The Scandalous Lives of the Spencer Sisters: Diana’s Family and Its Hidden Cost HT
August 31st, 1997. Just past 4:00 in the morning, Paris time. Lady Jane Fellowes is the first member of the Spencer family to receive the call. Her husband, Sir Robert Fellowes, private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, is among the very first officials to be formally notified that Diana, Princess of Wales, is dead.
Jane passes the news to her sister Sarah. Within hours, both women are on a plane to Paris with Prince Charles, bound for the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, and their sister’s body. Picture those three people in that cabin. Charles, who had been Sarah’s companion before he was Diana’s husband, and finally Diana’s most public adversary.
Sarah, who had brought Diana into his orbit 20 years earlier, and publicly named herself Cupid. And Jane, who had spent the previous several years barely speaking to Diana at all, because of the man beside her, and what his institutional role had required of both of them. What was said on that flight has never been reported.
Nobody who was there has chosen to speak about it. What we know is this. Somewhere over the English Channel, two sisters were flying toward a body, and carrying between them enough unresolved history to fill a book the Spencer family has never been willing to write. Diana wasn’t the only Spencer sister carrying something the family desperately wanted to keep quiet.
She was just the one whose story the world decided to tell. The Spencer family’s connection to the British royal family was old enough to feel almost ornamental by the time Diana was born. Their parents, Johnny Spencer and Frances Roche, had married in Westminster Abbey in 1954, the Queen herself in attendance.
The children, Sarah, then Jane, then Diana, then Charles, grew up at Park House on the Sandringham estate, close enough to the royal grounds that Diana played as a small child with Princes Andrew and Edward. The Spencers had been embedded in the aristocratic world surrounding the crown for generations through land stewardship and social connection, and the quiet proximity that makes royalty feel like simply the next family over.
What that image of gilded proximity concealed was a household under persistent private strain. In 1960, before Diana was born, a son named John had died within 10 hours of his birth. In 1967, Frances Spencer left her husband Johnny for a man named Peter Shand Kydd. Two years later, the divorce was finalized, and Johnny received full custody of all four children, aided by testimony from Frances’s own mother, Baroness Fermoy, who took the stand against her daughter in the proceedings.
The children experienced their mother’s departure not as a clean severance, but as an ongoing absence that shaped everything about how the family managed difficulty by not managing it visibly, by maintaining the exterior, by keeping the surface smooth. By the mid-1970s, when the family relocated to Althorp, the ancestral estate in Northamptonshire, the two eldest Spencer children, Sarah and Jane, had already absorbed more loss than their surroundings suggested.
Four children survived into adulthood. Sarah, born 1955, Jane, born 1957, Diana, born 1961, Charles, born 1964. What history recorded about them is mostly about the third child. What it largely ignored is what happened to the two who came before her, when the institution Diana would eventually marry got its hands on them first.
In summer 1977, Lady Sarah Spencer was 22 years old. Time magazine would describe her the following year as willowy, red-haired, and 23. That birthday fell in March 1978. And she was known in aristocratic circles for a quality that biographer for Sarah Bradford, writing in Diana, Finally, the Complete Story, called sparkiness and irreverent wit.
She met Prince Charles at the annual Royal Ascot house party at Windsor Castle. He was 28, already under escalating pressure from family and press to find a wife. The tabloids had taken to calling his string of eligible companions Charlie’s Angels. Sarah Spencer was the latest name on a list that included Davina Sheffield, Lady Amanda Knatchbull, Lady Jane Wellesley, and several others.
For roughly 9 months, she moved inside the orbit that would eventually consume her family. Charles sent her invitations to Windsor and to Balmoral. Tina Brown, in The Diana Chronicles, writes that Sarah enjoyed being squired around and received a flattering stream of those invitations. She attended polo matches and house parties, occupied a position any number of young women in her social world would have envied.
She described the relationship in terms that are essential to understanding what came next as totally platonic. Charles was the big brother I never had. Her characterizations suggest a woman who genuinely liked and enjoyed him without ever seriously contemplating marriage. Whether that was always true, or partly retrospective reframing after the relationship ended, is impossible to verify now.
What’s clear is that Sarah didn’t see herself as a future princess. The problem was that nobody else knew that. Before the romance began, Sarah had already been through experiences the Spencer family kept carefully private. Her anorexia had developed in the mid-1970s, severe enough that her weight reportedly fell to approximately 81 lb in 1975, below 6 stone, a figure that places her clinical condition beyond doubt.
She had been expelled from her boarding school near Sevenoaks for drinking, not socially or occasionally, but seriously, with a preferred list of spirits that included whiskey, Cointreau, gin, sherry, and most often vodka. She had reportedly checked into an eating disorder clinic and received formal psychiatric treatment.
One account suggests she was permitted to speak by telephone with Charles as an incentive to gain weight, a detail from a single source that can’t be independently confirmed, but which speaks to the severity of what she was managing. None of this was public. The aristocratic world she moved in had no mechanism for it to become public.
The code was you managed, you performed, you kept the surface smooth. What Sarah was living through privately matters enormously when placed beside what Diana would later experience. In 1992, Andrew Morton’s book would reveal that Diana had suffered from bulimia nervosa, a diagnosis rooted in Diana’s own account, in the misery of her marriage and the emotional isolation of life inside the royal household.
A 1997 news article on eating disorders noted explicitly that Diana’s sister Sarah suffered from anorexia nervosa, naming the parallel directly. The Spencer household had apparently produced two sisters who managed unbearable emotional pressure through the same mechanism, controlling what they ate in opposite directions, and hiding it from everyone around them.
The family didn’t do crisis. It did composure. Both Sarah and Diana learned that lesson early, and paid for it for the rest of their lives. In November 1977, Sarah invited Charles to Althorp for a shooting weekend. He arrived in the way the English country set had been doing for centuries, with dogs and guns and companions striding through plowed fields.
And it was there that he first properly encountered Diana. She was 16, still at school, doing her best impression of someone composed in the presence of the heir to the throne. Diana’s first recorded impression of him wasn’t what you’d expect from a future princess. She found him sad. “What a sad man,” she reportedly said. Her own later account describes seeing Charles striding through the field with his Labrador, and experiencing what Tina Brown memorably calls a “woomph” moment.
From that weekend onward, there was essentially no other possible subject for Diana’s romantic attention. For Charles, she was, in his own recollection, a jolly and bouncy younger sister of Sarah. He wasn’t looking at Diana. He was still with the woman who brought him. He wouldn’t be with that woman much longer.
In early 1978, Sarah and Charles went to Klosters, the Swiss Alpine resort Charles favored for skiing. They were photographed there together. The press pack had been monitoring the relationship for months, reading significance into every Balmoral weekend and polo match. Watching for the engagement announcement that court correspondents were convinced was coming.
Sarah was by this point genuinely famous by association. The woman who might be the next Princess of Wales. When they returned to London, Sarah did something that in retrospect has the quality of catastrophic self-revelation. Though Tina Brown suggests it was closer to naive gregariousness than deliberate self-destruction.
>> [snorts] >> She made friends with two journalists, Nigel Nelson and James Whitaker. Whitaker was working for The Sun at the time, one of the most relentless royal correspondents in Fleet Street. A man who would spend decades tracking, documenting and occasionally goading the Windsors and their circle.
He described Sarah in his own later account for the Sunday people as disarmingly frank. And noted that her head seemed to have been turned by the publicity. He wasn’t wrong. Sarah agreed to have lunch with them. She talked. The conversation ended up in Woman’s Own magazine. Whitaker published it under the byline Jeremy Slazenger, one of several pseudonyms he reportedly kept in rotation.
And what it contained was, by the standards of anyone connected to the Prince of Wales in 1978, extraordinary. Not because it was hostile. Not because it was calculated. Because it was simply catastrophically honest. Sarah told Whitaker she wasn’t in love with Charles. There is no chance of my marrying him. I’m not in love with him. And I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love.
Whether he were the dustman or the king of England. She described him as a romantic who falls in love easily. She called herself a whirlwind sort of lady as opposed to a person who goes in for slow-developing courtships. A remarkable self-description given the circumstances. She said she enjoyed his company. Charles makes me laugh a lot.
I really enjoy being with him. But her account was entirely that of a woman describing a pleasant friendship, not a romantic future. She also mentioned that she had been saving press clippings about herself and the prince to show her grandchildren someday. Whitaker was delighted. He recalled years later that Sarah seemed delighted I was so keen to share it with the nation.
Whatever he had expected to get from that London lunch, he got considerably more. Vanity Fair’s account of this period confirms the interview also touched on other personal matters. Underage drinking, her expulsion from school, her struggles with anorexia. The picture it painted was of a young aristocratic woman who was candid, self-aware and entirely unschooled in the calculus of royal secrecy.
Whatever damage she had done to herself, she had done it openly and without apparent malice. The publication landed like a stone into the still surface of the Prince of Wales’s carefully managed public life. Sarah, according to Brown, recognized her error almost the moment the words left her mouth. She attempted damage control suggesting Whitaker had obtained the quotes through dubious means.
That accusation did her no good. Whitaker responded by publishing additional material under the Slazenger byline. She had warned Charles the interview was coming before it ran. His response, delivered according to the Radio Times after a pause and with deadly coldness, was You’ve just done something extremely stupid. The relationship ended shortly after.
Nine months, finished. The woman Time magazine had described as positioned for a royal future was, at 23, simply no longer in the picture. The expulsion from that orbit was total. She wasn’t vilified in the press. The interview, strange as it was, didn’t read as scandalous so much as reckless. But she was gone.
Whatever Sarah Spencer had been before that lunch in London, she was now a private person again. The invitations to Windsor and Balmoral stopped. The photographers moved on. Charles went back to searching for a bride. What happened next is either the most magnanimous act in modern royal history or the most complicated gesture of sisterhood on record.
Sarah went on to introduce Charles to her younger sister formally and deliberately, describing herself to The Guardian when Diana’s engagement was announced in February 1981 as I introduced them. I’m Cupid. The introduction itself had begun at Althorp in November 1977 when Charles met Diana as Sarah’s companion.
The active matchmaking came later once Sarah’s own dismissal was complete. The blessing given, the connection acknowledged, the younger sister passed the baton Sarah herself had never particularly wanted. Sarah became part of the bridal party at Diana’s 1981 wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Watched by approximately 750 million television viewers worldwide.
She became one of Diana’s ladies-in-waiting from 1992 onward, traveling with her to Lille in France and to the Met Gala in New York in 1996. She was godmother to Prince William. The hierarchy between the two sisters had inverted completely. Diana, the younger, was now the most watched woman on Earth. Sarah, the older, was in attendance on her.
Diana called Sarah the only person I know I can trust. Whatever complexity may have existed beneath the surface of Sarah’s feelings about what she had set in motion, and the available evidence can’t settle that question, the documented relationship was one of genuine loyalty and closeness. Paul Burrell, Diana’s former butler, claimed Sarah said on Diana’s wedding day, I thought all this would be mine one day.
That account requires significant caution. Sarah had testified against Burrell at his theft trial when he made that claim, which gives him an obvious motive to portray her uncharitably. The claim sits in contested territory and shouldn’t be treated as settled fact. What is documented, without dispute, is this.
Sarah Spencer said too much in early 1978, lost the prince, and then spent decades cheerfully positioning herself as the architect of her sister’s destiny. Whether that cheerfulness was uncomplicated is a question only Sarah can answer. On April 20th, 1978, within the same calendar year as Sarah’s interview, Lady Jane Spencer walked down the aisle at the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks in London and married Robert Fellows.
She was 21 years old. He was 36. Diana, 16, was a bridesmaid. The Spencer family tiara sat on Jane’s head, the same piece that would later appear at Sarah’s 1980 wedding. The 1978 isn’t a coincidence of narrative framing. It’s the structural fact that defines the next two decades of the Spencer sisters’ lives.
In the same 12 months, one Spencer sister expelled from the royal orbit through her own candor. Another Spencer sister marrying permanently into it. Fellows wasn’t an accidental figure in this world. He had been born on the Sandringham estate when the then Princess Elizabeth was 15 years old.
His father, Sir William Fellows, was the Queen’s land agent at Sandringham, a role that placed the family in daily proximity to the royal household long before Robert joined it professionally. When he and Jane married, he had already been serving as assistant private secretary to the sovereign for approximately a year. He already knew where all the rooms were.
He already understood which doors were never discussed. Richard Kay, in his obituary profile for the Daily Mail, described Fellows as a man you could pass in the street without a second glance. An angular figure pedaling his bicycle from one palace where he lived to another where he worked. Unassuming and anonymous in his cycle clips. Behind the owlish spectacles and the frayed cuffs, Kay wrote, was a shrewd and effective aid who often displayed remarkable sangfroid.
He was precisely the kind of man the institution relied upon. Discreet, loyal, constitutionally incapable of drama. After Eton, a three-year commission in the Scots Guards, then a discount brokerage in the city, then the palace. Competent, correct, unflappable. The Queen, when he accepted the palace appointment in 1977, reportedly quipped that he was the first private secretary I have cradled in my arms.
He had been born at Sandringham when she was 15. Jane Spencer had married into the machine itself. In 1978, she might not yet have understood what that would eventually cost her. By 1990, it would be impossible not to know. Fellows moved from assistant private secretary to deputy private secretary in 1986. On October 19th, 1990, he was formally appointed private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II.
The role carries a specific institutional definition, the main channel of communication between the monarch and the government. Every morning, Fellowes arrived at Buckingham Palace with the Queen’s correspondence in one hand and a box of government documents in the other. He received a “You can come up now, Robert” on the intercom.
He drafted her speeches, coordinated her diary, managed the institutional response to every crisis that touched the crown. During his 9 years in the role, those crises included the Windsor Castle fire of 1992, three royal divorces, and the total collapse of public confidence in the monarchy that would culminate in Diana’s death.
He was at the center of all of it. He was also Diana’s brother-in-law. And from October 1990 onward, that dual identity was the knife-edge on which Jane Fellowes was forced to balance for the remainder of her sister’s life. For the first decade of the Wales marriage, the arrangement was difficult but navigable. Jane and Robert lived in the old barracks at Kensington Palace, immediately adjacent to Diana’s household.
The sisters visited constantly. Robert and Jane listened as Diana described her marriage’s deterioration. They came to conclude, according to Kay’s sourcing, that Charles should have treated her better. They were, as Kay put it, the princess’s crutch. That role became structurally impossible in June 1992 when Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, was published and detonated.
Morton had spent months in 1991 secretly recording Diana’s testimony at Kensington Palace. The system devised for this was almost comically covert. Diana’s friend, James Colthurst, would bicycle to the palace, deliver Morton’s written questions, collect her recorded answers, and carry the tapes back out. Before each session, Diana took the phone off the hook.
She recorded descriptions of Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, her own bulimia and suicide attempts, the systematic misery of a marriage that had, in Diana’s own words, gone bang after Harry’s birth in 1984. Nobody at the palace knew. When Morton later described this process to NBC, he called it “very kind of haphazard, very amateurish, but it kind of worked.
” When the book appeared in May 1992, Fellowes was immediately and indirectly implicated in the institutional response. He went to Diana. He asked her directly whether she had cooperated with Morton. She said no. He asked again. Again, no. A third time. “Certainly not,” she answered, “categorically.” Fellowes passed her denial to Lord McGregor, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.
McGregor, operating on Fellowes’s information, issued a statement condemning the press for what he called an “odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.” Three days later, Diana’s full cooperation was confirmed. McGregor was publicly humiliated. Fellowes had been used as an unwitting instrument of cover, and he knew it.
A horrified Fellowes offered his resignation to the Queen. She declined it. Jane said nothing. Not when her husband was humiliated before the Press Complaints Commission. Not when the formal separation of Charles and Diana was announced in December 1992. Prime Minister John Major, reading from a Buckingham Palace statement in the House of Commons, that the Prince and Princess of Wales were amicably parting.
Not during the years of escalating warfare that followed. The Panorama interview in November 1995 placed Fellowes in an even more excruciating position. Diana called him from Kensington Palace on what he presumably expected to be a routine day. He asked, in the tone of a man being entirely reasonable about his schedule, “Oh, Children in Need?” She replied, “No, Panorama.
” The Daily Mail’s account, drawing on Kay’s deep sourcing, describes Fellowes as momentarily silenced. The broadcast in which Diana told the BBC, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” was, from Fellowes’s institutional standpoint, a public assault on the monarchy he served. From Diana’s standpoint, it was the most honest thing she had ever said on television.
Jane was married to the person whose job required him to manage the fallout. The divorce was finalized on August 28th, 1996. Diana had been stripped of her HRH status. Fellowes reportedly told her that day, “Good luck for this difficult day ahead. It’s a tragic end to a wonderful story.” Diana replied, “Oh, no.
It’s the beginning of a new chapter.” She had 13 months left. Diana had a name for the people she felt were arrayed against her. Men in gray suits. The phrase is documented. It was widely recognized as her shorthand for the faceless institutional machinery of Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes, cycling between palaces in his owlish spectacles and cycle clips, was, by objective description, one of those men.
He was the primary channel between the monarch and the government during the most destructive period in the modern monarchy’s history. The question of Diana’s specific accusations against Fellowes requires careful handling. Mohamed Al-Fayed publicly accused Fellowes of involvement in Diana’s death, an allegation Fellowes denied categorically at the 2008 inquest, testifying he was in a Norfolk church hall that evening at a talk by the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, an alibi Al-Fayed’s lawyer declined to challenge. That accusation came from a
source with obvious interests and shouldn’t be treated as documented fact. What is documented is Diana’s general and deep distrust of the royal establishment, her use of the men in gray suits phrase, and the structural reality that her brother-in-law was simultaneously the Queen’s chief aid throughout the worst years of her marriage.
Paul Burrell, whose account requires careful handling, given his complicated relationship with the family, put the damage plainly. Diana barely spoke to her sister Jane after divorcing Charles because of her distrust for Jane’s husband. Diana’s childhood nanny, Mary Clarke, disputed the totality of that account, pointing out that the sisters had been neighbors on the Kensington Palace estate, and that relations were cordial.
The truth sits between those positions. In 1995, Diana visited Jane at Balmoral to see Jane’s new baby. Some contact continued at family occasions. Aristocratic estrangements are rarely total. They don’t require screaming or slammed doors. What they require is a permanent moratorium on the things that actually matter.
Jane and Diana could occupy the same rooms, appear at the same family events, not across christening tables. What they apparently couldn’t do, in any documented exchange, was speak honestly about what the institution had done to their relationship and to them. Jane wouldn’t break with her husband’s institutional loyalty.
Diana couldn’t forgive Jane’s silence. The estrangement wasn’t a rupture so much as a slow filling with things unsaid, a steady pressure that accumulated across years until it had the density of a wall between them. What is documented without dispute is Jane’s public record. Absolute silence. Not during the Morton controversy, not after Panorama, not during the divorce proceedings, not during the years of estrangement.
No public statement from Lady Jane Fellowes about any of it exists in the historical record. She absorbed it and stayed quiet because the institutional world she had married into required exactly that. On August 31st, 1997, Diana’s car crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris at 12:23 in the morning. She was taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where she died at 4:00. She was 36 years old.
Jane received the call first. Her husband was among the first officials formally notified, and Jane was the first Spencer to know. She passed the news to Sarah. Within hours, both women were on a plane with Prince Charles, crossing from Britain toward the hospital where Diana lay. Multiple sources confirmed the journey.
Both sisters went. Both sisters brought the body home. Sarah had been Diana’s lady-in-waiting for 5 years, traveling with her, accompanying her on engagements from a cultural festival in Lille to the Met Gala in New York in 1996. She was godmother to William. She was, by Diana’s own description, the person she trusted most.
Whatever Sarah’s private feelings about the role she had played in Diana’s history, the last years of Diana’s life had been years of genuine closeness. Jane had spent those same years in a different register entirely, maintaining an institutional silence that served the crown and cost her the relationship she perhaps valued most in her family.
She had watched her sister’s marriage collapse, watched her husband manage the palace’s response, watched the estrangement calcify into something that couldn’t easily be undone, and said nothing public about any of it. Charles had been everything to Diana, the reason for her rise, the cause of her suffering, the adversary she had outlasted by leaving.
He was the man Sarah had brought into the family in 1977, the man whose institution had exacted 20 years of damage, and he was the third person on that plane. What passed between those three people in that cabin, the grief, the guilt, the history that no conversation could have adequately addressed, has never been reported.
Nobody who was there chose to speak about it. The silence surrounding that flight is by now the most complete record available. Diana’s funeral was held on September 6th, 1997. Sarah read a poem. Earl Spencer gave his eulogy, the one that drew applause inside Westminster Abbey, that named the press as predators and pointed unmistakably at the royal establishment’s role in his sister’s destruction.
Sarah had a formal role in the ceremony. Jane didn’t. Sarah’s life after Diana was built on a foundation of dutiful stewardship combined with an underlying quality of the quietly extraordinary. She had married Neil McCorquodale on May 17th, 1980, 1 year before Diana’s wedding at St. Paul’s, at St. Mary’s Church in Great Brington, near Althorp.
Neil was a Lincolnshire landowner and former Coldstream Guards officer, solid, very steady, private, quiet, with a good sense of humor, in biographer Sally Bedell Smith’s description. They had three children, Emily, George, and Celia. After the upheaval of her 20s, the prince, the interview, the years of watching Diana navigate the most scrutinized marriage in the world, Sarah McCorquodale settled into a life in Lincolnshire that the tabloid press could find nothing dramatic to say about.
After 1997, she became co-executor of Diana’s will and then president of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, holding that role until the fund closed in 2012. She testified at the Diana inquest. She and Neil faced a 16 million pound lawsuit from the Franklin Mint over unauthorized Diana memorabilia, a genuinely serious legal threat.
In 2009, she served as High Sheriff of Lincolnshire. Both William and Harry remained close. Harry in particular identified strongly with his Spencer heritage, and royal commentator Ingrid Seward noted that he calls his aunts his red aunts, a reference to the distinctive Spencer coloring.
In 2025, Earl Charles Spencer mentioned that Sarah, then 70, had been hospitalized after what he described as a really bad fall from her horse. A doctor had told Neil that Sarah was quite a character, which Spencer interpreted as code for, “Could you take her home?” She was, by all available accounts, still entirely herself. She is the Spencer sister who said too much once in early 1978 and spent the rest of her life living with the consequence.
Diana called her the only person she could trust. History barely mentions her name. Jane’s story after 1997 has a different texture entirely. Robert Fellowes left the role of private secretary on February 4th, 1999, after 9 years at the epicenter of the most turbulent period in the modern monarchy’s history. He was elevated immediately to the life peerage, Baron Fellowes of Shotesham in Norfolk.
Jane became Baroness Fellowes. He went on to chair Barclays Private Bank. Asked about Diana after her death, he said, “I was deeply fond of her. She was a very good person. She found it difficult in life to find happiness, and I’m sad for people who have that situation.” Jane gave no equivalent statement.
Her silence, maintained across the Morton crisis, Panorama, the divorce, the estrangement, Diana’s death, and the inquest, continued. Whatever she felt about the impossible position those years had placed her in, she kept it in the private register that the institutional world she had married into conducted all of its emotional business in, the unwritten register, the one nobody discusses.
Robert Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of Shotesham, died on July 29th, 2024, at age 82. Richard Kay noted in his Daily Mail obituary that the date was, with a certain dark precision, the 43rd anniversary of Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles. He left almost all of his 1.5 million pounds estate to Jane.
Charles Spencer described him as exceptional and a total gentleman, and said he was deeply proud to have been his brother-in-law. Prince Harry flew from California to attend the funeral. Jane, now a widow and a baroness, was carrying decades of history she had never once publicly examined. Then there was one moment. On May 19th, 2018, Prince Harry married Meghan Markle at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.
Harry asked his aunt Jane to give the reading, not from his father’s family, from his mother’s. Time magazine reported it as Harry’s tribute to Diana. The couple honored Princess Diana by asking her sister, Lady Jane Fellowes, to give the reading at the royal wedding. Jane stood in the chapel in front of the assembled Windsors, the institution she had served through her silence for two decades, and read from the Song of Solomon, one of the oldest love poems in existence.
“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.” It was the first public tribute Jane Fellowes had ever given her sister. She had attended Diana’s 1997 funeral without a formal speaking role. She had maintained her silence through everything that preceded and followed. And then, in 2018, in a church full of royals at a wedding Diana hadn’t lived to see, she stood up and she read a love poem.
She hasn’t spoken publicly about it since. The story of Sarah and Jane Spencer isn’t a footnote to Diana’s story. It’s the same story, running in parallel, visible only if you know where to look. Two women from the same house, marked by the same institution in opposite ways. One through the honesty it couldn’t accommodate, one through the loyalty it demanded at the price of what mattered most.
Sarah spoke in 1978 and changed royal history. She spent the next decades in the shadow of the consequence, calling herself Cupid, trusting that the woman she had made possible was also the woman she loved most. Jane married the institution in 1978, and it eventually consumed the relationship that defined her family.
She kept the silence it required. When she finally broke that silence, it was in a church, 21 years too late for Diana to hear it. On August 31st, 1997, both of them got on a plane to retrieve what was left. Subscribe for more stories like this.