Chapter Twenty-Seven ‘I Stand Before You Today…’ #2
By far the hardest part of my tribute to Diana came when delivering its last paragraphs.
By that stage I had expended all my reserves – both of energy and self-control.
When entering the final stretch – defences down, chest tightening – I was floundering fast, while aware that I was coming up hard against the most personal and affecting passage of my text:
‘William and Harry, we all care desperately for you today. We are all chewed up with sadness at the loss of a woman who was not even our mother. How great your suffering is, we cannot even imagine.’
Those sentences left me all but spent. I made the concluding points while barely able to speak. I had to punch each word out of my lungs, one by one, contracting my diaphragm repeatedly for the necessary impetus, as my normal way of speech was finished:
‘I would like to end by thanking God for the small mercies he has shown us at this dreadful time. For taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her private life. Above all we give thanks for the life of a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds.’
I was utterly finished by this point, and felt my feet buckle as I descended the pulpit’s steep steps.
While I know there was kind applause, I never heard it.
I learnt later that it started outside the Abbey, and members of the congregation initially thought it sounded like falling rain.
Then they realized what it was and joined in – like the laughter in St Paul’s, on Diana’s wedding day, when the crowd outside had acclaimed the bride for saying, ‘I do.’
I was completely wrung out and was grateful that some officer of the Abbey gently guided me back to my seat, where I slumped forward, tearful and in a state of shock.
I remember my mother’s arm reaching out towards me.
She was noticeably affected by her tranquillizers, and I felt the movement of her arm betrayed this: it came towards me in a somewhat robotic extension.
And I (to my eternal embarrassment and regret) was so much in my own world of hurt and exhaustion that I shrugged it away.
I just wanted to be alone. If I could have curled up in a ball, I would have done so.
Instead, I leant forward in my seat, clasping my forehead, brushing away tears that I was relieved not to have shed earlier, completely overwhelmed by the emotion of it all.
I do not remember the hymn that followed my eulogy. I see now that it was ‘Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace’. While I was in no state to appreciate it at the funeral, its second verse contained a perfect encapsulation of some of Diana’s extraordinary gifts:
…Where there’s despair in life let me bring hope,
Where there is darkness, only light,
And where there’s sadness, ever joy.
Diana mostly brought joy with her. As the Queen had observed, in her Buckingham Palace address the previous evening, Diana did this no matter how tough times were for her, in her deeply complicated and challenging life.
By this point of the funeral, I had an almost irresistible urge to exit the gigantic place that pulsed with grief.
I had said my piece. I had no idea how long the rest of the service was going to be.
I felt increasingly claustrophobic. I yearned to rush for the Abbey’s door, to feel sunshine on my skin and to let fresh air purge me of the pall of gloom all around.
It seemed to me to be the right time to flee the overwhelming sadness of the occasion.
I felt that the funeral had reached its natural conclusion.
It took all of my remaining reserves to hold tight and remain in place. I can only shudder when thinking how appalling it would have looked if I had marched out then.
Perhaps it was partly relief at having got through the eulogy.
But it was mainly a delayed reaction to the devastation of losing my sibling.
I suspect that having the speech to think and worry about over the previous days had acted as a distraction – at least in part – from the astonishing, incomprehensible, fact that my youngest sister was dead.
With the distraction gone, I was left with the raw truth of the loss.
Although I had been the member of my family liaising with Buckingham Palace about the minutiae of the funeral, paying attention to detail has never been my thing.
My head had been elsewhere, when the finer points were discussed.
I sat there, not knowing how much more of the service was still to come.
Only afterwards did I learn that the whole service only lasted from 11 a.m. till noon: just a single hour.
I was soothed by the beauty of the remaining music, especially Sir John Tavener’s ‘Song For Athene’.
It was written for Athene Hariades, a young Greek actress friend of the composer who had also died in a road accident. Tavener noted of Athene that she had had – much as I had concluded in my words about Diana – ‘beauty, both outward and inner’.
Thematically, musically and emotionally, ‘Song For Athene’ proved to be the perfect musical conclusion to such an emotionally draining service in England’s greatest place of worship.
It was performed as Diana’s cortège solemnly made its way down Westminster Abbey towards the world outside, at which point she would be lowered by the pall-bearers into the waiting hearse, which would point north to Althorp.
*
I was ushered out of the Abbey with my family.
We had walked only 100 yards or so when I saw a dark-haired, spectacled, middle-aged woman spring out of the crowd and run straight towards me.
I shrank back, assuming it was some form of attack – one that, I saw, involved her extending her hands at full stretch towards me, while bringing them hard together.
I was relieved when she was pursued, then grappled, by police officers, who pulled her away. ‘Poor woman – she must be mad,’ I said to one of my sisters.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘She was applauding what you just said for Duch.’
This was the first occasion on which I realized that people were judging my eulogy and reading into it what they wanted to see. The Guardian, a left-of-centre paper with little time for the monarchy, wrote:
Just minutes before, Earl Spencer…delivered an unutterably moving address which damned the press who tortured her and, obliquely but unquestionably, doomed the House of Windsor for stripping Diana of her royal title.
Speaking with extraordinary intensity, staring directly at the Royal Family across Princess Diana’s coffin, he appeared to be addressing his remarks to her former in-laws.
His voice was clear and his words precise until he reached the climax of his address. Then, his face reddened, and his voice tightened. By the end he was close to tears. When applause for his address started, the Royal Family remained still.
The Earl’s tribute was a tour de force, summing up the beauty and joy his sister gave to millions across the world, but also admitting her insecurities and weaknesses. He attacked the Royal Family both for stripping her of her title and withdrawing its support from her.
Unaware that so much was being said and written about what we had just witnessed and been part of, my family and I were driven to Euston railway station.
This was a place I knew extremely well from reluctant journeys to my childhood boarding school, as well as unreliable commutes between London and Althorp.
But, this time, I was boarding the Royal Train, and there could be no disruptions to that service on that day.
There had been a functioning railway station at the hamlet of Althorp, a mile from the house, till it fell victim to route closures in the 1960s.
I had seen photographs of it from long-ago family albums, showing the Spencers’ dedicated waiting room, from the nineteenth century, bedecked with oil paintings of royal visitors to Althorp, a huge fireplace ablaze in winter.
I had never thought anyone from my family would stop at this defunct railway staging post again, but this was to be our destination on that grimmest of days.
I knew of sombre photographs recording the funeral procession from Althorp station to the family crypt from ninety years earlier, when my great-grandmother Margaret Spencer died in childbirth.
It was a family tragedy whose unresolved traumas had reverberated down the generations.
My grandfather was fourteen then and died seven decades later still affected by the untreated shock of his devastation at such a tender age.
Such damage is so often the lot of a child who loses a parent when young.
I had just boarded the train when I heard a voice behind me.
It was my brother-in-law, Robert, looking astonished.
‘Charles,’ he said, and then said many lovely things about my efforts in the Abbey.
Robert was a solid citizen, but the moment had clearly got to him.
I realized that his were kind exaggerations, from a man twenty-three years my senior, who had long kept an avuncular eye on me.
The Royal Train was as luxurious as you might expect. The carriage we were in was like a formal sitting room, far removed from the tight seating of a normal compartment. We were all able to sit together and relax a little, after the public ordeal of the previous few hours. The atmosphere was warm.