said she was very happy for them. She said they had been worried and unsure. They seemed to have been pushed into having a big London wedding, and she thought they felt they wanted more time to think and were a bit nervous about the whole thing.
Pushed into it. That is the word a mother used to describe her daughter’s wedding.
The wedding took place on 17 May 1980. The church is usually given as the parish church at Great Brington, which stands near the gates of Althorp, though the official record only says Northamptonshire. It was said to be the first wedding at Althorp since 1914.
She wore a simple dress by Bill Pashley, embroidered with antique lace and georgette in the style of riding clothes. She had spent her whole life with horses, and she married in a dress cut to resemble riding wear. Her veil was held by the Spencer tiara, the family heirloom that Jane had worn before her and Diana would wear 14 months later.
One of her bridesmaids was Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, daughter of Princess Margaret. Her sister Diana, 18, was not a bridesmaid. She had been one at Jane’s wedding two years earlier.
Whether Prince Charles attended is not recorded anywhere. The photographs of that day are described as rare. No public guest list survives. The honest answer is that nobody knows. He may have attended. He may have stayed away. Anyone telling you either is guessing.
The reception was held at Althorp, and it was paid for by Frances Shand Kydd, the mother who had lost custody of the bride 11 years earlier, now writing the cheque for her daughter’s wedding. Her biographer records that Frances spent most of the afternoon avoiding both Raine and Barbara Cartland.
Imagine the lawn. The bride in lace and the family tiara. Her father, out of hospital, leaning on the arm of the wife his children did not speak to. Her mother, who paid for it, moving between groups to avoid the stepmother and the famous mother of the stepmother. Her 18-year-old sister somewhere in the crowds in a hat. And 550 acres of Northamptonshire in May. In a family that had not seen a wedding since the year the first war began.
Her new life had a shape that can be described in one sentence. A farm of about a thousand acres near Grantham. A house that had belonged to her husband’s mother’s family. A county with no photographers in it. She would live there for the next 46 years. She still lives there now.
What she chose in the end was a version of the life her own family had failed to provide. A working estate. A husband who would later serve as High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1987. Three children who would come in sequence through the 1980s. A parish church at the end of the lane that would eventually see two of those children married.
It is a small, settled, deeply traditional English life. And she sought it out herself within two years of losing the biggest prize in the country. Sarah Spencer walked out of that. She married at 25 a steady man with a Lincolnshire farm. And the royal chapter of her life appeared to close completely. It had two months left to run.
I introduced them. I’m Cupid
Four months after her wedding, the man she had brought to Althorp began dating the sister she had introduced him to.
The summer of 1980 is where the story turns from bad luck into something closer to fate. The sequence needs to be set out carefully because the popular account compresses three years into an afternoon.
November 1977: a ploughed field near Nobottle Wood, a 16-year-old in her sister’s jacket, and nothing of note for nearly three years.
February 1978: Klosters.
Spring 1978: the interview and the end of Sarah’s love affair.
1978: Diana at finishing school in Switzerland.
August 1979: Sarah’s engagement.
May 1980: Sarah’s wedding.
Then July 1980, a party at Petworth in West Sussex, and Charles noticing that the girl who had made a fuss at Althorp was now 19.
One error needs correcting here because everyone makes it, and it credits Sarah with something that belongs to her middle sister. The visit to Balmoral in autumn 1980, where the relationship became public, was not arranged by Sarah. Jane married Robert Fellowes in April 1978. He was an assistant private secretary to the Queen. Jane gave birth to her first child, Laura, on 19 July 1980. Diana went to Scotland to help her sister with the baby, and Jane and Robert Fellowes were the ones who hosted her there.
Sarah had been married for two months and was living in Lincolnshire. She was nowhere near it.
That distinction matters because it defines precisely what Sarah did and did not do. She did not manage that love affair. She did not push her sister forward. She was not a chaperone or a fixer or a conspirator. She did one thing in one field in one November, and everything that followed came from other people.
The Fellowes marriage deserves a pause because it completes the pattern. Robert Fellowes had been assistant private secretary to the Queen since 1977. He became deputy private secretary in 1986 and private secretary to the Queen from 19 October 1990 until 4 February 1999, making him for over a decade the most powerful official in the Palace. He was given a life peerage in 1999 and died on 29 July 2024.
So consider the family’s position across four years. In June 1977, the eldest Spencer daughter began dating the heir to the throne. In April 1978, the middle daughter married the Queen’s assistant private secretary. In February 1981, the youngest daughter, 19, was engaged to the heir. Their grandmother had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother for decades. The godmother, in Sarah’s case, was the Queen Mother herself. Three sisters, one house, and no distance left between the Spencers and the Crown.
The engagement was announced on 24 February 1981. On 25 February, the very next morning, Lady Sarah McCorquodale told the Guardian five words that have chased her for 45 years. “I introduced them. I’m Cupid.”
That sentence is the reason this story exists, and it needs very careful handling because everything written about it since has come from people who decided in advance what it meant. The literal content of the sentence is accurate. She did introduce them. The meeting in November 1977 happened because she invited him to the family home, and no serious account disputes that.
What she did not do was arrange that marriage. There was no matchmaking, no plan, no scheme to put her sister in front of the heir to the throne. She brought her boyfriend home, and her little sister was there. The credit claimed here is retrospective, and the credit belongs to chance.
But she made the statement, and the making of it is the act. She could have said nothing. Every instinct her family had instilled in her over 500 years was to be silent. Her grandmother had served the Queen Mother for decades without a public word. Her sister Jane was married to the man who ran the Queen’s private office and spent her life silent. Silence was the family trade.
Sarah, 25, married nine months, living in Lincolnshire, woke up on the morning after the engagement of the century, spoke to a reporter from the Guardian, and claimed responsibility. She said it lightly, as a joke, as a cheerful piece of self-deprecation from a woman feeling pleased with herself.
She also gave a second comment to the Lincolnshire Echo in the same period that reads the same way. “They are absolutely ideal for each other,” she said. She thought they had been in love just before Christmas, she said. There was an extra sparkle in her sister’s eye.
There is no bitterness in either quote. No visible edge. If this is a woman nursing a grudge against the man who chose her sister, she does not volunteer to tell a national newspaper that she is the one who brought them together.
And yet the sentence has been read as bitterness ever since. The reason is that everyone reads it backwards from 1997. Because of how the marriage ended, “I’m Cupid” has been recast as irony, or boastfulness turned sour, or a black joke from a woman who handed her sister a disaster. That interpretation is only available from the far side of a tunnel in Paris.
In February 1981, she meant it literally. A cheerful woman, taking a bow at a family wedding, explaining what she had actually done by the age of 25. She had dated the Prince of Wales for the best part of a year. She had told a national magazine she did not love him and would not marry a man she did not love, whether he was a dustman or the King of England. She had lost him for it. She had married a Guards officer after a five-week courtship. She had brought the same Prince to a field where he met the girl he would marry. And on the morning after the announcement, she said so out loud.
No other girl of that generation of royal girlfriends did any of those things. She did all five. She opened the door herself, then stood in the doorway and told a reporter she had opened it.
Five months later she watched her sister climb the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. And there was one more thing she would give away.
The pearls
She was not a bridesmaid at St Paul’s, and the official guest list placed her between her father and her middle sister.
29 July 1981, St Paul’s Cathedral. A bride who had been a schoolgirl in a borrowed jacket three years and eight months earlier. Sarah’s place in the service was the place of the properly married elder sister. Not in the procession, not among the bridesmaids. In the official order, she and her husband appear as the bride’s sister and her husband, listed immediately after the Earl and Countess Spencer and immediately before Lady Jane and Mr Robert Fellowes.
Read the order of that list and the whole family is in it. The father and the stepmother the children refused to speak to. Then the eldest daughter who had dated the groom. Then the middle daughter, married to the man who ran the Queen’s office. The three Spencer sisters and their absorption into the House of Windsor, printed in sequence in the seating plan.
Nothing about that day was small. It was a state occasion in every sense of the word. With 3,500 guests inside the cathedral. And somewhere in it, in the family seats between her father and her middle sister, sat a 26-year-old farmer’s wife from Lincolnshire who had been photographed three and a half years earlier on a Swiss mountain with the man now standing at the altar.
But before the wedding there was the lunch that everyone knows and almost everyone gets wrong. In the days before the ceremony, Diana discovered the bracelet Charles had ordered for Camilla. She went to her sisters and told them she could not go through with it.
Her own account, recorded in her own voice, is as follows. She went upstairs and had lunch with her sisters who were there and said: “I can’t marry him. I can’t do this. This is absolutely unbelievable.”
She described them as wonderful, then relayed what they said to her. “Well, bad luck, Duch,” they said. “Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out.”
“Duch” was the family nickname for the youngest sister. The tea towels were real. Commemorative tea towels bearing the faces of Charles and Diana had been produced in bulk for the occasion.
Now, the correction, and it is the most important correction in this story. That line was not Sarah’s alone. Every source says the two sisters said it together. Andrew Morton, who first published it, wrote “they said.” Diana, in the recording, said “my sisters who were there.” No surviving account attributes the line to Lady Sarah McCorquodale alone. Anyone who attributes it to her specifically is going beyond the evidence.
What that exchange actually shows is not cruelty and not disbelief. The two sisters took a frightened 20-year-old seriously enough to hear her out, then turned it into a joke. And the joke was that it was too late. In the world they came from, in late July 1981, with a state occasion assembled around them and the world’s press already in position, it was too late. Everyone in that room knew it. They were telling her, in the only language that family knew, that there was no way out.
There is another voice to listen to before the pearls, and it belongs to the oldest woman in the family, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, the grandmother who had testified against her own daughter in the divorce court in 1969, who was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, and who warned Diana against this marriage. She knew the family from the inside, and she told her granddaughter she did not think their sense of humour or their lifestyle would suit her. Nobody listened, and there is no evidence Sarah ever heard it. But it means that of the four Spencer women alive in 1981, at least two had private doubts about this marriage. And one of them had already told a magazine, in print, that she would not have accepted it herself even for a crown.
Something more needs to be said about that lunch because it has been used against the two sisters for 30 years. There is no record anywhere of either of them disbelieving her. Nothing survives in which Sarah or Jane question the bulimia or question Camilla or tell Diana she is imagining it. What survives is a joke about a tea towel. That is dismissal, not denial. And the difference between those two things is the difference between two sisters who lacked experience and two sisters who were cruel.
Which brings the story to the pearls. Every Spencer daughter received a pearl necklace as part of family tradition. Diana’s was three strands. Sarah’s, as the eldest, was five strands. She wore it at the wedding. She would wear it again at the weddings of both of her brother’s children.
And after the ceremony, as Diana was leaving Buckingham Palace for Broadlands and the honeymoon, Sarah took off her five-strand necklace and gave it to her sister.
Consider that moment slowly, because it is the image this entire story has been building towards. An elder sister, 26, married, living in Lincolnshire, standing in a palace courtyard. The man she had dated for a year and lost for telling the truth about him in a magazine was now her brother-in-law. The girl she had introduced him to in a wet field in her coat was now the Princess of Wales, about to get into a car.
Sarah reaches up, unclasps the pearls, the five strands she inherited because she was the eldest, and puts them into her younger sister’s hands. There is no record of what she said when she did it. There is no photograph of it ever taken. There is only the fact, and the fact is enough.
She had given her the man. She had given her the field and the coat in which she met him. And now she gave her the pearls.
That is the end of the story as the public understood it. The younger sister had overtaken the elder Spencer girl, completely and permanently, and everything the elder sister had was now her sibling’s. Except that it was the beginning of 45 years of work, most of it unpaid, some of it in the courtroom, none of it acknowledged.
16 years after that moment in the courtyard, she would be put on a plane in the dark.
Lady-in-waiting to her sister
In 1987, she returned to her old school with Diana wearing a suit Diana had worn two years earlier in Australia.
Clothes are the detail that reveals the arrangement, and there are two documented instances. In 1987, during a visit to West Heath, the school all three sisters had attended, Sarah was photographed in a blue and white striped suit that Diana had worn two years earlier on an official tour of Australia. And in 1993, accompanying Diana to Nepal, she wore a green and white midi dress that Diana had worn seven years earlier in the Gulf states.
The Princess of Wales was giving her old clothes to her elder sister, and the elder sister was wearing them publicly at her old school and on a royal tour. That is the family wardrobe, and there is no other honest way to read it.
The role she played is usually described as “lady-in-waiting,” and that description needs honest handling because it is lighter than the term suggests. Some accounts say she was formally appointed an extra lady-in-waiting from 1992 to 1997. Others describe the position as informal. The standard reference work contains the claim but notes it is unsupported by evidence.
Diana’s principal lady-in-waiting throughout the marriage was someone else entirely. A professional member of the household did the actual work. And the 1987 date undermines the tidy account anyway. She was accompanying her sister on public engagements five years before that alleged appointment. What happened was that a sister kept turning up for years, and then a title was given to it later.
What the role involved is easier to state. She travelled with Diana. She stood behind her at official functions. She performed those small tasks that make royal visits work. In 1987, when Diana went fox hunting and caused a small national controversy about it, she was staying with Sarah at the time and riding her horse.
Which brings this chapter to the question the whole story has been circling, and the records do not settle it. Were the sisters close? Or did Sarah never forgive her?
The resentment case begins with Diana herself. Biographer Sally Bedell Smith has Diana saying that Sarah was very upset that she agreed to go out with Prince Charles. Note precisely what that sentence says. It concerns 1980 and the courtship period, not the marriage. It is Diana’s account of Sarah’s feelings, not Sarah’s actual feelings. And it is a single line.
The harshest account came from Paul Burrell, Diana’s butler, in a newspaper serialisation in November 2002, days after his trial collapsed. Burrell wrote that he believed Sarah was jealous of her sister, and that on Diana’s wedding day Sarah turned to her and said: “I thought all this would be mine one day.” The nickname he gave her in the press was “Lady Sarah Sarcastic.”
That claim requires three warnings, and they must be stated plainly. It is second-hand gossip: Burrell is relaying what Diana told him Sarah said. It was published days after a criminal trial in which Sarah had given evidence against him. And Burrell himself added that Diana was not offended but found it a joke, which is not the manner of someone describing a wound.
Set against all of that is one line from Diana, independently reported, that Sarah was the only person she knew she could trust. Both cannot be entirely true, and yet both were probably said. That is how sisters are, and these sisters grew up in a house where the mother was removed by court order and the father married a woman they refused to speak to. Whatever the relationship between the three Spencer girls was, the word “simple” does not describe it.
One further voice exists, and it is the strangest. A royal writer told an American magazine that she believed Sarah knew about Diana’s affairs, and that Sarah somehow encouraged Diana to be rebellious and have lovers. If that is true, and it is a single claim from a single writer, then the relationship was not competitive at all. It was closer to the pattern set in the Chelsea flat when Diana was cleaning Sarah’s floors. The elder sister who burned publicly standing behind the younger one, telling her to go ahead and live.
Sarah never denied the jealousy claims for nearly 25 years. She never denied anything at all. The only objection she ever made was under oath, and it was two words.
There is one further piece of evidence, and it is the clearest of all. Diana had two elder sisters and a mother, and when she wrote her will, she mentioned none of them. Then in February 1996, 18 months before her death, she changed it. The person she added to the will was Sarah.
Whatever the relationship was, that is what Diana did in the official papers.
By the mid-1990s the marriage was over. The tapes and the books and the interview had done their work. And there was a mother, a stepmother, a butler, and an entire nation standing between the sisters. Then one morning in late August, the phone rang in Lincolnshire.
Brought back to life
On 31 August 1997, she flew to Paris in the dark with her sister Jane and Charles.
The official record of that flight is unusually precise, and it should be given as written because it is one of the very few occasions in this entire story where Sarah Spencer’s movements were documented by the state.
The Princess’s body was brought back to the United Kingdom on the evening of Sunday 31 August aboard a British Aerospace 146 aircraft of the Queen’s Flight. The Prince of Wales and the Princess’s two elder sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes, accompanied the Princess’s coffin on the return journey.
The pilot published his own account years later, and it contains details no one else recorded. There was a standing order that if a member of the royal family died abroad, the coffin would not return until day four. That order was overridden. The aircraft was modified so engineers could fit a flat floor in the rear luggage hold, with ball bearings added to make the coffin easier to move in and out.
The crew flew from Northolt to Aberdeen via Wittering. At Wittering they picked up Diana’s two sisters. A separate aircraft carried a lead-lined coffin to Paris. The Prince of Wales and his staff went to the hospital to collect her while the crew waited at an airfield outside the city.
They landed at Northolt at nine minutes to seven in the evening. The aircraft was parked behind the air traffic control tower so the engineers could not see. At exactly seven o’clock the engines stopped and the rear door opened. The coffin, draped in the Royal Standard, was carried by a team from the Queen’s Colour Squadron who had not been allowed to practise in advance. The Prime Minister was among those waiting. Twenty minutes after landing, the aircraft left again for Aberdeen so Charles could return to Balmoral and to his sons.
Sarah has never spoken about that flight. Not one word in 29 years.
Six days later, on 6 September 1997, she stood in Westminster Abbey and delivered the first reading at her sister’s funeral.
Here is a correction the record demands because this is almost always misunderstood. Sarah did not read the Henry van Dyke poem about time. That was Jane, and it was the second reading. Sarah read first, and what she read was a poem called “Turn Again to Life” by the American poet and suffragist Mary Lee Hall.
If I should die and leave you here a while, be not like others, sore undone, who keep long vigils by the silent dust. For my sake, turn again to life and smile, nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do something to comfort other hearts than thine. Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine, and I, perchance, may therein comfort you.
Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine. She read that aloud in a church on a Saturday morning in front of her sister’s coffin, with two boys aged 15 and 12 sitting a few feet away. Then she spent the next 15 years doing exactly what the poem asked, in courtrooms and boardrooms and witness stands, for nothing.
Something else about that funeral belongs to her and almost nobody knows it. Sarah is the one who asked Elton John to perform the song. The family had entrusted her with the music, and she said so at the time. The song, with new words written for the occasion, was sung once on 6 September 1997 and never sung again.
Papers published years later showed that the Dean of Westminster personally pressed senior Palace officials to allow it, insisting on including something of the modern world the Princess had represented. And that a solo saxophonist had been considered as an alternative.
So the most famous moment of the most watched funeral in history happened because the eldest Spencer sister was in charge of the music and wanted her sister’s world in the room.
20 years later, in 2017, she gave a few remarks for a documentary about the week of the death. It is the only substantial public statement of feeling she has ever made, and it runs to a few sentences. Her sister Jane refused to take part at all.
She said: “I think I was in shock, but I don’t think I felt anything else.” Just love and shock. “My sister’s death provoked a huge national and international response.” Then this. “She was so careful to put her seatbelt on. Why didn’t she put it on that night? I will never know why.”
She described putting a barrier in front of her emotions so she could deal with the practicalities. She described feeling anger, for reasons she could not explain, at the broadcasters who spent two hours that night saying Diana was on the road to recovery.
That is all. Three decades of public silence broken for a few minutes. And most of what she said was about a seatbelt.
She was 42 that week. She had lost a brother who lived 10 hours. She had watched a court take her mother from her. She had lost a Prince for telling the truth about him in a magazine. And now she had flown through the night to collect the body of the sister she had handed him to. What she chose to say about it, 20 years later, was that she felt love and shock and nothing else. And that she could not understand why the seatbelt was not fastened.
The practicalities she put the barrier up for were about to consume 15 years of her life.
The woman with no honours
She became executor, chair, witness, and finally a name in someone else’s conspiracy theory about her sister’s death.
The will was signed on 1 June 1993 and named two executors: Diana’s mother and her private secretary, Commander Patrick Jephson. On 1 February 1996, a codicil removed the private secretary and put in his place, in the formal wording of the document: “my sister, Elizabeth Sarah Lavinia McCorquodale, of Stoke Rochford, Grantham, Lincolnshire.”
With that one paragraph, Diana made her elder sister responsible for everything she owned.
The size of the estate was proved under oath. The total estate was £21,711,485. Tax took £8,502,330. Probate was granted on 2 March 1998 to three people: a mother, a sister, and a bishop appointed by the court.
Then came the decision that has haunted her ever since. Diana had left a letter of wishes asking that a quarter of her estate go to her 17 godchildren. In December 1997, the executors went to the High Court and obtained a variation of the will giving them absolute discretion over what any of the godchildren received. The value of the quarter share was, by a conservative estimate, about £100,000 each. What they received was one item each. It was later described in the press as a trinket. Reports say the parents of those children were not informed in advance and were shocked when they found out.
A letter of wishes is not binding under English law, which is the executors’ defence, and it is a real defence. But Sarah’s name was on it, and Sarah’s name took the criticism.
The same variation assigned Diana’s name, image, and voice to a discretionary trust, along with the right to go to court over them. That clause is the reason for everything that followed.
Sarah became chair of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, established in September 1997, days after the death. The fund raised more than £112 million, including £38 million from the sales of the song Elton John sang in the Abbey, and closed at the end of 2012.
In 1998, the fund and the executors sued an American company producing unauthorised Diana memorabilia, and lost, because English law recognises no posthumous right of publicity. In 2002, the company countersued for $25 million and named Lady Sarah McCorquodale personally. The fund froze grants to more than 120 organisations, including the landmine charity that Diana had devoted the last year of her life to. The settlement came in 2004, and the settlement was that the fund paid.
Sarah said not one public word about any of it.
Four years later she was on the witness stand. On Monday, 28 January 2008, in the Royal Courts of Justice, she gave evidence at the inquest into her sister’s death.
She was asked about their last phone call. She said there had been a French newspaper article about landmines, and Diana was very upset because she felt she had been misunderstood and made to look as though she was criticising the government. She was very distressed. And from that, Sarah said, she did not think the relationship would last much longer.
She was asked about an engagement and about a pregnancy. She denied both. She was asked about the shredding. She admitted that she and her mother had destroyed material they found upsetting, including publications by what she called fortune tellers, because she did not want William or Harry to see them. My sister was aware, she said, that I did not approve of her over-indulgence in fortune tellers.
Then she settled it decisively. No historical documents were ever shredded. My conscience is clear about what I destroyed.
Counsel suggested to her that she had not in fact been close to her sister at all. She said their relationship was good. Counsel replied that good was one thing, close was another. At one point she was shown a photograph of the three Spencer sisters laughing hard in the back of a car, and it was suggested she could barely remember the joke. She smiled and said: “I’m afraid I do remember it.”
Three weeks later, in the same courtroom, Mohamed Al Fayed named the people he believed had conspired to kill his son and Diana. The list included Prince Philip, Prince Charles, the Prime Minister, former police commissioners, an American intelligence agency, and Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale.
That is where 45 years of service ended up. Accused in open court of killing her own sister, by a man whose claims the coroner later dismissed.
The rest of her life has been in Lincolnshire. She served as High Sheriff of the county from March 2009, the office her husband had held in 1987. She served as joint master of the Belvoir Hunt from May 2010, which in 2018 brought her to Leicester Crown Court to give a character reference for the hunt’s huntsman, who had admitted an assault that left a man with a broken neck. She told the judge he would lose his home if jailed, and he received a suspended sentence.
She was still riding in her seventies. In autumn 2025, she fell badly from a horse and spent a long time in hospital, and the country only knew because her brother mentioned it in passing on a podcast.
She holds no honour, no medal, no title, no award. Nothing at all. In a family that collects knighthoods and peerages the way other families collect photographs, the eldest Spencer sister has a public service record of one year as High Sheriff of a rural county, and that is all.
She opened the door herself, and it never closed, because that is what the Crown does with the people it decides not to take in. It does not send them away. It keeps them unpaid and unthanked, standing at the threshold for the rest of their lives, doing the work no one else in the family will do. And it never writes them a thank-you letter.
It all began in a wet field in Northamptonshire in November 1977, with a 22-year-old who wanted to show her Prince the house her family had lived in for 500 years, a 16-year-old in a borrowed jacket, and a day’s shooting that ended before dark.
She never denied any of it. Three years after that field, on the morning after the engagement was announced, a journalist asked her how it had happened, and she answered without hesitation. That answer has outlived everyone who was there.
I introduced them. I’m Cupid.