Diana, Princess of Wales

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’.Read the rest of this story