Chapter Eighteen ‘Thanking God for the Small Mercies…’
Chapter Eighteen
‘Thanking God for the small mercies…’
Grief killed any hope of sleep.
I got up at five thirty or so on the morning after my initial musings on what to include in the eulogy, and returned to my study, feeling ready to put my words down.
After looking at the headings I had jotted down that previous evening, I realized that I needed focus and structure.
It occurred to me that I would be best off relying on the lessons of my broadcasting career. I had worked for NBC News as a reporter for the decade after leaving Oxford and had written well over a hundred scripts. Now was the time to lean on that experience.
I realized that my task was much the same as my reporting one: setting out my stall for the audience by explaining what the story was, and what my role and intentions were. Then would come the body of my speech, which would need to end on a solid conclusion.
The first sentence I penned came to me quite easily: ‘I stand before you today, representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning, before a world in shock.’
On reading this through, the only alteration I made was to add the word ‘the’ before ‘representative’.
Wanting further to bind together the three strands of the audience I had identified – family, nation, world – my second sentence was a recognition that everyone listening had a common challenge: ‘We are all united,’ I wrote, ‘in trying to come to terms with what a week ago seemed impossible.’
To this I added: ‘The wonderful, complex, unique focus of compassion.’ Then I put the word ‘girl’ next to this thought, intending to build it out.
As a brother, I have always tended to see Diana first as the girl I grew up with, rather than the woman the world met in 1981 and said goodbye to sixteen years later.
I then tried another tack, daring to start to address the horrific circumstances of Diana’s death, which I was sure needed to be included: ‘…the brutal destruction of the girl we loved, transformed our lives, just as it ended hers’.
It was all a bit of a jumble at this stage, and I see that I put a line through all the words I had written after ‘trying to come to terms with’.
I rewrote this passage as: ‘trying to come to terms with the events of last Sunday morning, when…’
Still unhappy with how the all-important opening was going, I wrote a second paragraph that I recognized immediately contained crucial truths that demanded inclusion: ‘We are all united in paying our respects to Diana, whether as daughter, sister, friend, or the very essence of duty and compassion.’
On rereading this part, I added ‘mother’ before ‘daughter’, and reminded myself never to lose sight of the sad fact that those who would feel Diana’s loss more keenly than her many other mourners must, of course, always be her two young sons.
At some point, early on, I realized I must address the public’s great concern for William and Harry, and their emotional futures.
This was when I also thought about Prince Charles’s insistence that the two boys must walk behind Diana’s coffin, through the streets of London.
I wanted to offer the hope that they would continue to draw on the warmth and wisdom Diana had given them and would not now be forced to bow to cold tradition.
The walk behind the coffin symbolized so much to me. It was important to call it out.
I felt this was also an opportunity to point out that I was talking for Diana’s surviving close family, who shared her (and my) hopes and values. The spirit and sensitivity she had awoken in them must continue to thrive, even with Diana gone for ever.
I encapsulated this in a long, stark, agonized sentence:
And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.
I balanced such thoughts with declarations of respect for the heritage that came to William and Harry through their father’s line. They would always have, it seemed then to me, royal roles, and these would need understanding and support from all around them.
The rest now fell into place around that thought.
As a counterbalance to Prince Charles’s slurs on the phone, I made a particular point of emphasizing Diana’s sense of duty, when stating in my final words how her example would, far from being ‘forgotten soon enough’, as the prince had hoped, ‘never be extinguished from our minds’.
I put the Spencer coat of arms[*1] at the top of my speech. Having no printer in my home, I faxed the four pages of it, written in capitals, to: ‘SELF’, at 7.12 a.m. on 3 September 1997, and read it through one more time.
It had taken just an hour and a half to write, tumbling onto the page with love, enormous sadness, and a hope that I had said all that Diana would have wanted to hear.
I remember feeling so pumped up, so ready to write and speak on Diana’s behalf, that I felt like I had ten more such eulogies in me. This, final, one that I had committed to the page was merely a sample of what was coursing through my heart and mind that early morning.
The very few changes I later made to the version that I faxed to myself are visible in my black handwriting. A few of these were minor stylistic ones.
I underlined ‘you’ in the phrase: ‘even though God granted you but half a life’.
I originally wrote the word ‘power’, towards the end of my fourth paragraph, when I referred to ‘and only the power of the message you gave us through your years of giving has afforded us the strength to move forward’. On reflection, I felt ‘strength’ to be a smoother word to declaim here.
I removed ‘in time’ from ‘It was as if we had been transported back in time, to our childhood, when we spent such an enormous amount of time together…’ ‘In time’ added nothing to the thought, and I worried that the phrase had a fairytale connotation to it that had no place here.
I changed a reference to ‘our parents’ houses’, when talking of Diana’s and my long train journeys as children of divorce, to ‘our parents’ homes’. This was a qualitative upgrade: I wanted to show we felt warmly ‘at home’ when with our father and our mother, wherever they chose to live.
In my original draft I gave a small nod to Dodi Fayed, thanking him by name for making Diana happy in her last few weeks alive.
I cannot remember why I took it out, but it was not a personal slight against Dodi: I had never met him but had heard that he was a nice man who was good to Diana.
As Michael Gibbins, a Private Secretary of Diana’s, noted at the time: ‘This Dodi character may have been a bit odd, but he certainly made her happy.’ I suspect I did not want to trivialize the tribute in any way by referring to a man who, in the final reckoning, had only been in her life for a few summer weeks.
Now I believe I was wrong to remove his name from my speech. I should have left him in, even though I reckon they most likely would not have married. I have always felt the fling with Dodi stemmed from Diana wanting to make another suitor – whom she loved deeply – jealous.
But Dodi was kind to Diana, and they had had fun together.
If you view the final filmed images of Diana and Dodi, in the lift of the Paris hotel that they exited to take their final fatal car ride together, there is a gentle playfulness between the two of them, and I reckon Diana would have wanted him thanked for that.
More significantly, I removed some aggressive criticism of the press.
After casting their worst operatives as being at ‘the opposite end of the moral spectrum’ to Diana, in the speech, I had written further about ‘Those who inhabit the murky swamps of malevolence, and who need to suck their victims dry of their souls.’ That I took out.
It struck me as too dark for what was, at the end of the day, a speech celebrating my sister rather than denigrating others.
*
One of the main accusations levelled against Diana by her critics is that she manipulated the media for her own ends.
This indictment usually comes from journalists who resent the way in which she managed to survive in their ruthless sphere of operations.
I see my sister as having felt compelled to engage in desperate guerrilla tactics against a vastly better resourced army, rather than surrender.
Certainly, Diana quickly grew to distrust those who should have been her allies.
From early in her marriage, she became wary of any form of Palace advice.
She was quick to see how ‘the men in grey suits’, as she called them, always prioritized the Royal Family’s interests over those of the people who dared to marry into it.
In turn, the courtiers despaired that this young lady from an aristocratic background, with a pedigree of royal service on both sides of her family, was not going to fall into line.
Her bloodline made it look as though she would be biddable, but instead she thought for herself quite freely.
This breakdown of trust on both sides led to increased tension, as Diana took things into her own hands.
Meanwhile, the Old Guard of Palace officials never seemed to appreciate what Diana’s modern persona gave to that archaic institution, which they often served with good intentions, but in a blinkered manner.
Diana developed contacts in the press, who could get her word out to the world while avoiding the interference of the Palace press offices. I saw this from up close.
She shared my horror at our stepmother Raine’s indiscriminate selling of so many of Althorp’s historic chattels, as well as its estate assets. After his stroke, in 1978, my father effectively abdicated his Althorp responsibilities to his busy, acquisitive wife.