In April 1969, a 33-year-old woman stood in a witness box and listened as the court dissolved her marriage on the grounds of her adultery. She had already lost her four children the previous year, in a custody hearing in which her own mother had given evidence against her. The word that would follow her for the rest of her life was already in the air, and it would not leave her until her obituaries. It was a word borrowed from a Nancy Mitford novel, and nobody has ever applied it to the person who kept the children.
Frances Ruth Burke Roche was born on the 20th of January 1936 at Park House on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. Her father was a baron and a friend of the king. Her mother was a lady-in-waiting. Twenty-five years later, in the same house, in a room that had been prepared in the same way, she gave birth to a daughter called Diana.
Both of them were born in the shadow of the same royal estate, in the same building, to the same family. And both of them would be taken out of the households they were living in by decisions made about them rather than by them. One of those stories has had thirty years of films, books, and documentaries made about it. The other has had almost none.
And it happened first. And it is the reason the second one happened at all. In 1968, an English court heard a custody case. On one side was John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, heir to an earldom and to Althorp, one of the great houses of England.
On the other side was his wife, Frances, who was 32 years old and had four surviving children: Sarah, 13, Jane, 11, Diana, seven, and Charles, four. She lost all four of them. And one of the witnesses who appeared against her, in support of her husband, was her own mother. The word that was applied to Frances almost immediately by the press, and by more than one account by her own mother, was “bolter.
” It comes from Nancy Mitford’s *The Pursuit of Love*, published in 1945. In the novel, the narrator’s mother abandons her family and moves through a series of husbands, and she is referred to throughout simply as the Bolter. By the 1960s, the term had escaped the book and become standard shorthand among a certain kind of English family for a woman who left. It stuck to Frances for 36 years and into her obituaries.
The marriage that everything follows from began on the 1st of June 1954, when Frances married Johnny Spencer at Westminster Abbey. She was 18 years old, the youngest woman to be married in the Abbey since 1893. The wedding was a national event: 1,700 guests, the Queen and the Queen Mother among them. What an 18-year-old was walking into was not a marriage in the sense most people mean the word.
It was an institution with a job attached. The Spencers are one of the oldest and richest families in England, untitled, then titled. They had been at Althorp in Northamptonshire since 1508. The house held one of the great private art collections in the country—Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds—along with furniture, silver, porcelain, and family papers accumulated across four and a half centuries.
The earldom had been created in 1765. Johnny Spencer was the heir to all of it, and an earldom, under English law, descends through the male line. No son, no earl. The title would go sideways to a cousin, and the house and the collection would go with it.
Four and a half centuries of accumulation would leave the immediate family. So the job Frances was given at 18 was to produce a boy. Not as a hope, as a function. That was the arrangement.
It was not hidden from her, and in 1954 it would not have occurred to anybody in that Abbey that it needed defending. Sarah came in March 1955. Jane came in February 1957. And on the 12th of January 1960, she gave birth to a boy.
He was christened John after his father. He lived for about ten hours. What is said to have happened next is the single most quoted thing about this marriage, and it cannot be documented. By accounts that have been told consistently for decades, Frances was sent to clinics in Harley Street to be examined to establish why she was failing to produce a healthy son.
Her husband was not examined. No medical record of that exists, and none could. It is exactly the kind of claim that circulates for 40 years and never acquires a source. But it has been repeated by people close enough to the family to be worth listening to, and it fits everything documented about the pressure on her.
Nobody connected to the Spencers has ever denied it. Diana was born on the 1st of July 1961. Another daughter. Charles, the son the whole apparatus had been waiting for, arrived on the 20th of May 1964.
Ten years into the marriage and four children in, it was over in every way that mattered. The separation came in 1967. Frances moved to London and took the two youngest children with her: Diana, six, and Charles, three. That was the arrangement.
Then, over the Christmas holidays of 1967, the children went to Althorp to see their father, and he did not send them back. That is the whole mechanism. She did not leave her children. She left a marriage, took the two youngest with her, and they were retained at the other end of a Christmas visit.
The legal position she found herself in the following year was one she had been placed in over a fortnight in December. The case was heard in 1968. Althorp obtained custody of all four children. The file is not public, and there is no transcript available to anybody outside the parties.
What is established is the outcome, and one fact about the evidence: Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence in support of her son-in-law and against her daughter. That is on the record and has never been disputed by anyone, including by Ruth Fermoy. What is not recoverable is everything that would tell you what happened in the room. Nobody knows what words she used.
Nobody knows what the judge said, or what reasoning was given, or what weight her mother’s evidence carried against everything else that was put. It may have been decisive. It may have been one factor among many. It is not possible to say.
What can be said is what the law was. In an English divorce in 1968, there had to be a guilty party. The concept of no-fault divorce did not exist in English law until the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, which came into force in 1971. Somebody had to be at fault, and in this case, it was Frances.
The marriage was dissolved in April 1969 on the grounds of her adultery with Peter Shand Kydd, who had himself divorced his wife Janet the previous year. A mother found guilty of adultery in an aristocratic custody case in 1968, with a title and an entailed estate on the other side of the argument, was in an almost unwinnable position before anyone said a word. That was the convention. It was applied routinely, and it was applied to thousands of women who were not married to viscounts.
The honest version is not that one woman’s testimony took four children away. The honest version is that the system was going to do it anyway, and that her mother chose to help. That is a smaller charge and a much harder one to forgive. There is a piece of timing in this that is almost unbearable once you notice it.
The Divorce Reform Act received Royal Assent in October 1969 and came into force on the 1st of January 1971. It introduced irretrievable breakdown as a ground for divorce in England and Wales. It removed the requirement that one person be found guilty. Within about two years of Frances Shand Kydd losing her four children on the basis of being the guilty party, Parliament abolished the category she had been placed in.
She was on the wrong side of a piece of legislation that was already being redrafted while her case was being heard. None of which would have got the children back. The framework that decided she was unfit lasted about another 24 months. The children stayed at Park House until 1974.
Then Johnny Spencer’s father died, he became the eighth Earl Spencer, and in 1975 the family moved to Althorp, a house of a hundred odd rooms in Northamptonshire. Diana was 14 when she arrived, and by every account she never liked it. On the 14th of July 1976, at Caxton Hall in London, their father married again. His second wife was Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, the daughter of the novelist Barbara Cartland.
Diana was 15. None of the four children were told the wedding was happening until it had happened. They called her Acid Raine. Over the following decade, a great deal of what was in Althorp left it.
To fund an extensive redecoration of the house, a substantial quantity of the family’s heirlooms was sold: paintings, including works by Van Dyck and Gainsborough, along with furniture, china, porcelain, silver, gold, and family documents. The sales drew bitter public criticism from art historians and from members of the family, and the general verdict was that the new gilding and wallpapers did not begin to compensate for what had gone. A court decided in 1968 that four children were better off with their father, in the interests of continuity and the estate and the proper order of things. Within eight years, those children had a stepmother they detested and had not been consulted about.
Within about 15, a good deal of the collection that the whole arrangement had existed to protect had been sold off to redecorate the house it hung in. The mother who was found unfit spent those same years on a farm on a Scottish island. That is not proof that the court was wrong. Custody decisions are not judged by what happens 15 years later.
And Johnny Spencer was, by the accounts of all four of his children, a loving father who was not responsible for the sales in the way the criticism sometimes implies. But the institution the ruling was built to protect turned out to be the one thing in the story nobody protected. Frances married Peter Shand Kydd on the 2nd of May 1969, three weeks after the divorce was granted, and they went as far away as it was possible to go and stay in Britain. They bought a 1,000-acre farm on Seil, an island off the west coast of Scotland, connected to the mainland by a single 18th-century bridge.
She was 33 years old, with four children she saw on the terms other people set, a label she was never going to lose, and a farm on an island. She stayed there for 35 years. What “on the terms other people set” meant in practice is the part that the word bolter is designed to stop you thinking about. Seil is off the west coast of Argyll, roughly 500 miles from Northamptonshire.
In 1969, that was the better part of two days each way on roads and trains that were nothing like the ones that exist now, to a house that could only be reached across a single narrow 18th-century bridge. Her children were at boarding schools in England. Their holidays were arranged around their father’s household, because his was the household with custody. The contact was letters and telephone calls and visits that had to be requested, agreed, and traveled to for decades.
Every one of those visits ended with her putting four children back on a train or into a car and returning to an island by herself. Her son Charles has spoken about the period after his mother went in terms that are unusually plain for that family. He was three. He has described how his sister Diana looked after him, how she stepped in and was good to him in the way an older sister does when something has happened that the adults are not explaining.
That is what the ruling produced at ground level. A 7-year-old comforting a 3-year-old in a large cold house in Norfolk about an absence that a court had ordered and that neither of them had been consulted about. The second marriage failed, too, eventually. They separated in June 1988 and divorced in 1990.
Peter Shand Kydd remarried and moved to Australia. Frances did not leave Seil. She converted to Roman Catholicism, gave a great deal of her time to Catholic charities, and lived, by every account, a quiet and largely private life on an island of a few hundred people several hundred miles from any of her children. In 1996, she was convicted of drink driving and banned from the road.
She denied having a problem with alcohol. That is the whole of what is established. A single conviction in a woman of 60 living alone on a Scottish island, 28 years after losing custody of her children, was widely reported as confirmation of a character that had been assigned to her in 1968. The word bolter had been waiting nearly three decades for a supporting fact, and it took the first one it was offered.
The conviction actually establishes only that on one occasion in 1996, she drove having drunk too much and was caught and was punished for it, as several thousand other people in Britain were that year. Everything beyond that is inference by people who were not there, applied to a woman who had already been sorted into a category 30 years earlier. There was a reconciliation, and it lasted a long time, and then it broke. After Diana’s engagement in 1981, the two of them came back together, and the public version of it was the wedding on the 29th of July 1981, where Frances was visibly and centrally the mother of the bride.
For most of the next 15 years, she was in her daughter’s life. It ended in May 1997, over an interview. Frances gave an interview to *Hello* magazine, which she had sold to raise money for her church, in which she said that Diana’s loss of the style Her Royal Highness after the divorce from Charles was a good thing. Diana did not agree, and did not agree very strongly.
They stopped speaking. By the reporting that exists, Diana returned her mother’s letters unopened as the summer went on. That last detail rests on a narrow base of sources, and no letter has ever been produced. What is not in doubt is the silence, because Frances herself would eventually be required to confirm it in a courtroom.
They had not spoken for something in the order of four months on the 31st of August 1997, when Diana was killed in Paris. A question gets asked about that week, and it deserves an honest answer rather than an invented one: her children were in Paris, her grandchildren were at Balmoral—who was with Frances Shand Kydd? The answer is that nobody has published it. She was on Seil.
Beyond that, the public record does not say who was in the house, or who telephoned, or how she was told. It is simply a thing that was never reported, because in the first days of September 1997 there was no journalist in Britain assigned to a 61-year-old woman on a Scottish island. She came south for the funeral on the 6th of September at Westminster Abbey. The same building she had been married in at 18.
Afterwards, she said something about that day, which is the most striking thing she ever said on the record, and which is not what anybody expects. “Strange though it may seem,” she said, “Diana’s funeral was probably the proudest day of my life. Proud of her. Proud of my daughters who were rock steady in their readings, and my son who gave the ultimate tribute of brotherly love for her.
” The four children she had lost in a courtroom when they were 13, 11, seven, and four were, that afternoon, the four people holding the thing together in front of two and a half billion viewers. Their mother watched them do it from a pew. What she felt, by her own account, was pride. Five years later, she was in a witness box again.
In 2002, Paul Burrell, who had been Diana’s butler, was tried at the Old Bailey for theft of items belonging to her estate. Frances Shand Kydd gave evidence. In the course of that evidence, in a public criminal trial, being questioned about her dead daughter’s possessions, she was made to state on the record that she and Diana had been estranged for several months before Diana died. In 1968, her mother stood up in a court and gave evidence that helped take her children from her.
In 2002, she stood up in a court and was required to say out loud to the press bench and to the public gallery that she and the most famous of those children had not been speaking when she died. Two courtrooms, one family, 34 years apart. Both times, the thing that was taken was the relationship with the daughter. The trial collapsed in November 2002 after the Queen recalled a conversation with Burrell that undermined the prosecution’s case, and the whole thing ended without a verdict.
The admission she was made to give, the one thing from those weeks that people remember, was extracted in a proceeding that was abandoned before it reached a conclusion. It is worth knowing who Ruth Fermoy actually was, because the easy version of her—the cold aristocratic grandmother—is not accurate. She was not born to any of this. She was Ruth Sylvia Gill, born on the 2nd of October 1908 at Dalhebity House in Aberdeenshire, the daughter of Colonel William Smith Gill.
She was a serious musician. She showed real promise as a pianist as a girl and went to Paris in the 1920s to study at the Conservatoire under Alfred Cortot, one of the most celebrated pianists in Europe. That is an unusual training for a woman of her generation and background, and it was not decorative. It was a career she was capable of having.
On the 17th of September 1931, she married Maurice Roche, the fourth Baron Fermoy, who was wealthy and very much older than her. They took Park House on the Sandringham estate as tenants of the King. That is how the connection was made. The Fermoys became the King’s Norfolk neighbors, and Ruth became close to the Queen, the woman who would become the Queen Mother.
In 1956, she was appointed an extra woman of the bedchamber, was later promoted to woman of the bedchamber, and held that post for the next 33 years. She did not give up the music either. In 1951, she founded the King’s Lynn Festival and stayed closely involved with it for 25 years. The woman who gave evidence in 1968 was a talented, self-made, hard-working person who had entered the court from outside it and had spent 30 years making herself indispensable to it.
People who have earned their place inside an institution are frequently its most exacting enforcers, because they know precisely what it costs to be let in and precisely how quickly it can be taken away. Her daughter had been given a viscount, an Abbey wedding, and a place in that world at 18, and had walked out of it. It is not difficult to see how that looked from where Ruth Fermoy was standing. And she did not stop at 1968.
She is widely credited as one of the people who encouraged the match between the Prince of Wales and her own granddaughter in 1980 and 1981. That much is in every serious account of the engagement, except that she denied it. Asked whether she had orchestrated the match, she said, “You can say that if you like, but it simply wouldn’t be true. ” That is the answer of somebody who has spent 33 years at court.
It concedes nothing, refuses nothing, and closes the subject. According to Andrew Morton’s biography of Diana, which was built from tapes Diana recorded herself, Lady Fermoy had privately told her granddaughter not to do it. The words that come down through those tapes are these: “Darling, you must understand that their sense of humor and their lifestyle are different, and I don’t think it will suit you. ” It is not a warning about Charles.
It is not a warning about Camilla. It is a warning about the household, from a woman who had been inside that household in service for a quarter of a century by the time she said it, and who therefore knew better than almost anybody alive what she was describing. She said it privately. She did not say it publicly, and she did not say it to anyone who could have stopped the thing.
Ruth Fermoy died on the 6th of July 1993, aged 84, and it was reported at the time that she and Diana had not been on speaking terms. In 1968, she gave evidence that helped a court decide a woman was not fit to keep her children, and the woman was her daughter. In 1980 and 1981, she helped place that woman’s daughter into a marriage that she is reported to have privately advised her to refuse. There is no document connecting those two decisions.
Nobody has produced a letter or a diary or a remark to a third party that ties them together. Drawing a line between them is an argument, not a finding. But it is not a strained one. What both acts have in common is a woman who was in every situation on the side of the institution, of the title, of the estate, of the household, of the arrangement, and against the individual woman in front of her who wanted something else.
It is not villainy. It is a set of values held completely by somebody who had spent her adult life in service to a court, and who genuinely believed the arrangement mattered more than the person. She was consistent. Frances Shand Kydd died on the 3rd of June 2004 at her home on Seil, aged 68, after a long illness that included Parkinson’s disease and a brain tumor.
She had outlived her daughter by six years and nine months. The funeral was on the 10th of June. Her grandson William gave a reading. She was buried at Pennyfear Cemetery in Oban, on the mainland, about an hour’s drive from the island, and a very long way from Park House, and from the Abbey, and from Althorp.
She had been married in Westminster Abbey at 18, in front of a queen, with the whole thing arranged around a son who took ten years to arrive, and whose birth did not save anything. She was called a bolter for leaving, by a mother who then went into court to make sure the leaving cost her everything. She got the children back only as adults, on their terms, in the years when they had already been shaped by somebody else’s house. The last public act of her life was standing in a witness box at the Old Bailey, being made to confirm out loud that the daughter she was there to speak for had stopped taking her calls.
She said the funeral was the proudest day of her life. She meant it. Four children she had not been allowed to raise, standing up in front of the world and doing it properly.
There is no record of anyone in that family ever telling her so.
