In the autumn of 1977, a 22-year-old woman walked a prince across a plowed field in Northamptonshire. The earth had gone the color of wet cardboard, the light was thinning by mid-afternoon, and the ground pulled at her boots with every step. Lady Sarah Spencer was the eldest of the Spencer daughters, the confident one, the one who rode hard, talked fast, and said the things everyone else had decided not to say.
The prince beside her was 29, the most eligible bachelor in the world, already exhausted by a decade of it. He was at Althorp for a shooting party because Sarah had asked him. Trailing behind them in the wrong shoes for the mud was Sarah’s youngest sister, a 16-year-old named Diana who had come home from school for the weekend. She was tall already, not yet grown into it, and she looked at people from under her fringe before looking at the floor.
Nobody photographed that afternoon. What survives is a single line the prince gave to an interviewer years later, remembering a jolly, amusing, and attractive 16-year-old full of fun. That is the whole record of it. And the person who put all three of them in that field was Sarah.
She would later call herself Cupid. She said she had introduced them. She said it with the particular brightness of a woman who has understood several seconds too late that the sentence will follow her for the rest of her life.
What happened in the four years between that field and Diana’s engagement changed everything. In the spring of 1978, Sarah sat down with two journalists in a flat in London and answered their questions honestly. She told them the truth about a royal romance and the truth about her own health. She was not vindictive, she was not paid, and she did not sell a story. She simply answered the questions she was asked in the way that had always worked for her, which was directly.
The machine that had been watching her with cautious approval for a year closed like a door in a draft. The offense was not the content of what she said. The offense was the act of speaking at all.
There were two Spencer sisters, and the palace felt very differently about each of them. The other sister was Jane, two years younger than Sarah, two years older than Diana. Jane was quiet where Sarah was loud, careful where Sarah was direct. In April of 1978, in the same season Sarah’s interview was detonating in the newspapers, Jane married a man named Robert Fellows.
Fellows was the son of the land agent at Sandringham. He had grown up on the estate, gone to Eton, served in the Scots Guards, and worked in the city before being brought into the royal household as an assistant private secretary to the Queen. By 1990, he would be the Queen’s private secretary, the man who actually operates the British monarchy on a Tuesday morning. He would hold that post through the entire collapse of the Wales marriage.
So the palace had one Spencer sister inside the building with a desk and a salary and a grace-and-favor house, and one Spencer sister outside it with a documented history of talking to the press. The preference from 1981 onward was for Jane. Sarah was invited to everything and trusted with nothing.
Diana, who was drowning inside that marriage almost from the first year, went to Sarah anyway. Of course she did. Diana had lost her mother from the house at six years old. She had watched a custody case tear the family apart. In that kind of childhood, the eldest sister is not a sibling. She is a fixed point.
Sarah had been ill first, in 1977 and 1978, with an eating disorder, at a time when nobody in Britain outside a handful of clinicians had a useful word for it. She had come through it. Which meant that when Diana became ill in exactly the same way four years later inside Buckingham Palace, there was precisely one person in the world she could ring who would not require an explanation.
The story begins in Norfolk, in a rented house on the Sandringham estate called Park House, where five Spencer children were born and one of them lived for less than a day. The boy was born in January of 1960 and lived roughly ten hours. Sarah was four, Jane was two. The marriage of their parents did not survive it, not really.
Francis Spencer was sent to Harley Street to be examined after the death of the infant son. The working assumption was that the failure to produce a living heir was a fault located in her body and nowhere else. She was 23 years old. Sarah and Jane were too young to understand the mechanism, but they absolutely understood the temperature.
Diana was born in July of 1961 at Park House. She was a healthy baby and she was a girl, and the disappointment was apparently not concealed with any great skill. The son arrived three years later, Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, christened at Westminster Abbey with the Queen as godmother.
Park House stands on the Sandringham estate, not near it, on it. The royal children came over to swim in the outdoor pool. Prince Andrew and Prince Edward were close in age to Diana and her brother. There were birthday parties and the sort of arrangements that happen between two households with children of similar ages living a short walk apart.
In 1966, Francis met Peter Shand Kydd. He was married too, with children of his own, and he was funny and modern and entirely outside the closed circuit of court appointments. In the autumn of 1967, she left Norfolk for a flat in London. The divorce that followed was not a discrete county arrangement. It was a public dismantling.
Then came the custody hearing. Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence against her own daughter. She was a woman of real accomplishment, a trained concert pianist, a founder of the King’s Lynn Festival, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother and one of her closest friends across four decades. When the choice arrived between her daughter and the world she had spent her adult life inside, she chose the world.
Johnny got the children. Francis got access. Sarah was 12. She was old enough to follow the newspapers, old enough to understand that a court in London had adjudicated her own mother and found against her, and that her grandmother had helped it happen.
Sarah was sent to West Heath, a girls’ boarding school in Kent. She was funny and quick and she made an art out of the specific kind of rebellion that boarding schools cannot easily punish. In 1972, she was asked to leave. The reason, which the family has never gone out of its way to deny, was drinking.
She was sent to Switzerland to a finishing school, the same one Diana would attend some years later. Then London, the season, the parties, the flat, the jobs. She worked for a period in an estate agency and later at Vogue. By her early twenties, she was a recognizable face in the diary columns.
Underneath all of it was an illness. Anorexia nervosa was not, in 1976 and 1977, a thing that people talked about in England. Sarah was seriously unwell. She lost a great deal of weight over an extended period. She was treated and she recovered, and the recovery was slow and imperfect in the way that recoveries generally are.
She met Prince Charles at Ascot in June of 1977. She was 22. What followed was about a year of visible closeness. She was at Balmoral, she was at the polo, she went to Klosters with him in February of 1978 on a skiing party. By the winter, the newspapers had installed her as the front runner.
Through most of it, she was not well. The coverage did not carry that because the coverage did not have the language for it.
In the summer of 1978, she sat down with James Whitaker and Nigel Nelson. The interview ran in Woman’s Own. She said she was not in love with him. She said she would not marry a man she did not love, whether he were a dustman or the King of England. She said that if he asked her, she would turn him down.
She also talked openly and without embarrassment about having been anorexic. In 1978, that was an almost unheard-of thing for a young woman of her class to say out loud to a reporter.
Charles was reportedly furious. The version that has survived has him telling her she had just done something extremely stupid. The fury is the interesting part. The offense was not the content. The offense was the act. A woman who has been near the heir does not speak, ever, about anything to anyone for the rest of her natural life.
Anna Wallace, who came after her, never spoke. Camilla Shand did not speak for 20 years. The rule was not written down anywhere and it did not need to be.
Sarah married a man named Neil McCorquodale in May of 1980. The surname carries one of the strangest ironies in the entire family. McCorquodale was the married name of Barbara Cartland. Barbara Cartland’s daughter was Raine, and Raine by 1980 was the second wife of Sarah’s father and the stepmother Diana would come to loathe with a completeness that has become almost folkloric.
Sarah married into the family of the woman her sister called Acid Raine.
Then came the engagement in February of 1981 and the wedding in July. Sarah stood in St. Paul’s Cathedral watching her 19-year-old sister marry the man she herself had been photographed with three years earlier.
Diana moved into Clarence House and then into Buckingham Palace to wait out the five months until the wedding. She was given no preparation, no induction, no formal instruction of any kind about what the job involved. She was 19, alone in a building of a thousand rooms. The eating disorder started in that period.
In the last week before the wedding, Diana told her sisters that she could not do it, that she had made a mistake, that she wanted to call it off. The answer she got, attributed in most accounts to Sarah, was that it was too late because her face was already on the tea towels. Bad luck, Duch. Your face is on the tea towels now.
That line has been used for four decades as evidence of Spencer callousness. It was not cruelty. It was the specific black humor of a family that had been through a divorce court and a custody case and a dead brother and had learned that sentiment does not change outcomes.
The wedding was on the 29th of July 1981. Sarah was in the cathedral. If she felt anything complicated that morning, she has kept it entirely to herself.
For the next 11 years, the two Spencer sisters occupied positions so different that it is worth drawing the map. Jane Fellows lived at Kensington Palace, not near it, in it. Robert Fellows had a grace-and-favor house within the palace grounds. From the early 1980s onward, the Princess of Wales lived in apartments 8 and 9, and her sister lived a short walk across the same enclosed compound, married to the man who would shortly be running the Queen’s office.
Sarah McCorquodale lived in Lincolnshire in a farmhouse with a husband who had no connection to any of it. Her first child Emily was born in 1983. Her son George came in 1984, four months after Prince Harry. Her second daughter Celia was born in 1989.
The marriage at the center of it was already failing. It failed early and it failed comprehensively. Diana was 20 when she married and 25 in 1986. She had two small children. She was the most photographed woman on earth. She was ill. She was living in a system that had given her no preparation and no support and which regarded emotional difficulty as a species of bad manners.
She could not fully talk to Jane. Whatever Jane’s private loyalties were, her husband’s job made her a structural risk. Not a spy. Nobody sane has ever suggested Jane Fellows carried tales. But Diana was a young woman with an eating disorder and a collapsing marriage, and in that state of mind, you do not confide freely in the wife of the Queen’s private secretary. You cannot, not because she would tell him, but because you would spend the whole conversation wondering.
To talk to Sarah, Diana had to make a telephone call or get in a car and drive to Lincolnshire. Both of those things were harder. And both of them were, for exactly that reason, safer.
The palace’s assessment of the two sisters, formed in 1978, had by the mid-1980s produced exactly the outcome that assessment should have warned them about. By treating one sister as the safe one and building the relationship there, the institution guaranteed that the Princess of Wales would take her real confidences to the other one.
Johnny Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer, died on the 29th of March, 1992. He was 68. Within a very short time of the funeral, Raine’s belongings were reportedly outside the door in bin bags and she was gone. The ninth Earl Spencer was 27 years old.
Ten weeks later, Andrew Morton published Diana: Her True Story. The Sunday Times serialization began on the 7th of June, 1992. The book said the Princess of Wales had an eating disorder. It said she had made attempts on her own life in the early years of the marriage. It said Camilla Parker Bowles had been present in the marriage from the beginning.
We know the answer now. It came from Diana. She had recorded answers onto tapes. The tapes went to Morton through an intermediary, a friend called Dr. James Colthurst, who cycled between Kensington Palace and Morton’s office carrying them.
Sarah did not talk to Morton. Neither did Jane. Neither did their brother. Neither did their mother at that stage. The four members of Diana’s blood family, including the sister the household had regarded as a proven security risk since 1978, contributed nothing.
The institution had spent more than a decade quietly managing the wrong person.
Robert Fellows was by this point the Queen’s private secretary. He was also Diana’s brother-in-law. When the book landed, he asked Diana directly whether she had cooperated with Andrew Morton. She told him she had not. Fellows, on the strength of his sister-in-law’s word, went to Lord McGregor at the Press Complaints Commission and passed on the denial. McGregor then issued a public statement condemning the press for what he called dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.
The entire basis of it was false. When it became clear over the following months that Diana had in fact cooperated, McGregor was left publicly humiliated and Fellows was left having staked the credibility of the Queen’s office on a denial from a member of his own wife’s family. He offered his resignation. It was not accepted.
Robert Fellows married Jane Spencer in 1978 when she was 21. Fourteen years later, his job required him to interrogate his wife’s sister, and his wife’s sister lied to him, and he repeated the lie in good faith to a public body, and his professional reputation took a wound it carried for the rest of his career.
The closeness between Diana and Jane cooled and did not fully recover for years.
1992 did not improve after June. In August, the Sun published a transcript of a recorded telephone conversation between Diana and James Gilbey taped some three years earlier. In November, Windsor Castle caught fire. On the 9th of December, John Major stood up in the House of Commons and read a statement announcing that the Prince and Princess of Wales had separated.
Through all of it, Sarah McCorquodale was in Lincolnshire.
In June of 1994 came the Dimbleby documentary in which Charles admitted adultery on camera. Diana went out the same evening in a black off-the-shoulder dress by Christina Stambolian that she had owned for three years and never worn. The photographs of her arriving at the Serpentine Gallery ran on more front pages the next morning than the confession did.
On the 20th of November 1995, 22.8 million people in the United Kingdom sat down to watch a Panorama interview recorded in her sitting room at Kensington Palace 15 days earlier. There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. She would like to be a queen of people’s hearts. She admitted her own adultery with James Hewitt.
The palace did not know. Robert Fellows, running the Queen’s office, learned of the interview only days before transmission.
Martin Bashir did not get to Diana through Sarah. He got to her through Charles Spencer, her brother. In September of 1995, Bashir met the ninth Earl and showed him documents purporting to be bank statements indicating that people close to the Spencer family were being paid by the security services for information. The documents were forgeries mocked up by a BBC graphic designer at Bashir’s request.
Charles Spencer, believing them, made the introduction. That is the finding of Lord Dyson’s inquiry published in May of 2021.
For 17 years, the institution had carried a file on Sarah Spencer dating from a magazine interview she gave at 23. On the working assumption that she was the loose Spencer, the one who talked, the risk in the family. In the event, the material that did the institution real damage came out of Diana’s own recorded tapes in 1992 and out of Diana’s own sitting room in 1995. Sarah, across the entire period, contributed nothing to either.
On the 20th of December 1995, one month after Panorama, the Queen wrote to both her son and her daughter-in-law, advising them in terms that were understood by everyone concerned to be an instruction to divorce. The decree absolute came through on the 28th of August, 1996.
She kept Kensington Palace. She kept the title Diana, Princess of Wales. She lost the style Her Royal Highness. She lost her royal protection officers. She lost most of her household.
What she needed was a woman of the right background who would travel with her, manage the small things, stand slightly behind her at the right angle, and be absolutely and unquestionably on her side. In the last months of her life, on several of those trips, the woman standing slightly behind her was Sarah.
Sarah had been traveling with her intermittently for years before that. She went to Nepal in 1993. She went to Pakistan more than once, to Lahore, to the cancer hospital Imran Khan had built and named for his mother. She carried the bag with the spare tights and the paracetamol and the list. She stood three feet behind her sister in corridors that smelled of disinfectant while Diana sat on a bed and held the hand of a woman who was dying for as long as it took.
She did not appear in the photograph. It was not a glamorous role, and it was not a paid one.
On the 30th of August, Diana flew from Sardinia to Paris. At around 23 minutes past midnight on the 31st, a Mercedes carrying Diana, Dodi Fayed, the driver Henri Paul, and the bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones went into the 13th pillar of the underpass at the Pont de l’Alma. Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died at the scene. Diana was pronounced dead at 4 in the morning French time.
A British Aerospace 146 of the Queen’s Flight took off from RAF Northolt, bound for Paris. On it were three people. Prince Charles, who had insisted on going, and Sarah and Jane. Their brother did not go. He was at his house in South Africa.
The two Spencer sisters flew to Paris together to collect their youngest sister. There is no account of what was said on that flight. There will never be one.
They landed in the afternoon. They went to the hospital. Diana had been washed and dressed and laid in a room on the first floor with candles and flowers. The two sisters and her former husband spent time there. Then the coffin was carried down and put into a hearse and driven to Villacoublay. The aircraft came back into Northolt at about seven in the evening.
Charles Spencer got up in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of September and delivered a eulogy that the palace had not seen. He called her the very essence of compassion, of duty, of beauty. He said she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic. He said of her sons that her blood family would do all they could to continue the way in which she was steering them, so that their souls were not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but could sing openly.
She was buried on an island in the middle of an ornamental lake at Althorp in ground that had been Spencer land for 500 years.
Diana had made a will in June of 1993 and had named two executors: her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, and her eldest sister. Diana had a brother who owned the family seat and had a head for business. She had another sister married to the most senior official in the royal household. If you were picking an executor on the basis of relevant qualification, Robert Fellows was one of the best-qualified men in England.
She picked Sarah.
The estate was large, in the region of £21 million gross, reduced by tax to something under 13. The bulk of it went into trust for William and Harry. And then there was a document called a letter of wishes, written in October of 1993, three months after the will. In it, Diana asked that her chattels, her personal possessions, her jewelry and clothes and pictures and furniture, be divided so that three quarters went to her sons and the remaining quarter was shared among her 17 godchildren.
The executors went to the High Court and applied to vary the arrangements. In December of 1997, a judge granted the variation. The age at which the boys would come into their inheritance moved from 25 to 30. And the godchildren, instead of sharing a quarter of the chattels between them, received one item each. The items were modest, a piece of porcelain, a small painting.
This decision has been criticized for a quarter of a century. Diana wrote down what she wanted. She wrote it clearly. What the godchildren actually got was, by comparison, a token.
The case for the executors is also real. A letter of wishes is not a will. It has no binding legal force. The variation was made partly on tax grounds and partly in the interests of the two beneficiaries the will actually created, who were 13 and 15 years old and had just lost their mother in front of the entire world. Every object Diana had touched had acquired within a fortnight of her death a market value that had nothing to do with the object.
The executors made a defensible administrative decision and an indefensible communications decision. They did not explain themselves. They said almost nothing.
The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund was set up within days of her death. Over the years of its operation, it raised well over a hundred million pounds and distributed grants to causes she had worked on: landmines, palliative care, the treatment of people with HIV, and a great many small organizations that would never have got near that kind of money otherwise.
Sarah was a trustee from the beginning and became chair. The fund made a series of decisions that went badly. It licensed her name and her signature to commercial products. The execution produced a Diana signature on tubs of margarine and a memorial lottery scratch card, and the coverage was merciless.
Then came the Franklin Mint. The Franklin Mint was an American company producing collectibles, and after Diana’s death it produced Diana dolls and Diana plates without the fund’s authorization. In 1998, the fund sued it in California. The action failed. The court found that the fund did not have the standing it claimed and dismissed the case. The appeal failed too. Then the Franklin Mint countersued for malicious prosecution, seeking a very large sum indeed.
By 2003, the exposure was serious enough that the trustees froze the fund’s grant-giving. Charities that had been promised money were told the money was not coming because the fund had to hold reserves against an American lawsuit it had started. Hospices and landmine clearance programs and small AIDS organizations went without for the better part of a year.
It was settled in 2004 with a sum reported at around £13.5 million directed to charitable purposes agreed between the parties. The fund survived. It wound up its operations in 2012 after distributing something in the order of £120 million in grants across 15 years.
Sarah McCorquodale was a farmer’s wife from Lincolnshire with three children and no professional background in charity administration, litigation, or brand licensing. She was handed at 42, in the worst week of her life, the executorship of a £21 million estate and the chairmanship of what became one of the largest and most scrutinized charitable funds in British history. She was not equipped for it. Almost nobody would have been.
She did it anyway for 15 years without a fee, without an autobiography, without a single sympathetic newspaper profile placed by a friendly source. And when it went wrong, she did not brief against her fellow trustees or blame the lawyers or go on television to explain herself.
Twice in the years after her sister’s death, Sarah McCorquodale was put into a witness box. Both times it was the machinery of the English legal system that did it rather than any newspaper.
The first was in the autumn of 2002 at the Old Bailey in the trial of Paul Burrell. Burrell had been Diana’s butler. After her death, a very large number of items belonging to her were found at his house in Cheshire. He was charged with theft. Sarah gave evidence for the prosecution as executor of the estate. The trial collapsed on the 1st of November 2002 when it emerged that the Queen had recalled a conversation with Burrell from shortly after Diana’s death in which he had told her he was taking papers away for safekeeping.
The second was the inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al-Fayed, which opened at the Royal Courts of Justice in October of 2007 before Lord Justice Scott Baker, sitting as coroner, with a jury. It happened because Mohamed Al-Fayed had spent a decade insisting that his son and Diana had been murdered by the British establishment.
In January of 2008, Lady Sarah McCorquodale was called. She was 52 years old. She had not given a press interview since 1978. She now had to sit in a courtroom in London in front of a jury and a bank of reporters and answer questions under oath about her sister’s private life.
She was asked about the state of the relationship with Dodi Fayed and whether there had been an engagement. She was asked about her sister’s state of mind in the last months. She was asked about the letters Diana had written and about a note in which Diana had recorded a fear that an attempt would be made on her life in a staged car accident.
Sarah’s evidence did not help the conspiracy case. She was cross-examined by Michael Mansfield, who represented Mohamed Al-Fayed, and she was in the box for hours, and she did not give him what he needed. On the central questions, the engagement, the fear, the pregnancy, the conspiracy, her evidence pointed the other way.
The palace spent 30 years treating Sarah Spencer as the Spencer who could not be relied on. And when the moment finally arrived, when she was compelled under oath in public, with immunity from any consequence, and with the world’s press in the gallery to say whatever she wished about the royal family and her sister’s death, what she said was measured, factual, and unhelpful to the conspiracy.
The jury returned its verdict on the 7th of April, 2008. Unlawful killing by the grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of Henri Paul.
Jane Fellows has been treated by most accounts of this family as a piece of furniture. She married a man she loved when she was 21. He happened to work for the Queen. She did not choose to be placed at the intersection of a collapsing royal marriage and her husband’s career. What she did with that position, as far as anyone can establish, was hold it.
She stayed married. Robert Fellows retired in 1999 and was made a life peer, Baron Fellows of Shotesham, and they went back to Norfolk. In the 27 years since, neither of them has published anything, briefed anyone, or given a single account of the years in which they lived inside the machinery of the worst royal crisis of the century.
At the funeral in 1997, the two sisters read together from the pulpit. They read a poem about grief and the continuation of life, and their voices were steady.
In May of 2018, at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the reading was given by Lady Jane Fellows. That was not an accident of the running order. It was a decision made by a bridegroom who had been 12 years old at his mother’s funeral to put his mother’s sister into the service in the most visible non-clerical role available.
Frances Shand Kydd died in June of 2004. She had spent her last years on the island of Seil off the west coast of Scotland, had converted to Catholicism, and had done a great deal of quiet work for charities she never publicized. She was buried on the isle of Seil.
Sarah went home to Lincolnshire. She raised three children. She took on county responsibilities of the sort that the wives of Lincolnshire landowners take on, which involve a great many committees and very few photographers. She did the memorial fund work until it wound up. She turned up to family things.
In 2018, her younger daughter married in Northamptonshire wearing the Spencer tiara, the same tiara Diana had worn at St. Paul’s in 1981. The photographs went round the world for about a day and a half and then everyone moved on.
The Spencer aunts were not part of the daily fabric of the princes’ upbringing. They could not have been. Two boys in the line of succession at boarding school with a father who had custody were never going to be raised in part by an aunt in Norfolk and an aunt in Lincolnshire.
What can be said is what the record shows. Both aunts have been at the family occasions. Jane read at Harry’s wedding in 2018. Sarah was at the weddings and at the memorials and at the unveiling of the statue in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace in 2021 on what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, standing with her brother and her sister a few feet from her nephews.
Neither aunt has ever commented publicly on the relationship between the two brothers, on the events of 2020, on the books, on the interviews, or on anything else. The two women who were on that airplane to Paris have kept, across 29 years, the most complete silence of anyone with a claim to speak.
Sarah chose committees in Lincolnshire. She has held county appointments of the kind that go to people who have made themselves useful over decades. At 23, she had been on the front page of every newspaper in the country as the probable future queen. She was clever, she was funny, she had a voice, she had an address book, and after 1997 she had a name that would have opened any door in Britain and a story that publishers would have paid a very large amount of money for.
She could have had a public life. She chose committees in Lincolnshire.
Whenever the anniversaries have come round, every five years with the documentaries and the retrospectives and the reissued books and the researchers ringing around the family, the answer from Lincolnshire has been the same answer it has been since 1978, which is nothing at all.
There is no document. Nobody at Buckingham Palace ever wrote a memorandum saying, Keep Sarah Spencer away from the Princess of Wales. What we have is one magazine interview in 1978, a marriage in the same season that happened to be to a courtier, and then 17 years of events which can be arranged into a pattern.
Institutions of this kind do not need memoranda. What they run on is reputation transmitted verbally between people who have worked together for decades. The royal household in 1990 was substantially staffed by people who had been in post in 1978.
And there is a second piece of evidence which is negative but real. Sarah Spencer was never given anything. Not an appointment, not an honor attached to the household, not a role in her sister’s establishment during the marriage. In a system that distributes small formal roles to well-connected women of exactly her background, almost as a matter of routine, the eldest daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer received nothing at all from the institution across 16 years.
There is one more piece of this that has never been given its proper weight. Sarah Spencer talked about being ill. She was 23. It was 1978. There was no vocabulary in public life for what she was describing. And an Earl’s daughter in a magazine with a circulation in the millions said out loud that she had had anorexia.
That was not a slip. She did not have to answer that question. She could have said she had been run down, which is what everyone in her position said.
Fifteen years later, on the 27th of April 1993, the Princess of Wales stood up at a conference in London and gave a keynote address on eating disorders. She talked about them as illnesses rather than as vanity. She talked about the shame that surrounds them and about the way sufferers hide. She did not in that speech disclose her own experience. But by 1993, the Morton book had been out for ten months and everybody in the hall knew exactly what she was talking about.
It was received as a landmark. It was reported around the world as an act of courage.
Hold the two moments up next to each other. 1978. A Spencer daughter says publicly that she has had an eating disorder, and the institution’s verdict is that she is indiscreet, unsound, and finished. 1993. A Spencer daughter says publicly that eating disorders are illnesses deserving compassion, and the world calls it brave.
The difference between the two is not the subject and it is not the courage. It is that by 1993, the speaker was the most famous woman on the planet and could not be silenced. And in 1978, the speaker was a 23-year-old whom the machine could afford to drop.
The family retains people who injure it. It expels people who describe it. There is a rule buried under all of that. The rule is not about morality. It is about the maintenance of a single asset, which is the family’s ability to say that nobody really knows what goes on.
Sarah Spencer damaged it slightly, once at 23 by accident, and the file stayed open for the rest of her life.
The case against Sarah McCorquodale is not empty. She made the introduction. She did carry it, and she has carried it in public for 45 years. The tea towels line, if it was hers, is the response of a woman who deals with distress by making it smaller. And a 19-year-old in genuine panic six days before the largest wedding in history needed something else.
She and her mother set aside a letter of wishes their dead sister and daughter had written in her own hand, and 17 children received a token in place of a share, and the executors said nothing to explain it. That was a failure.
There was also a charitable fund chaired by her that froze its grant-giving for the better part of a year because of a lawsuit it had chosen to bring in a foreign jurisdiction and lost. Hospices went without, landmine clearance went without. That happened on her watch.
Now the other side. She never sold a word. Not in 1997 when the offers would have been life-changing and every newspaper in the world was outside her gate. Not in 2002 when Burrell was making money out of the same material. Not in 2008. Not in 2017 at the 20th anniversary. Not in 2022 when the Queen died and the market for royal memoir was at its peak.
48 years. One interview given at 23 and nothing since.
On the day her sister died, she flew to Paris, stood in a hospital room, brought her home, and has never described a second of it. She traveled to Lahore and Kathmandu and stood three feet behind her sister in hospital corridors, unpaid and uncredited, in the last years when the household had been dismantled and there was almost nobody left to do it.
The executorship and the chairmanship came to her because her sister had asked, and she stayed with both for 15 years through failure and public criticism, and never once briefed a reporter to make herself look better.
And when the coroner finally compelled her to speak under oath with every protection and every incentive to say something explosive, she told the truth as she understood it, and the truth as she understood it happened to be dull.
The palace did not want Diana talking to Sarah because Sarah had once told a magazine the truth about a relationship and about her own health. On the strength of that, an entire family was sorted into the reliable one and the risk, and the sorting held for the rest of both their lives.
It was wrong in every particular. The sister who talked was Diana, into a tape recorder in 1991 in her own sitting room, because by then the institution had left her with no other instrument. The door into Kensington Palace in 1995 was opened by her brother holding forged bank statements. The man whose reputation was damaged by all of it was the one the palace trusted most, Robert Fellows, who defended his sister-in-law in good faith on a denial that was not true.
And the woman they spent 30 years watching went to Lincolnshire, raised three children, buried her sister, administered her estate, chaired her fund, testified when required, and said nothing.
She is 71 years old now. Somewhere in Lincolnshire this afternoon, there is a woman in her 70s working through correspondence about a village hall or a hospice or a county show who was the front runner for the throne of the United Kingdom in 1977, who introduced her sister to the man she married, who flew to Paris to collect her body, who administered her estate for 15 years, who was cross-examined for hours in the High Court about the worst night of her life, and who has never once told anybody what any of it was like.
There is a kind of discipline in that which the institution of all bodies on earth ought to have recognized and rewarded. It was the one thing it could never bring itself to see.
The institution built a file on a 23-year-old in 1978 and never opened it again to check whether it was still accurate. It was never accurate. That is the whole of it.