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Charles Spencer is looking back on his heartbreaking eulogy for Princess Diana.
The 9th Earl Spencer, 61, appeared on the latest episode of Gyles Brandreth’s “Rosebud” podcast and revealed that he initially had a “very different” speech written for his sister’s funeral in Sept. 1997.
“I flew back [to England] – 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 recalled.
“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,” he explained. “[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.’ And she said, ‘Well, it is going to be you. Your sisters and I have decided it.'”
Spencer that his original tribute to Diana — who died on Aug. 31, 1997 in a car crash in Paris — was a “very traditional eulogy.””Almost… ‘She was very good at this as a child’ and all that,’ Spencer shared. “And then I thought, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, that’s not who she was.'”
He said he “realized” that his job to deliver the eulogy wasn’t to speak about Diana but to “speak for” her.
“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 added, referring to his nephews Prince William and Prince Harry, who were 15 and 12, respectively, at the time of the accident.
“Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me,” Spencer went on. “That sort of duty, I think. And then I wrote it in an hour and a half and, yeah, that was it, really.”
Spencer also admitted he took “one bit out” of his eulogy about Rupert Murdoch because it was “rather unnecessary.”
Spencer gave the eulogy for his late sister at Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997.
“Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty,” Spencer said at the time. “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.”
“She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry, from a similar fate and I do this here Diana on your behalf,” he continued. “We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.”
Spencer also pledged that William and Harry would be raised as “two exceptional young men” whose souls “can sing openly as you planned.”
English (US)