Excerpt from Diana by Phil Craig, Tim Clayton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Occasionally in repose her face would look sad, but I wouldn't have said that she was a sad person. She was always full of fun and very, very lively and always doing things. She wasn't moping around or anything like that. I think she was quite happy at West Heath.

The Shand Kydds bought a romantic hill farm on the Isle of Seil near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Diana had a poster of Seil over her bed at West Heath and took friends there in the holidays, spending her time playing with lobster pots on the beach. She still saw Princes Andrew and Edward regularly in Norfolk. Diana's sisters had it in mind that she might make a suitable bride for Prince Andrew and she did, for a while, correspond with him at school. Their teasing ambition for her in this direction is one of many explanations that have been produced for her nickname 'Duch', short for Duchess. Her brother Charles denies this version, saying that they named her Duchess after the elegant leading feline in Walt Disney's cartoon The Aristocats.


Aristocat was certainly appropriate for the Spencers. About three hundred and fifty years before her birth, the family bought their peerage for £3,000 in hard cash from the impoverished James I. The first Lord Spencer's introduction to the House of Lords infuriated another member so much that he interrupted Spencer's speech on the conduct of affairs previous reigns, saying with heavy sarcasm: 'When these things were doing the noble Lord's ancestors were keeping sheep!'

But measured in ready cash, that newly ennobled Spencer soon became the richest man in the land. Having founded their wealth on wool, his family captured the London meat contracts and grew richer. With enough gold to fund dynastic ambitions, they acquired a genealogy from the College of Heralds that traced their line through the Despensers to the retinue of William the Conqueror. It was not until 1901 that their right to the Despenser coat of arms was declared a fraud and their pedigree exposed as near-total fabrication. But by then they had been playing a leading role in the affairs of Great Britain for a good century more than the present Royal Family.

Indeed, the Spencers had helped place the Royal Family on the throne. It was another Spencer who, in 1693, brokered the deal by which William III received the support of the noble families that had fought on the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War. Spencer, described as 'the most subtil working villain on the face of the earth', hosted a conference at Althorp, a conference of 'Great Men'. There, King William accepted the principles of limited monarchy. When his successor Queen Anne died in 1714 without producing the requisite Protestant heir, the Spencers were among the same great families who imported the Elector of Hanover from Germany to be King George I.

The new German royals found themselves in a country famed for removing inconvenient monarchs, with a parliament that regarded itself as sovereign and a haughty aristocracy that could match them for wealth. For three generations they spent as much time as possible in Hanover. Admittedly, through the long reign of Victoria, the people became less boisterously critical of their imported royals. But a Spencer, in particular, was always liable to remember that meeting at Althorp in 1693 where aristocracy and royalty had met eye to eye.

Copyright © 2001 by Tim Clayton & Phil Craig and Brook Lapping Productions.