If you’d like to read a Windsor-centric history on the Spencer family, the Daily Mail has everyone covered. It seems like the Spencer family’s visible support for Prince Harry at the Invictus service has ruffled more than a few royal feathers. King Charles doesn’t like to be reminded of Diana, and Charles has little to no relationships with the Spencer family at this point. Which is sort of extraordinary given the fact that A) the Spencers clearly wanted to be part of Harry and William’s lives and a good father would have supported that and B) the Spencers are very high-level aristocrats. I remember the Earl Spencer (Diana’s brother) speaking last year about how he had zero plans to attend the coronation and how moved he was that people brought up Diana and how the coronation would be a difficult day for people who loved Diana. Like… the Earl Spencer should have been invited to the coronation just on rank alone, you know? But given the tortured and intertwined history of the two families, it didn’t happen. Now we’re getting history lessons from the Mail:
The divide between the Spencers and the Windsors was highlighted by those who did and didn’t attend Prince Harry’s Invictus Games service, an expert claimed today. Harry gave warm hugs to his uncle Earl Spencer and aunt Lady Jane Fellowes at St Paul’s Cathedral before the event to celebrate the competition’s 10th anniversary. Princess Diana’s siblings were also joined by former army officer Mark Dyer, who acted as the Duke of Sussex’s mentor after his mother’s death in Paris in 1997.
Other notable guests at the service in London yesterday included his cousin Louis Spencer, lawyer David Sherbourne and the Prime Minister’s wife Akshata Murty. But there were no senior royals with Harry, as they instead put on a show of unity for King Charles who attended a Buckingham Palace garden party two miles away.
Former BBC royal correspondent Michael Cole said it was notable that none of Harry’s royal blood relatives – including his father and brother William, who attended the inaugural Invictus event in London at Harry’s side in 2014 – were at St Paul’s. He told MailOnline that there ‘never was much love lost between the Spencers and the Windsors’, and the ‘divide was shown in its deepest and starkest form’ yesterday.
Mr Cole pointed out that while Harry’s ‘birth family’ – led by Earl Spencer and Lady Jane Fellowes – went to St Paul’s to support the Duke, ‘the entire Royal Family stayed away’. He also recalled that when Princess Diana’s coffin arrived for burial on the Spencer family estate of at Althorp in Northamptonshire in 1997, Earl Spencer ‘whipped off the flag that covered it and replaced it with the Spencer standard’.
Mr Cole said: ‘Nothing could have illustrated more clearly the gap that will always separate two famous families. Words have power and actions have consequences, as Prince Harry – whose criticisms of his Windsor family have been harsh, cruel and wounding – is increasingly finding out. ‘
What I find interesting, and it’s not mentioned by this Michael Cole person, is that William barely seems to keep up any kind of relationship with the Spencer family. It’s just Harry. It was always just Harry – he’s always spent time with his Spencer cousins and he wanted the Spencers close-by for his son’s christening. There’s evidence to support the idea that the Earl Spencer has visited Montecito a couple of times in recent years, and I’d be willing to bet one or two Spencers made it to Lili’s christening as well. I’m sure all of that pisses off Charles AND Camilla to no end. While Camilla’s family – the Shands – absolutely had aristo ties, they weren’t titled and they basically hustled their way into those circles. I’ve always said that part of the reason why Charles and Camilla never wanted Harry around was because they both saw so much of Diana in him, so much SPENCER.
I hope my father would have approved that I wore his Royal Scots Greys regimental cufflinks at the moving celebration of 10 years of @WeAreInvictus at @StPaulsLondon yesterday. pic.twitter.com/6bwfe6mBZ8
— Charles Spencer (@cspencer1508) May 9, 2024
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.