eulogy

Before today, I’ve never searched out the video of Charles Spencer (the Earl of Spencer) eulogizing his late sister at her 1997 funeral. The eulogy is seared into the collective consciousness of my generation and the older generations – a young earl from one of the oldest noble families in England, telling the Windsors to their ugly faces that they mistreated his sister, Lady Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales. He made it clear that Diana’s blood was on their hands, and on the hands of the British media. Obviously, the Windsors have quietly ensured, over the course of decades, that few clean copies of that video remain online. Here’s one I could find, which is pretty poor quality.

My favorite part is still: “Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.”

Over the years, Charles Spencer has spoken about eulogizing Diana and acting as caretaker to her memory. Especially in the American media, people will always ask him about Diana and that eulogy. But before now, I’ve never heard him speak about how it was decided that he should speak, and how he decided what he would say. He spoke about it on Gyles Brandreth’s podcast:

Charles Spencer is revealing new details about his original eulogy for Princess Diana. The 9th Earl Spencer, 61, said that the eulogy he’d initially planned for his late sister’s funeral was “very different” from what he eventually read.

“I flew back [to the U.K.] – I was living in South Africa – I flew back from Cape Town overnight. [I had a] very sweet stewardess help me, because I was in bits,” Spencer said on the Oct. 24 episode of Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast. He further explained that he initially searched for someone else who could give the eulogy. “I had a big, thick address book, and I thought, ‘I want to find someone who’s going to make the speech for her.’ And I got to ‘Z’ and I hadn’t found anyone,” Spencer recalled.

“[I] got off the plane in Heathrow [Airport], called my mother, I said, ‘I can’t think who’s going to give the eulogy. And I’ve got an awful feeling it’s going to have to be me,’ ” he continued. “And she said, ‘Well, it is going to be you. Your sisters and I have decided it.’ ”

When he started putting together the tribute, Spencer said, “[It was a] very traditional eulogy, almost … ‘She was very good at this as a child’ and all that. And then I thought, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, that’s not who she was.’ ” He said he then “realized” his job in that moment wasn’t to speak about Diana, but to “speak for” his late sister, who died at age 36 after a car crash in Paris in August 1997.

“And I knew I’d been left at that stage – it had no legal standing – but I knew she’d left me as guardian of her sons,” he continued, referring to his nephews, Prince William and Prince Harry. “Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me,” said Spencer. “That sort of duty, I think. And then I wrote it in an hour and a half and, yeah, that was it, really.”

[From People]

“I knew she’d left me as guardian of her sons. Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me.” Referring to the current king as “the other parent” is amazing and Diana would laugh her ass off at that. Something which really struck me as I read Prince Harry’s Spare is how much it meant to him that the Spencers really did stick by him and they were always there for him in a way the Windsors probably weren’t. I really wish Meghan had worn the Spencer tiara for the wedding. She and Harry probably felt like they couldn’t say no to QEII, but they should have.

Charles Spencer speaks about how he approached his sister Diana’s eulogy – knowing it was his duty to speak for her and protect her boys. It’s a shame nothing could save Willy; he turned out a sociopath. The Spencers have certainly been Harry’s rock.😍

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— Zandi Sussex (@zandisussex.bsky.social) October 25, 2025 at 9:40 PM

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.