The story of Princess Diana and her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, is often reduced to a single, brutal headline: that Diana hated her. The internet has repeated this narrative for decades, presenting it as settled fact. But the record tells a more complicated, and far more painful, story.
The truth is not a simple tale of contempt, but a decades-long struggle between a daughter who felt abandoned and a mother who fought—and lost—to keep her children.
Frances Ruth Burke Roche was born into the aristocracy in 1936. At just 18 years old, she married John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, in Westminster Abbey in 1954, with Queen Elizabeth II in attendance. It was a union of two ancient families, and Frances was expected to fulfill her role.
The marriage produced five children: Sarah, Jane, a boy named John who died within hours of birth, Diana, and finally Charles.
The marriage, however, was not what it appeared. Behind the stately walls of Althorp, John Spencer was physically abusive toward his wife. By 1967, the marriage had collapsed.
Frances met Peter Shand Kydd, a wealthy wallpaper heir, and left her husband for him. The gossip columns painted her as a bored aristocrat who abandoned her family. The reality was that she was a woman escaping a violent marriage.
The divorce proceedings began in 1969, and Frances fought for custody of all four of her children. She did not leave quietly. She went to court to keep her family.
But in a devastating turn, her own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, took the witness stand and testified against her daughter, helping John Spencer win custody. The court awarded the children to their father. Frances lost her children not because she abandoned them, but because her own mother helped take them away.
The children, including six-year-old Diana, grew up at Althorp with their father and a series of nannies. Their mother was present in their lives through court-ordered holiday visits to the remote Scottish island of Seil, where Frances and Peter Shand Kydd had moved. She ran a gift shop in the nearby town of Oban.
The children would travel north for holidays, but the arrangement was a constant reminder that their mother was no longer part of their daily lives.
For Diana, this separation became the defining wound of her childhood. In 1992, she recorded tapes for Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story. On those tapes, she described the moment her mother left as the moment “Mummy” ran away.
She used the word “escape.” Diana felt abandoned. The feeling was real, even if the legal record shows that Frances fought to keep her children and lost.
Sally Bedell Smith, in her book Diana: In Search of Herself, traced a direct line from that perceived abandonment to the emotional struggles Diana faced as an adult. The insecurity, the neediness, the belief that people would leave her—all of it connected to that childhood wound. Diana was six years old when her mother left the house.
She did not understand the court battle or her grandmother’s testimony. She only understood that her mother was gone.
Despite the pain, the relationship was not one of constant estrangement. Frances attended Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles in 1981. The two women spent real time together during the 1980s and early 1990s, attending Wimbledon matches side by side and taking private holidays.
According to Morton, Diana once told a friend that she had inherited her mother’s talent for appearing happy while feeling miserable. “Mummy is an expert at that,” Diana reportedly said. This is not the language of a daughter who despised her mother.
It is the language of a daughter who recognized herself in her mother, and feared it.
The relationship fractured in 1993 when Frances gave an interview to a magazine. The details of what she said mattered less than the fact that she said it publicly. Diana was hurt, and the two stopped speaking for a time.
They eventually reconciled, but the pattern repeated in May 1997.
In that month, Frances sat down with Hello! magazine. The topic was Diana’s recent divorce from Prince Charles and the loss of her title, “Her Royal Highness.”
Frances described the loss as “absolutely wonderful,” arguing that without the title, Diana could finally find her own identity. Whether this was clumsy support or a passive-aggressive attack remains unclear. Diana read it as a betrayal.
The two women stopped speaking again.
Four months of silence followed. Then came the phone call. The only account of this call comes from Paul Burrell, Diana’s former butler.
In his 2003 memoir A Royal Duty, and later under oath during the 2008 inquest, Burrell claimed that Frances called Diana in June 1997 and berated her for having affairs with Muslim men. The Spencer family has vigorously disputed Burrell’s credibility, and no second witness has ever come forward to corroborate the call. The claim remains contested, but something happened in that summer that the two women could not repair.
The silence lasted four months. On August 31, 1997, Diana died in a car crash in Paris. Frances and Diana had not spoken since the spring.
The last conversation they had was their last conversation, and no one could change that.
At Diana’s funeral on September 6, 1997, Frances walked into Westminster Abbey to bury her daughter. It was the same church where she had married John Spencer in 1954. The symmetry was devastating.
Frances lived for nearly seven more years, carrying that silence with her. In 2002, she testified under oath at Paul Burrell’s theft trial, confirming that she and Diana had not communicated in the four months before the crash. She acknowledged the silence publicly, in a courtroom, with every reporter in the building taking notes.
When Diana’s will was executed, Frances was named as one of the co-executors alongside Diana’s sister, Sarah. The woman Diana had described as having “run away” was entrusted with carrying out her daughter’s final wishes. Diana’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, attended their grandmother’s funeral when she died in June 2004.
The word “contempt” cannot hold up against these facts. Frances fled an abusive marriage and fought for her children in court. She lost because her own mother testified against her.
She remained present in her children’s lives through holidays and visits. She sat beside Diana at Wimbledon. She attended the wedding.
She was named an executor of Diana’s will. She buried her daughter.
Diana’s pain was real. She felt abandoned, and that feeling shaped her entire adult life. But the legal record shows that Frances did not abandon her children.
She fought to keep them and lost. Both things are true. A six-year-old girl does not understand custody hearings or witness testimony.
She only understands that one morning her mother was there, and then she was not.
The story of Diana and Frances is not a story of hatred. It is a story of a wound that never healed, a silence that ended in tragedy, and two women who kept circling each other, bleeding at every encounter. The contempt narrative is easier.
It fits on a thumbnail. But the real story is quieter, and it carries the entire tragedy within it.