Chapter Six ‘Blood Family…’
Chapter Six
‘Blood family…’
I originally thought I would be giving my eulogy in front of three or four hundred people.
My family very much wanted a small, private funeral.
Some of us were angry, and protective, feeling we had lent Diana to the world for a decade and a half, and that that sacrifice had ended in the darkest of tragedies.
Now, it seemed to us, was the time for us to reclaim her broken body, for quiet and dignified committal and safekeeping. This, we felt, should be as we saw fit, and certainly in private.
Such a thought was quickly undermined by Buckingham Palace, working quietly with the prime minister’s Downing Street office.
Both institutions were concerned that our wish for a family funeral might either be seen as the Spencers daring openly to insult the royals or, more problematic, in terms of PR, as a royal conspiracy: one that perpetuated the Windsors’ animosity towards Diana in life by denying her the sad magnificence of some form of state funeral.
Beyond the messaging, the Palace and the prime-ministerial team feared – and in this they were absolutely right – that the British people simply would not understand how they could be denied the opportunity to offer a suitable farewell to ‘their’ princess.
When the Queen had heard the first news of Diana’s being in a traffic accident, she had asked tetchily, ‘What is she up to now?’ This, before the seriousness of it all became clear.
After Diana’s death the Queen said she wanted Diana’s coffin to be placed in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle, where princes and princesses generally end up.
But my family was determined that Diana must come home to Althorp.
We knew she would have wanted to do so. Besides, having had her HRH title removed as part of the package of humiliation handed to her at her divorce, almost a year to the day before her death, Diana was no longer eligible for royal Frogmore.
The removal of Diana’s title had hurt her.
The loss was designed to emphasize to her, and the world, that her royal days were over.
She, who had been recognized around the world as such a singular asset to the Royal Family (apart from by some of that institution’s more jealous members) should, they believed, just accept that she had been returned to the ranks as a commoner.
At least this pettiness helped to save her from some meaningless burial plot in Frogmore.
Our initial thought had been to bury Diana with our Spencer ancestors.
Their tombs lay beneath a chapel inside St Mary’s Church, in Great Brington, the hilltop village a mile from Althorp.
This was where my father’s ashes had been placed by his four children five years earlier.
We had been surprised, that day, to see the orderliness of the five-hundred-year-old crypt.
My grandfather, most unusually for an English aristocrat, possessed the methodical and enquiring mind of an academic.
His curatorial bent dovetailed with his vocation as the guardian of his family legacy.
In the 1950s, he had had the stone slab that sealed off the Spencer crypt from the chapel above chiselled open so the estate’s works’ team could check the condition of the subterranean space.
Its first occupant, in 1522, had been an enterprising early Spencer, knighted by Henry VIII.
When my grandfather’s staff descended into the crypt they found it an overcrowded mess.
Its many coffins were either piled untidily on top of one another or were propped up against their neighbour without dignity.
There was no theme uniting this jumble of oak boxes except the Spencer bones sealed within.
My grandfather set about bringing order to the disarray.
He had each coffin carefully prised open.
As a boy my father thrilled me by saying that most of the corpses still sprouted the family’s trademark red hair, and that their hard, desiccated skin, drawn tight against their skeletons, disintegrated when touched.
Grandfather’s quest for posthumous dignity saw him cremate all these ancestors.
Then he had their ashes decanted into individual urns.
The lead from their centuries-old coffins was repurposed for use on the church’s failing roof.
When the left-wing tabloid the Daily Mirror heard of this, it lambasted him for being a depraved, amoral aristocrat – a disciple of the Antichrist, they claimed.
In fact, he was a thoughtful custodian of ancestral remains.
It seemed that Diana could, as we hoped, be added to the family crypt.
The day after her death, I had the tombs opened up so they could receive her after her funeral, but when we learnt that she had stated in her Will that she wanted her body to be buried intact, rather than after cremation, questions of practicality arose.
Even before my sister’s funeral, I saw one of my future roles as keeping her safe from any criminals, lunatics or journalists who might seek to desecrate or steal her remains.
I remembered with fury the promise one well-known paparazzo had spat at her, when she was vulnerable and on her own, begging him to please leave her alone: ‘I will follow you till the day you die – and then I will piss on your grave,’ he had said.
Diana had tears in her eyes when telling me this.
It was now my eternal duty to shield her from any such outrage.
Dangerously obsessive fans were another worry.
One of Diana’s favourite police protection officers, Graham Smith, once shared with me how very many there were of these figures who lurked, deluded, in the shadows of the spotlight that illuminated my sister’s life for the world.
‘Frankly I get most worried when she’s set to do a public engagement and there’s silence beforehand,’ he told me.
‘It’s better when we hear from them that they are coming to see her there, because we can look out for them, and monitor them on the day.
But when there’s silence, well, some of them are still going to come, but they will do it unannounced. And that’s a worry.
‘The only way to counter such people,’ he added, ‘is to be obviously on guard, so they are deterred, and they can then go on to bother Princess Margaret, or whoever. I don’t wish ill on any other members of the Royal Family, of course,’ he continued, ‘but my job is simple: to ensure the safety of your sister.’
It was clear that I had to borrow from Graham’s textbook and make Diana’s grave such an unattractive proposition to even the most determined and dangerous of her followers that they chose to expend their energy elsewhere.
I had assumed that we could guarantee Diana’s safety by sealing up the grilles that allowed outside air into the crypt.
But, I was informed, if we were to inter Diana’s whole remains down there, without cremation, the circulation of fresh air was essential, otherwise – an appalling thought – the coffin might burst open.
While I was weighing all this up the outside world intervened.
It was immediately assumed by the media that St Mary’s would be Diana’s resting place.
Sightseers began to overwhelm the church, while clogging Brington’s narrow streets with parked cars.
The villagers shared their fears with Althorp’s Estate Office as to how much worse it must surely get.
They were understandably anxious that their lives would be overrun by endless pilgrims flocking to Diana’s grave.
It became clear to me that my sister could not be buried in Brington’s church, both because her coffin could not be sealed up in its crypt, and because of the effect on the local population. This was one of many plans to change, once the uniquely powerful reaction to Diana’s death was unleashed.
This was at a time when 580,000 people signed messages of condolence on the memorial page of the British monarchy’s website, while millions more stood in line to record their sympathy in books in cities, embassies, schools and prisons around the world.
Such was the particular wish to pay tribute to her memory at her London home, Kensington Palace, that forty-three separate condolence books were opened there, and the queues soon stretched for twelve hours.
The question remained for me: where to put my much-mourned sister so I could protect her for eternity?
I decided that she could most easily be kept safe behind the walls that had given Althorp its privacy for hundreds of years. The site of her grave would have to be somewhere close to the House, for security, and so it could be easily visited by our family.
The island in the Round Oval lake quickly struck me as the perfect spot.
It was Diana’s favourite place in the grounds, and its water formed a ready-made moat.
I was told, though, that bodies cannot be buried close to watercourses, because of the risk of contamination.
However, the extraordinarily sturdy structure of royal coffins made this consideration fall away.
They have an especially thick lead lining. The island it would be.
Althorp’s two estate foresters, John and Nick, set about digging out the soil with pickaxe and shovel to create her grave. John had worked at Althorp since 1963 and had seen Diana come and go since she had been a toddler.
Practicalities had to be addressed. A formal consecration was required to make this a place of Christian burial. Two days before the funeral the Bishop of Peterborough drove to Althorp with his chaplain.
The three of us walked the three hundred yards from the back of the house to the side of the Round Oval, talking of the astonishing global reaction to Diana’s death.
The two churchmen stepped gingerly into my waiting boat, before I joined them aboard and rowed us across to the island where we scrambled ashore.