Princess Diana

The Full Biography

Diana, Princess of Wales. The Sandringham girl who made a wedding into a civic weather, then spent the last years as a woman the palace could not hold and the cameras would not release.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a veil, a balcony, a woman in a visor walking a cleared lane in Angola, or a tunnel in Paris the culture will not stop retrying. What the still cannot show is Diana Frances Spencer, born on a royal estate, married at twenty into an institution that wanted a quiet consort and got a climate, a mother of two future heirs, and a thirty-six-year-old who died in a car with a drunk driver while the official inquiries — not the documentaries — said it was not murder.

She was born on July 1, 1961, at Park House, on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, to Edward John Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, and Frances Roche. The house sat inside the weather she would marry. She was the third daughter. A brother, Charles, arrived in 1964 and became the heir the family had waited for. The marriage did not hold. Frances left in 1967. The divorce was granted in 1969. The children shuttled between Park House and a mother who had gone. John Spencer, who would become the 8th Earl, kept the title and the house. Diana learned early what a broken room sounds like when the adults are still polite in public.

School was Riddlesworth Hall, then West Heath in Kent, then a Swiss finishing term at the Institut Alpin Videmanette. She was not a scholar. She was tall, shy, and good with smaller children. Back in London she cleaned, nannied, and taught at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico. The papers had not invented her yet. She was a Spencer girl in a flat, a nursery helper the future king had noticed because she was young, aristocratic, and — the household thought — unformed enough to be trained.

Charles, Prince of Wales, needed a wife the country would accept. He had dated her sister Sarah. He proposed in February 1981. She was nineteen. She said yes. The engagement photograph, the sapphire, the shy tilt of the head, became a national object overnight. On July 29, 1981, she walked the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral in a dress that was also a weather system: ivory silk, a twenty-five-foot train, a veil that made a girl into a balcony. An estimated 750 million people watched. The kiss on the Buckingham Palace balcony is the civic still. The marriage, she would tell the country in her own voice, was crowded.

William Arthur Philip Louis was born on June 21, 1982. Henry Charles Albert David — Harry — on September 15, 1984. She took the infant William on the 1983 tour of Australia and New Zealand, against advice, and the crowds treated the young mother as the point of the trip. That was the first public lesson. The institution wanted a consort who waved. The country wanted a woman who sat on the floor with a child. She sat on the floor.

The work, if a princess may be said to have work, was the walkabout, the hospital corridor, the hospice chair. She learned names. She stayed longer than the schedule. She let a camera see her stay. The palace wanted the cameras managed. She learned, sometimes badly, to manage them back. The warmth was real. The use of the warmth was a skill she taught herself because no one in the household was going to teach it to her.

April 9, 1987, is the day the temperature changed. She opened Britain’s first dedicated AIDS ward at Middlesex Hospital and shook a patient’s hand without gloves. The establishment still treated the disease as a verdict and a stain. A princess touching a man the country was afraid to sit beside did more, in a single still, than a stack of leaflets. She said the thing in words as well as skin: HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it. She sat on beds. She held children. She went back.

HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it.Diana, Princess of Wales

The same method traveled. She visited leprosy hospitals in Indonesia, India, Nepal, and Zimbabwe and touched the patients the staff had learned to keep at a distance. She became a patron of Centrepoint and walked night hostels with young people who had no balcony. Great Ormond Street. The Royal Marsden. The English National Ballet. Headway, for brain injury. Turning Point, for addiction. She was not a minister and not a clinician. She was a famous woman who went where the cameras would follow and pointed them at a bed. That is a kind of work. It is also a kind of power the palace had not issued.

The 1980s tours were the other half of the job. Australia and New Zealand with an infant. Canada. The United States, where a White House dance with John Travolta became a still the country filed under fairy tale and she filed under work. Gulf states. The Far East. She learned to do the walkabout in heat and in rain, to take flowers from children, to stand still while a crowd made a noise that was not quite love and not quite hunger. Charles walked a step apart. The cameras preferred her. The household noticed. The marriage, already thin, had to perform itself on tarmacs. She developed bulimia she would name in public only when the marriage was already a wreck. She described suicide attempts the palace would have preferred as private weather. A complete file holds the wards and the illness without making either a sermon.

The marriage failed in public because it had already failed in private. Camilla Parker Bowles was not a rumor she invented. Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, published in June 1992, was the first breach that could not be walked back; she had cooperated in secret, through a friend, because the household would not let her speak in her own sentence. Prime Minister John Major announced the separation to the House of Commons on December 9, 1992. Tapes the tabloids named and numbered — her voice, his voice — did the rest. The country overheard a marriage. It did not hear a plan for how a young woman was supposed to live after the plan had collapsed.

The turn is the decision, after the marriage, to use the cameras on purpose. A lot of royal women endure. She pointed. The pointing made her impossible to manage and impossible to forget. Fond memory that keeps only the balcony is a cleaned room. A pile-on that keeps only the tunnel is a different cleaned room. The wards and the field are the file.

William and Harry have had to share a mother who is a balcony and a tunnel and a field. The Spencer family and the Crown have had to share a ghost. Friends from the hospital years describe a woman who was late, emotional, and present — who would sit after the suite had moved on. The Diana in that tunnel was a woman who had already been a climate and was now a body in a car. Both are the life.

I want my boys to have an understanding of people’s emotions, their insecurities, people’s distress, and their hopes and dreams.Diana, Princess of Wales

The later years

There were almost no old-age years. What the file does have is 1992 to 1997, and those five years are a chapter, not a coda. After the separation she kept Kensington Palace as a base and tried to build a life that was not a balcony. She took the boys to theme parks and to homeless shelters, the same week, because both were the education she had named. She sat with men dying of AIDS after the marriage no longer required her to ask permission. She went to Nepal and to Zimbabwe when a leprosy ward still needed a famous hand. She dated. She was followed. She dropped some patronages in 1996 because the institution wanted a quieter ex-wife and she wanted a shorter list she could actually work. She kept the causes that still needed a famous body in the room. She saw Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon, in a privacy she could not make hold. The papers treated every dinner as a public utility. She tried anyway.

On November 20, 1995, she sat for Martin Bashir on the BBC’s Panorama. Nearly twenty-three million people in Britain watched. “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She spoke of bulimia, of a cry for help, of Camilla, of her own affair with James Hewitt, of a wish to be a queen of people’s hearts. The line is hers. The method that bought the interview is not a romance. Bashir showed Earl Spencer forged bank statements to win an introduction. He fed a frightened woman a story of surveillance tailored to the fear she already carried. Lord Dyson’s inquiry, published in May 2021, found deceit and a BBC that failed to investigate its own reporter. William and Harry have said the deceit wounded their mother. A complete biography holds the interview and the rotten scaffolding. It does not treat the broadcast as a hoax and does not treat Bashir as a hero.

The Queen, after that broadcast, asked for a divorce. The decree was made absolute on August 28, 1996. Diana lost the style Her Royal Highness and kept the name the country already used: Diana, Princess of Wales. The settlement was £17 million. She kept an office, access to the boys, and a fame no decree could cancel. The household had wanted a quiet ending. It received a woman who still knew how to fill a frame.

January 1997, Angola. She went with the HALO Trust into Huambo, put on a visor and a vest, and walked a lane that had been cleared of mines so the cameras would have to look at the thing that keeps killing after a war is declared over. She visited hospitals where children were missing feet. She let the stills be ugly. She was not a diplomat and not a deminer. She was a famous woman who understood that a photograph of her feet in that dirt would travel farther than a white paper. The British government, then selling mines, was not grateful. She did not ask it to be. In London on June 12 she spoke at the Royal Geographical Society: landmines as a modern tragedy, children as the unfinished casualties. In August she went to Bosnia with the Landmine Survivors Network, sat with Ken Rutherford and Jerry White and with people who had already lost limbs, and did the same pointing in a different country. The Ottawa Treaty that banned anti-personnel mines was signed in December. She was not in the room. She had already done the walk that made the room possible to fill.

On August 31, 1997, a Mercedes in the Pont de l’Alma underpass, Paris. Henri Paul was driving. Dodi Fayed was in the car. Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard, survived. The official French investigation and the British inquest under Lord Justice Scott Baker did not find a murder. They found speed, drink — Paul’s blood alcohol well over the French limit — pursuing paparazzi as a weather, and a seat belt she was not wearing. The 2008 jury called it unlawful killing by the grossly negligent driving of the chauffeur and of the following vehicles. One paragraph is enough. The conspiracy industry is not a biography. The boys are.

She died at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in the small hours. She was thirty-six. The body came home to a country that had not planned a funeral for a divorced princess and then discovered it needed a state in all but name. That is the end of the living chapter. It is not the whole of the life.

After she was gone

The funeral on September 6 emptied a city. Westminster Abbey. The princes walking behind the gun carriage. Earl Spencer’s address. Elton John’s rewritten song is a civic object some people now wince at and cannot unhear. An estimated 2.5 billion watched something. The landmine treaty moved. The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund spent years turning the name into grants, then closed when the work was done. The boys grew up in the weather she left — William toward the Crown, Harry toward a different kind of pointing. Every royal interview since still pays her a tax. Every tunnel theory still tries to eat the inquest. The wards and the field are the correction.

She came out of Park House, walked an aisle, shook a hand without a glove, said there were three in the marriage, walked a minefield, and died in a tunnel the official record has already described. If you only remember the balcony, you have the still. If you remember the wards, Angola, the boys, and the inquest, you have her.

Portrait: John Mathew Smith (www.celebrity-photos.com) · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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