Amongst other things Diana & I had in common with each other, the
greatest and certainly the most important was Dame Barbara Cartland. We
both shared her, almost equally. She was Diana’s maternal
step-grandmother and my fairy godmother in England. The honourable
Diana Frances Spencer was born the youngest daughter Edward Sepncer,
Viscount Althorp, and his first wife, Frances Spencer, Viscountess
Althorp (formerly the Honourable Frances Burke Roche) at Part House on
the Sandringham estate. She was baptized in St. Mary Magdalene Church
in Sandringham; her godparents included John Floyd (the chairman of
Christie’s) and Mary Colman (a niece of Queen Mother). Diana came from
a royal and aristocratic background. Diana’s
great-great-great-grandmother Eliza Kewark (some sources spell the
surname Kevork or Kevorkian) was a native of Bombay, India and likely
of Indian descent. Her parents divorced when the children were very
young because of her mother, Frances’s adultery case with Peter Shand
Kydd, and the father married Countess Raine Spencer of Dartmouth,
daughter of the world’s greatest romance novelist Dame Barbara Cartland.
On the death of her paternal grandfather, Albert Spencer, 7th Earl Spencer, in 1975, Diana’s father became the 8th
Earl Spencer, at which time she became Lady Diana Spencer and moved
from her childhood home at Part House to her family’s sixteenth-century
ancestral home of Althorp. Her brother’s name was Charles she also had
two sisters name Sarah and Jane. The Spencers had been close to the
British Royal Family for decades. Her maternal grandmother, Lady Ruth
Fermoy, was a longtime friend and a lady-in-waiting to HRH Queen
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. HRH Prince Charles and his love life had
always been the subject of press speculation, and he was linked to
numerous women. Nearing his mid-thirties, he was under increasing
pressure to marry. Legally, the only requirement was that they could
not marry a Roman Catholic. A member of the Church of England was
preferred. His great-uncle Lord Mountbatten of Burma, also the last
viceroy of India, who was assassinated in 1979, had advised him to
marry a virginal young woman who could look up to him. In order to gain
the approval of his family and their advisors, any potential bride was
expected to have a royal or aristocratic background, preferably, a
virgin. Diana seemed to meet all of these qualifications. Behind their
marriage was the influence of her grandmother, the queen of the
romantic novel, in whose stories there was always a tall, dark &
handsome prince charming. Lo and behold, the prince charming did arrive
– and they were both married at St. Paul’s Cathedral on the 29th
July. 1981. The marriage produced two children, some domestic problems
and turned Diana into ‘the world’s most photographed woman’.
