Buckingham Palace has swiftly refuted a claim in Earl Spencer’s memoir that King Charles told him we’ll forget her soon enough regarding Diana, Princess of Wales, days after her death.
A Swift Palace Pushback Over Diana’s Final Days
When allegations surfaced regarding King Charles’s private words in the turbulent wake of Diana’s death, Buckingham Palace discarded its traditional silence. Little over an hour after an excerpt from Earl Spencer’s memoir Swan Song about his sister, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, had published its first extract online, a statement was issued.
The excerpt claimed that during a heated argument over funeral arrangements, Charles told Spencer, Rest assured, we'll forget her soon enough.
In response, the King countered that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss
.
“Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.”
King Charles
While the monarchy typically operates under the guiding mantra of never complain, never explain
, the personal nature of the allegation demanded immediate action. Julian Payne, the King’s former communications secretary, explained on the BBC’s Today programme that because the claim targeted the monarch directly, it carried a greater ability to do harm, prompting officials to set the record straight and deny these remarks have been made. Given the amount of things the palace don’t comment on, you can imagine the strength of feeling. Payne remains close to the king and was due to be sitting alongside him at Thursday’s AI summit just hours later, so the fact he felt able to speak so freely suggests his robust defence of Charles came with official sanction.
Decades of Pressures Behind Palace Doors
The intense public fascination with Charles and Diana’s relationship stretches back decades. The couple married on July 29, 1981, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, in a celebration where the world watched them tie the knot in a fairytale wedding. Yet, behind closed doors, things weren’t quite as picture perfect. When they weren’t carrying out royal duties, the then-Prince of Wales and the People’s Princess reportedly did not have many things in common, leading to “blazing rows” behind the scenes.
According to The Duchess author Penny Junor, tensions escalated during their three-month-long honeymoon, which began in July 1981 following their royal wedding. While Charles took along his watercolours, some canvases and a pile of books by the Afrikaner mystic and writer Laurens van der Post, which he’d hoped he and Diana might share and then discuss in the evenings, Diana was no great reader. She hated his wretched books and was offended that he might prefer to bury his head in one of them rather than sit and talk to her. She resented him sitting for hours at his easel, too, and they had many blazing rows. One day, when Charles was painting on the veranda deck of Britannia, he went off to look at something for half an hour, and came back to find she’d destroyed his painting and all his materials.
The marriage ultimately unraveled amid infidelity on both sides, and the pair tried to make it work until their eventual separation in 1992. Charles eventually rekindled a romance with his former flame Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he would eventually marry in 2005. Diana countered with high-profile media appearances, including her iconic 1995 Panorama interview in which she uttered the incendiary line: Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.
Divorce, Legacy, and Royal Precedent
Following pressure from Queen Elizabeth II, who wrote to both the prince and princess and gave them her view, supported by the Duke of Edinburgh, that an early divorce is desirable, Diana released a statement announcing: The Princess of Wales has agreed to Prince Charles' request for a divorce.
The recent exchange between King Charles and Earl Spencer echoes past instances where the palace abandoned its silence to correct the narrative. Media outlets quickly drew parallels to the late Queen Elizabeth II’s measured response to a torrent of allegations from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in their Oprah Winfrey interview, when the palace famously issued her some recollections may vary
statement.