Princess Diana’s Evil Stepmother: Raine Spencer – HT
Rain Spencer was born Rain Mccoraddale on the 9th of September 1929 in London, the only child of Barbara Kartland, a famous romance novelist and columnist, and her husband Alexander Mccoradale, an army officer and printing heir. The marriage quickly became scandalous and ended in divorce in 1936. According to Rain, her mother simply married one of her husband’s cousins, Hugh Mccoradale, later that year.
Young rain spent her early years in an upper class London millure. In 1947 at age 18, she was presented as a debutant at court and was named debutant of the year. She was thus briefly a symbol of youthful glamour in postwar Britain. Rain grew up surrounded by books and governnesses and even spent part of World War II in Canada with her mother’s circle. speculative rumor.
Over the years, a persistent but unconfirmed rumor circulated that Ray Mccorale was actually fathered not by Alexander Mccorquidale, but by Prince George, Duke of Kent, Queen Elizabeth II’s uncle. This story traces back to Barbara Cartland’s social circle in the 1920s. A 2018 Marie Clare feature notes that the Duke of Kent was rumored to have had an affair with Kartland with Rain born 1929 sometimes cited as a possible child from that liaison.
However, historians and family records do not substantiate this claim. In fact, Reigns legal father was Alexander Mccorale and the Duke of Kent paternity remains unverified gossip. After the war, Re Mccoradale quickly established herself in society. In 1947, she was celebrated as Deb of the Year, and before long, she became well known for her striking beauty, towering buffont hairstyle, and flamboyant dress sense.
At just 18, she was engaged to Gerald Leger, the heir to the Eldom of Dartmouth. They married in 1948. As a married woman styled Vic Countess Lewisham after her husband inherited that courtesy title in 1958 and Countess of Dartmouth in 1962, Rain also pursued a public career. Despite her high society image, she was politically active.
At age 23, she became the youngest member of Westminster City Council. Over the next decade, she served on numerous local government committees, planning, parks, and personnel, and later won election to the Greater London Council from Richmond. She took a particular interest in environmental planning, heritage, and tourism, reflecting her lifelong conservative allegiance.
In summary, Rain used her position and energy to champion civic causes even as she raised a family. Rain and Gerald Leger had a conventional aristocratic family life. They had four children together, two sons and two daughters, and Rain maintained her London social life and her political career throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By 1958, Gerald became Viccount Lewisham, second daughter of the Earl of Dartmouth, making Reign Vic Countess Lewisham.
and in 1962 he succeeded as the fourth Earl of Dartmouth making her countess of Dartmouth. In practice the Dartmouths divided their time between London and the family’s country estate in Northamptonshire, always with reign at the center of entertaining and managing household affairs. She continued on Westminster Council and on civic boards throughout this period.
For almost three decades, Rain Lia balanced raising her four children with her public duties. In 1971, Rain’s life changed dramatically. While serving on an architectural heritage committee, she met John Spencer, Viccount Althorp, then 43, a divorced father of two young children. A romance blossomed quickly. She and Lord Althorp, who would soon inherit the eldom of Spencer, fell passionately in love, even though both were married to others.
Their affair became London society gossip. When Reigns husband sued for divorce in 1976, naming Alth as co-respondent, it was front page news. Two months after her divorce from Lord Dartmouth was finalized, Rene McCoradale, then Countess of Dartmouth, secretly married John Spencer, now the 8th Earl Spencer, on 7th June 1976. The marriage immediately made her Rain Spencer, Countess Spencer, stepmother to the Earl’s children, 13-year-old Diana, and her older brother Charles, later 9inth Earl Spencer, plus two younger daughters from J’s first marriage. While
newspapers speculated about Rain’s motives, wealth, status, love, it seems both she and John were genuinely devoted. As one friend later said, they found each other irresistible and married in secret at Caxton Hall earlier than expected. Rain Spencer now became mistress of Althorp, the grand Spencer family seat in Northamptonshire.
She threw herself into restoring and renovating the vast country house and estate. The work was extensive. Beyond simple repairs, she modernized Althorp with new heating and bathrooms and redecorated many rooms. At the estate’s 500year-old scale, maintenance costs were enormous, and Rain took pragmatic steps. Reports note that she reduced the household staff and opened Althorp to paying visitors to raise income.
To fund the renovations, Rain controversially sold off many heirlooms and antiques, reportedly over 15 million pounds worth. Critics, especially some Spencer family members, complained bitterly about the sales. At the same time, Rain stamped the house with her personality. She brought in bold new decor, colorful fabrics, and Louis V 16th style furnishings.
Diana’s brother Charles would later sneer that her style had a wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco. In the press, she acquired a reputation for lavishness. One biography wrote that Rain’s predelection for using talcum powder post bathe and her habit of being served breakfast in bed helped feed the image of an imperious aristocrat.
In reality, her spending was not far from what many peers were doing to maintain large homes, but the Spencer’s shrinking fortune made the changes more palpable. As Counter Spencer, Rain took charge of renovating the vast estate, but her ornate style, pearls, high hair, bright coats, invited criticism. Beyond the estate work, Rain used her position as countest to expand her public role.
She continued in business and charity. For example, she joined the board of the British Tourist Authority and other heritage bodies promoting British culture abroad. In 1978, 2 years after her marriage, the Earl Spencer suffered a serious stroke. Rain nursed him through that illness at Althorp, personally overseeing his care while still running the household.
By the early 1980s, Rain had become a fixture of life at Althorp. She oversaw renovations, hosted social events, and maintained her duties on various public committees. Yet, the contrast between her flashy urban persona and the Spencer’s oldworld country norms helped fuel family tensions. From the moment she arrived, Rain Spencer’s relationship with her stepchildren was icy.
Princess Diana, then 13, and her siblings disliked Rain intensely. As Diana later related, she and Charles immediately mocked the newcomer. They derisively nicknamed her acid rain. That nickname captured their resentment. They saw her as an outsider who had supplanted their mother. The young Spencers even began presenting her with insulting gifts.
On one Christmas soon after the wedding, they gave Rain a grim biography of Marie Antuinette, signifying her share of a queen’s fate. The hostility was also widely reported in the media, helping build Re’s reputation as the archetypal wicked stepmother. Tatler later noted that Re was vilified as the wicked stepmother of Princess Diana in the press.
The reasons for the family feud were both personal and cultural. Rain was loud, conspicuous, and vulgar by aristocratic standards. She chose bright furnishings, pink lampshades, pale drapery, and had a famously large hairdo, which the press called a mering hairo. The Spencer children were said to resent that Rain treated Althorp as her home, replacing family portraits with personal art and moving heirlooms out.
According to one biographer, Diana and her sisters were used to having their father to themselves, and when rain came along, it was a disaster. Diana herself lashed out in anger on a few occasions. As one account recounts, Diana once slapped her father in protest at his marriage to Rain.
Overall, the new countest faced a steady campaign of animosity from Diana and her siblings through the 1970s and 1980s. Public comments and anecdotes from this period paint Rain as horty and Diana as defiant. But in reality, this was a turbulent blending of families where each side deeply misunderstood the other. When Diana Spencer married Prince Charles in July 1981, the blended Spencer family was on display for the world.
Re Spencer attended the wedding ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but she was not given a prominent role. Contemporary reports and later accounts note that Earl Spencer Johnny was chosen to walk Diana down the aisle and Rain was banished to a seat at the back of St. Paul’s Cathedral during the ceremony. She sat apart from the front pews of the royal party and did not appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony with the newlyweds.
In short, she was kept at arms length in the formal proceedings. Diana’s marriage to Charles was thus a moment when rain, officially present, was nevertheless not treated as a full member of the bridal family. Historian Penny Junor noted it was pretty full-on war between Diana and Rain in those years. This public sidelining stung.
The bride’s side of the family, including Diana’s maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, Francis Shand Kid’s mother, carried off center stage, while Rain and Diana’s stepfather, Peter Shand Kid, sat quietly on a side pew. Ray’s daughter later recalled that her mother’s appearance on the wedding day was minimal.
In any case, Ray’s lack of visibility at Diana’s wedding set the tone. She was clearly not embraced by the royal family or by Diana herself during that happy event. Tensions came to a head in late 1989 during the wedding of Diana’s younger brother Charles Spencer Vicount Althorp. According to multiple reports and later documentaries, Rain and Diana had a fierce confrontation at Althorp that ended in violence.
Rain’s personal assistant, Sue How, later recounted that witnesses said Diana pushed Rain Spencer down the steps in the saloon staircase of Althorp. In that documented incident, Diana, distraught that her own mother had been excluded from family arrangements, allegedly lunged at Rain and forced her down a flight of stairs.
Rain was left badly bruised and dreadfully upset. According to the eyewitness account, while family insiders dispute various details of the story, the broad outline is supported by published accounts. It is widely reported that in 1989, Diana physically shoved her stepmother during an angry moment.
This episode, sometimes called the staircase incident, cemented the public image of a bitter feud. Rain chose not to press any charges, and both women cooled off afterward, but the event remained infamous in press law. Afterwards, the hostility between Diana and Rain only intensified, although, as we shall see, it would eventually thaw.
At the time though, in late 1989, Diana’s actions made her stepmother’s life more uneasy. Rain later described the incident matterof factly as a cruel, heartless thing to do to an older woman, reflecting how bruised and upset she was by Diana’s violence. The disputes culminated when Earl John Spencer died in 1992.
By this time, Diana was Princess of Wales and Charles the heir apparent to Althorp. The family strife became painfully public at the time of Johnny’s death. For 2 days, the household descended into chaos. Diana and Charles, who had become Earl Spencer, insisted that Rain leave Althorp immediately. In one vivid telling, Diana had Rain’s clothes thrown into bin bags, which Charles gleefully kicked down the house’s grand staircase.
Family members reportedly refused to let Rain take any of the furniture out of Althorp unless she could prove legal ownership. It was an ignaminious eviction. Legally, John Spencer had provided for his widow. She received a reported 4 million inheritance and a Mayfair house in his will. Diana’s family found even this distasteful.
Charles later had to sell some ancestral property to cover Althorp’s expenses. In any case, Rain had no choice but to move to London. According to press reports, she was unceremoniously kicked out of Alth by her stepchildren. She took up residence in the townhouse her husband had left her.
In practical terms, the 1992 death meant that Rain lost the home where she had built her new life. From the perspective of Diana and Charles, Rain had no place at Althorp. From Rain’s perspective, her husband’s heirs had treated her spitefully. In the immediate aftermath, Rain made a swift unexpected decision. Within about a year, she married again.
In July 1993, at age 63, Rain wed Count Jean Francois Pineton De Shambra, a French aristocrat much younger than herself. The society press called it a nearly royal wedding, though Diana and her siblings gave it a wide birth. None of them attended the ceremony. Rain and the count even sold pictures from their ceremony to Hello Magazine for a reported £70,000, a move that some in the tabloid media ridiculed as crass.
The marriage was short-lived. They divorced in 1995, but it marked a clear break. Rain had severed ties with the Spencer household and was establishing a new life. Remarkably, after years of hostility, Rain Spencer and Princess Diana eventually reconciled. By the mid 1990s, Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles had broken down, and the princess was no longer maintaining royal protocols at Althorp or elsewhere.
Several accounts, and Diana’s own inquest testimony, described the two women growing close in those final years. For example, Rain’s new husband reported that Diana had written to her in French after a lunch date. Diana thanked Rain for the love you gave to my father and said she was grateful for the happiness Rain had given Johnny.
In Rain’s own words, as published years later, she and Diana became huge friends. Diana would come and sit on my sofa and tell me her troubles. Diana’s former butler, Paul Burl, likewise said that Diana did a complete Uturn in inviting Rain and Shambbron to lunch during Diana’s last three years. By 1997, it was not uncommon to see Rain and Diana together at public events, smiling side by side, a far cry from the cold shoulders of a decade earlier.
This unexpected friendship had a simple basis. Both women had suffered disappointments and heartbreaks, Diana’s divorce and struggles with royal life. Rain’s widowhood and ostracism. They found comfort in each other’s company. Rain later told interviewers that Diana always believed Rain had no hidden agenda toward her.
After reconciling, Diana made efforts to include Rain in family occasions. For example, arranging to have photographers catch them hugging, much to the surprise of Diana’s mother, Francis. In the end, as author Tina Gordo wrote, “Rain went from wicked stepmother to one of Diana’s closest confidants, a genuine, albeit late, friendship that lasted until Diana’s death.
In the mid 1990s, Diana and Rain Spencer became close. By then, Diana trusted Rain, often confiding in her and even inviting her to lunch in Diana’s final years. This camaraderie was a remarkable turnaround from their earlier feud. After Princess Diana’s tragic death in 1997, Rain Spencer largely stepped back from the public spotlight, but she never returned to private obscurity.
She continued her work on various boards, notably at Harrods, and remained a recognizable society figure. In particular, she served on the board of Harold’s department store for many years, leveraging her charm and contacts in business circles. She even took part-time work on the Harrods sales floor on occasion as an ambassador to wealthy customers.
At the 2007 inquest into Diana’s death, Rain gave testimony about Diana’s last days. She made only a few public remarks, but one notable line was her comment that Diana had insisted Rain had no hidden agenda toward her. This statement underlined the trust Diana ultimately had in her stepmother. Rain also recalled that Diana felt overwhelmed by the pressures of fame.
“It was a very draining life,” Rain quoted Diana as saying. Throughout her later life, Rain maintained her elegant personal style and social schedule. She divided her time between her London townhouse, the Mayfair property bequeathed by Earl Spencer, and her Chelsea home. She did charity work, attended society events, and continued friendships from earlier decades, including with Muhammad Al Fed and other high society figures.
In 2007, Rain published a memoir titled The Path to Paradise, reflecting on her turbulent life. By the 2000s, she was known affectionately simply as the Dowager Countess Spencer, still Buxom, still immaculately groomed, and still mixing with the rich and famous. She remained a director of Harold’s estates until her death.
Rain Spencer’s final years were largely peaceful. In 2016, she fell ill and died on the 21st of October at age 87. Her son, William Le, the 10th Earl of Dartmouth, announced that she had passed away after a short illness at her London home. In death, as in life, Rain was respected for her vivacity and a work ethic.
Major newspapers ran obituaries noting that she had held aristocratic titles and served in politics. Survived by her four children, Rain had no surviving husbands. Her third husband divorced her in 1995. She was buried privately and notably none of the Spencer family, Diana’s siblings, attended her funeral as she had fallen out of favor with them decades before.
In her legacy, Rain Spencer remains a figure of contrasts. Born to scandal yet moving high in society. Vilified as a step monster, yet eventually cherished by Diana. Remembered for her extravagance, yet also for her energy and charity. Documentary retrospectives and biographies in the years since her death have revisited her story with more nuance, crediting her for restoring Althorp and eventually bridging the rift with Diana.
Rain’s life from 1929 to 2016 spanned eras of change in Britain’s aristocracy and she left behind a complex portrait of a woman who was in the words of a royal memoirist a force of nature. Sources contemporary news articles, biographies and archival reports were used to construct this account. All efforts have been made to distinguish verified facts from unconfirmed rumors and to present an accurate objective history of Rain Spencer’s life.