She was twenty-three years old, and she had decided to tell them the truth. Sitting across a restaurant table from two newspapermen in the early months of 1978, she said plainly that she was not in love with the Prince of Wales. The whole country believed she would marry him, and she told them she would not. She would not marry any man she did not love, she said, whether he were the dustman or the king of England.
She talked about her drinking and about an illness that had nearly starved her and about the thousands of boyfriends she claimed to have had. Almost lightly, she mentioned that she was keeping the newspaper clippings to show her grandchildren one day. Within weeks, the courtship was finished. And the crown she refused that afternoon did not travel far.
It went to a schoolgirl of sixteen who happened to be her own sister. Her name was Lady Elizabeth Sarah Lavinia Spencer. She was born on the 19th of March 1955 at Park House on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, a rented property of some ten bedrooms a short walk from the queen’s own front door. The distance between those two houses was the whole story of her life.
The Spencers were not hopeful outsiders waiting to be let into the royal world by a good marriage; they were already inside it. Sarah’s godmother was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Her grandmother was a close friend and lady-in-waiting to that same queen mother. Her younger brother would grow up a godson of the sovereign herself.
When we talk about the Spencers reaching for the crown, we are talking about a family that had been standing in its front hall for generations. Sarah was the eldest of five. After her came Jane in 1957, then a boy, John, in 1960, who lived for only about ten hours and whose loss sat under the family like a fault line. Then in 1961 came the fourth child, a girl named Diana, and last, in 1964, the son Charles.
Sarah stood at the head of that line. She was the one the others looked up to, and the one old enough to watch clearly when the family began to break. And break it did. When Sarah was twelve, her mother left, and after a bitter fight her father won custody of the children, helped in the coldest twist of the whole affair by his own mother-in-law, who went into a courtroom and gave evidence against her own daughter.
Sarah has never once described that wound, so we do not invent feelings for a woman who is still alive to hold them. What can be said is what she became inside that fractured house. She became the eldest child, the one old enough to grasp the damage and old enough to be sent away from it, first to a small preparatory school in Norfolk and then to West Heath in Kent. By every surviving account, she met all of it not by folding quietly inward but by acting out with real determination.
The family seat she would grow into was Althorp in Northamptonshire, a house the Spencers had held since the early 1500s, some ninety rooms set in hundreds of acres of park, and the family moved there in the middle of the 1970s. Park House passed out of the story in time, becoming a hotel. Althorp, cold and grand, became the stage on which the strangest scene of her life would soon be played out. The character that emerges from the record is strikingly consistent across seven decades.
She was funny. She was blunt. She was physically fearless to the point of recklessness. Her own brother told the story of a childhood row with their father that ended with Sarah riding her horse straight in through the door of the house and halting it in the middle of the hall.
Asked decades later whether age had softened her at all, he answered with a single word: “No. ” A family friend once gave a biographer a phrase for her: ebullient and enterprising, with an unpredictable streak running through her. She was, in other words, the last kind of girl who would ever sit waiting in a corner to be chosen. There is a story about how she left school, and it comes in two versions.
The polite version holds that she left West Heath at sixteen after passing her examinations and went off to work in London. The other version, reported years later by a Sunday newspaper and repeated since, even by her own brother in a passing remark, holds that she was expelled, and that the reason was drinking. Which is the true shape of it has never been settled on the record, so we set them side by side and let them stand together. The drinking itself is beyond doubt, because she described it herself.
By the age of nineteen she had done something almost no young woman of her class did in that era. She had moved to London and taken charge of her own life. One of her father’s houses was put in her hands, and she ran it and took rent from the tenants who lived there. She said so plainly and without apology.
A younger sister would later come and work for her in a Chelsea flat, cleaning it for the same wages as the other daily helps. That younger sister was Diana. There was one more inheritance waiting for the eldest Spencer daughter, and it was made of pearls. In this family there was a quiet tradition that each daughter received a pearl choker, and the eldest daughter’s was the grandest of them, a band of five full rows.
Sarah’s had the five rows. Keep those pearls in mind. They come back at the exact moment this story turns, and they are the last thing she will ever give to the sister who takes her place. In the summer of 1977, the man at the very center of those grandest rooms in Britain was about to notice her.
The public was about to be shown one Sarah Spencer and only one: willowy, red-haired, fast-talking, socially fearless, the aristocratic girl of the season. It was a flattering picture, and not a false one, but it was thin as tissue. Behind it stood a young woman who had spent the years just before 1977 fighting battles that had nothing to do with any prince. Start with the drinking, because she was honest about it herself in a way that still startles.
Describing her school days, she once said she would drink almost anything: whiskey, Cointreau, gin, cherry, and most often of all vodka, for the simple reason that vodka was the one the staff could not smell on her. It is an astonishing thing to hear a young aristocrat say out loud in the 1970s, and it is the first clear sign of the quality that would define her whole public life: she told the truth, and she told it with a kind of reckless good humor, almost daring the listener to be shocked. That habit of candor would carry her to the very center of British life, and then it would end her there. Then there is the illness, and here the story slows down and treads with care, because this is real suffering and no one’s entertainment.
In her early twenties Sarah lived with anorexia. That much is documented. The fuller account rests on a single newspaper source, so we hold it lightly and repeat only what that source reported: a love affair had ended, she had fallen into depression, and her weight had dropped to a frightening level before she found help at a clinic. Her own description is enough.
She had broken up with a boyfriend, she said, and had simply stopped eating. She would toy with a couple of pieces of lettuce. And if she forced a meal down, she would only bring it straight back up again. There is a painful rhyme in this family.
The same illness would later take hold of Diana, too. That both sisters suffered is simply a fact of the record. No honest storyteller can say that the one caused the other, and this one will not try. She belonged to the very first wave of aristocratic women who began slowly, and at real cost, to have voices of their own.
She would use hers sooner than almost any of them, and she would pay for it first and hardest. All of that sat inside her on the day the prince first paid her attention. It made her wonderful company. It also made her, by the cold measure of the institution she was being weighed against, a considerable risk, and nobody, least of all Sarah herself, seems to have thought to warn her that those two things were about to collide.
Here is the detail that proves she never once tried to hide any of it. When she was first introduced to Prince Charles, an introduction arranged by his younger brother, the first thing he ever said to her, according to one of the standard biographies, was to ask directly whether she had anorexia. Not a word about her eyes or her wit; a blunt question about the illness that had very nearly put her in a hospital bed. Whatever else her condition was, it was never a secret from the man courting her.
For about nine months she lived at the exact center of British attention. It began at Royal Ascot in the summer of 1977. There was a house party placed by one biographer at Windsor Castle itself, and it was Prince Andrew who made the introduction between his elder brother and the red-haired Spencer girl. She was twenty-two.
Charles was twenty-eight. For the nine months that followed, she was, by every measure the newspapers used, the woman most likely to marry the future king. The courtship unfolded in the settings that belonged to that world. There was polo at the Guards’ ground in Windsor Great Park, the prince in his boots and riding gear, the girl watching from the rail while the cameras watched her.
There was the theater. There were long weekends at the great country houses. The queen invited her to Balmoral, the family’s private retreat in the Scottish Highlands, and an invitation to Balmoral was no small signal. In February of 1978 there came a skiing holiday at Klosters in Switzerland, a party of friends on the snow, the details of which the press chased hard and never quite managed to pin down.
The chalet, the exact dates, the other guests, all of it stayed just out of the reporters’ reach, which only sharpened their hunger. And they were hungry because the 1970s was the decade that assembled the modern royal press pack: named correspondents with expense accounts, photographers with long lenses staking out house parties and polo grounds and ski slopes. A whole trade grew up around the private life of one family, and it needed faces. For one season, Sarah Spencer was the face it wanted most.
What makes this brief season so vivid all these years later is that she told us herself what it was actually like to live inside it, in a level of detail no other royal girlfriend of that era ever risked. Listen to her own inventory of what a single weekend at Windsor demanded. A suitcase full of clothes: a riding habit for the morning, a day dress for lunch, a skirt for tea, and a long dress for the evening. Four changes of clothing between breakfast and the end of one dinner, for one weekend as a guest in the house.
And folded into that account is one small telling submission: she said that she always, always called him “sir. ” She also told the reporters, with a kind of insider’s relish, that the prince made his own dates and did not, as some had claimed, arrange them through go-betweens. The height of it arrived in the middle of May 1978, when Time magazine ran a cover story about the man who would be king and placed her inside it. The magazine told its readers that Lady Sarah Spencer, willowy and red-haired and twenty-three, had spent a skiing holiday with the prince, and that she insisted all the same that the two of them were only chums.
That was the summit. Her name and face carried clear across the Atlantic. But by the time those words reached breakfast tables in America, the thing they described was already finished. Because Sarah Spencer had one quality that set her apart from every other young woman ever photographed at the prince’s side.
The others said nothing at all. Sarah talked, and in the early months of that year she had talked to precisely the wrong two people, and had told them precisely the truth. The end of it came not in a palace and not in a letter, but over a restaurant table, and she brought it down on herself. Sometime in the early months of 1978, Sarah agreed to have lunch with two Fleet Street journalists named James Whitaker and Nigel Nelson, among the founding figures of that new and hungry trade, the royal correspondents whose entire business was the private lives of this one family.
Exactly where the lunch was held and on precisely which day the record does not keep, and so we will not invent them. What the record keeps is what she said. She was candid about the prince in a way no one in her position had ever dared to be on the record. Then she spoke the sentence that would trail her for the rest of her life, as it was carried at the time by Time magazine.
She told them there was no chance of her marrying him. She was not in love with him, and she would not marry anyone she did not love, whether he were the dustman or the king of England. Read that again and take in what she had just done. The most eligible bachelor in the world, the near certainty of a crown if she simply held her tongue and played the game, and she had looked across a lunch table at two newspapermen and said in so many words that a throne itself would not be enough to make her marry a man she did not love.
It was at once the most honest thing any royal girlfriend of that generation ever said, and the most self-destructive. The strange truth is that it was both of those at the very same time. She did not stop there. She talked about the illness she had come through.
She said, in her own phrase, that she had had thousands of boyfriends. She spoke openly about past trouble with drink. And she told them, with what the two reporters plainly read as a kind of giddy delight, that she was keeping a scrapbook of the newspaper clippings about her own royal romance, so that one day she might show them to her grandchildren. The men drew their conclusion in print: her head, they wrote, seemed to have been turned by the publicity.
The interview itself ran in the magazine Woman’s Own, and Time confirmed it within weeks. There is one honest wrinkle in the timing, and we will not smooth it over. The couple had been photographed together on the snow at Klosters only weeks before, in February. So the interview sits very close to, and perhaps just after, the last time they were seen together in public.
No source claims the romance was already dead when she sat down to that lunch. Then she did the last reckless thing of all: she showed the article to the prince herself. What Charles said back to her is reported rather than recorded, and the exact wording is disputed between the accounts, so we take it as reported and never as a transcript. He was, by every telling, infuriated.
The rebuke that has come down to us in one form or another is that she had just done something incredibly stupid. Whatever the precise words were, the effect is not in question. The courtship dissolved within weeks. Now here is the part the old story always gets wrong.
The usual telling says that Sarah blew her one great chance, that she was a silly girl who chatted her way out of a crown she desperately wanted. But go back and read what she actually said. She was not cast aside by the palace. She had walked out of the room herself, in print, in her own plain words, saying that she did not love him and would not marry him for all the crowns in England.
That single distinction is the entire difference between the woman history remembers and the woman the record actually describes. And even her honesty was only the trigger. The deeper cause was the rules themselves. By the unwritten code of 1977, the woman who married the heir was required to arrive with no divorce behind her, no forbidden faith, no past that the newspapers could print, and above everything else, no public voice of her own.
Sarah’s private history was exactly the kind the code could not survive: the illness, the teenage drinking, the many boyfriends, the scrapbook of clippings. A girl who kept a scrapbook of her own royal romance to show her future grandchildren was never going to be allowed to marry the future king. She had simply become the first of them to say so out loud. There is a private cost buried under all of this, and a friend of hers put it into words many years later.
So here it is reported. She never forgave herself. The friend said that to this day, whenever the prince came up in conversation, Sarah would chime in with the same small wounded line: “Of course, he was my boyfriend first. ” Hold on to those five words.
They are the truest thing anyone ever said about her, and they come back at the very end of this story. But the strangest turn of the whole affair had already happened months before that lunch, on a wet afternoon out on her family’s land. Because that spring, while the romance was still alive, Sarah had done one thing that could never be taken back. She had brought the prince home to meet her family.
In November of 1977, while she and Charles were still together, Sarah invited him to Althorp for a weekend of shooting. It was the most natural thing in the world: you bring the man you are seeing home to the family house. Out on the estate that day, in the middle of a plowed field near a wood called Nobottle, the prince was introduced to Sarah’s younger sister. The girl was sixteen, home from school for the weekend.
According to Andrew Morton’s account, drawn from Diana’s own recollections, she cut a nondescript figure that day in a checked shirt and cords and rubber boots. And in the detail that stays with you, she was wearing her older sister’s anorak. Sarah’s own coat on Diana’s back on the day Diana first met the man Sarah was dating. Diana’s private verdict on the prince that afternoon held nothing romantic in it at all.
What a sad man, she thought. She was sixteen and thoroughly unimpressed. Years later, describing that meeting in public, she put it as plainly as could be: they had sort of met, she said, in a plowed field. But a door had been opened that would never close again, and the hand that opened it was Sarah’s.
Diana, for her part, watched her elder sister with the prince and remembered it without much tenderness. She had felt sorry for him, she said long afterward, because her sister was wrapped around his neck, and her sister, in her own blunt words, was quite a tough old thing. For a good while it made no difference, because Sarah’s own life moved on at speed. She was, by her own cheerful admission, a whirlwind kind of lady.
Within about two years of losing the prince, she had found a man of her own: Neil McCorquodale, a former officer of the Coldstream Guards and a farmer from Lincolnshire. There was even a brief rupture in the middle of the courtship, during which, by her biographer’s account, Neil flew off to Australia to think the whole thing over before returning to her. She announced the engagement to her father while he was distracted by a game of cricket at Althorp, and he gave his blessing half-absently in the middle of the cricket. And there is a small sharp irony folded into the marriage: through the tangled McCorquodale family, Neil was a distant relation of Raine, the stepmother the Spencer children could not abide.
Having spent years resenting the woman, Sarah went and married into her family. Neil’s own father had run for Britain at the London Olympic Games of 1948, reaching the final of the 100 metres and coming away with a silver medal in the relay. Neil himself would in time hold the ancient county office of high sheriff. By one family friend’s telling, he was a steady and private and quiet man, the settled opposite of the woman he was marrying.
She was the whirlwind. He was the farm she chose to land on. On the 17th of May 1980, at the little church by the gates of Althorp, Sarah married her Guards officer. It was said to be the first wedding held at Althorp in some sixty years.
She wore the family tiara, the same Spencer tiara her youngest sister would wear at a far more famous wedding the following year. Her mother paid for the reception and spent a fair share of it steering carefully clear of the stepmother and of the stepmother’s mother, Barbara Cartland. Sarah Spencer had chosen a quiet life on a farm in Lincolnshire, well away from palaces, and she would hold on to that life for the next forty-six years. And then, only four months after Sarah’s own wedding, the door she had opened in that plowed field swung wide.
In the summer of 1980, at a house party in the country, Charles and Diana began to see each other. Diana was nineteen now, and she satisfied every last one of the unwritten rules that Sarah had so spectacularly failed: no history, no public voice, nothing whatever on the record. The press pack that had once trailed the elder sister turned to the younger one with something close to relief. The engagement was announced on the 24th of February 1981.
And on the very next morning, the day after the whole world learned that Lady Diana Spencer would marry the Prince of Wales, a reporter reached her elder sister. Sarah’s answer has echoed for more than forty years. “I introduced them,” she told the Guardian. “I’m Cupid.
” To another paper, the Lincolnshire Echo, she added that the two of them were just right for each other, and that she had known they were in love since just before Christmas, when she had spotted an extra sparkle in her sister’s eye. Sit with the strangeness of that one word: Cupid. She said it cheerfully. She said it the morning after, before a single soul alive knew how the marriage would end, before any of the sorrow that was coming, before the crash in the Paris tunnel that would one day close it.
In that one bright moment, it was simply a proud older sister claiming a little credit for a happy match she had helped along. She could not have known she was describing the greatest tragedy her family would ever suffer. She had lit the match in a field. She had lost the man himself over a lunch.
And now she stood up in the newspaper and claimed the introduction with a smile. The claim was the act, and it is the line the whole story hangs from. Sarah was not among the bridesmaids at the wedding on the 29th of July 1981. She attended as family, one guest among thirty-five hundred inside St.
Paul’s Cathedral. She wore her pearls that day, the five-row Spencer choker of the eldest daughter, while her little sister wore the three-strand version that had passed down to her. And then came the gesture the whole story has been walking toward. After the ceremony, as the new Princess of Wales made ready to leave Buckingham Palace for her honeymoon, Sarah reached up, unclasped the pearls from her own throat, and gave them to Diana.
Understand what that gesture is. The elder sister, the one who had the prince first, the one who had stood at the head of the family line since the day she was born, unfastening her own inheritance and pressing it into the hands of the girl who was leaving to become a princess. The pearls that had marked Sarah as the first daughter now went around the throat of the sister who had taken the life that was very nearly hers. She handed all of it across: the man, the crown, the pearls, and she did it, so far as anyone watching could tell, out of love.
The sister she gave them to would be dead within sixteen years. And it would be Sarah who was sent to bring her home. Diana died in Paris in the small hours of the 31st of August 1997. When the family had to choose who would fly out to bring her body back to Britain, two of the people who went were her elder sisters.
Sarah flew out with her sister Jane, and with the man Sarah had dated twenty years earlier, Charles himself. The three of them traveling together to gather up the woman who connected all of them to one another. The details of that operation survive because the pilot later wrote them down. There was a standing plan for exactly this grim possibility: a rule that if a senior member of the family died abroad, the body would not be brought home until the fourth day.
The aircraft had to be specially prepared. A flat floor was fitted into the rear hold, and ball bearings were set into it so that a coffin could be moved in and out without a struggle. A separate transport plane flew a lead-lined coffin out to Paris. The Royal plane flew north first, by way of one air base, then on toward Scotland to collect Diana’s sisters before turning for France.
It landed back at a Royal Air Force base outside London in the last minutes before seven in the evening. The pilot remembered the timing down to the second. At seven exactly, he wrote, the engines cut and the rear door opened. There was a bearer party waiting from the queen’s own ceremonial squadron, men who would carry the coffin from the aircraft with no chance to rehearse the task beforehand, and the prime minister stood among the small reception on the tarmac.
Within about twenty minutes, it was in the air again, carrying Charles back north so that he could return to his two boys, who were fifteen and twelve years old and had just lost their mother. Sarah has never once described that flight in public. Not in an interview, not in a memoir, not in a single quoted line anywhere. On the subject of the worst night her family ever passed through, she has kept a silence so complete that all we can honestly do is note it and respect it.
She flew to Paris. She brought her sister home. And she said nothing. What she did do, she did in Westminster Abbey six days later, on the 6th of September.
There is a small fact here that is almost always reported wrongly, and we will get it right. At the funeral, there were two readings given by the two surviving sisters. Sarah gave the first of them. It was a poem called “Turn Again to Life” by an American writer named Mary Lee Hall, and it asked the grieving not to keep long vigil by the silent dust, but to turn again to life, and to take up the unfinished tasks of the one who had gone.
Her sister Jane gave the second reading, a different poem entirely. Sarah read the Mary Lee Hall, and it was Sarah, according to the funeral’s own planners, who had charge of the music. The family, she told them, had put her in charge of it. And so it was she who asked Elton John to sing.
For twenty years after that day, she said almost nothing at all. Then in 2017, for one documentary and one only, she offered a few short sentences about the death, and they are very nearly the only words she has ever given on it. She had felt shock, she said, but she did not think she had felt anything much beyond it. Just love and shock.
She spoke of putting a kind of barrier up inside herself so that she could get on with the practical things that had to be done. And she spoke of one thing that had never stopped troubling her. Her sister, she said, had always been religious about putting on her seat belt. Why she had not put it on that night, Sarah said she would never know.
When that documentary was being made, her sister Jane chose not to take part in it. And so the few halting sentences Sarah gave became the only substantial words either surviving sister has ever offered in public about the death. But grief for Sarah did not end at the graveside, because Diana had left her something more, something that would keep her bound to her sister’s death for another ten years, and would drag her, of all the places on earth, into a witness box. Diana had made Sarah one of the executors of her will.
A change to the will in early 1996 had written her sister in by her full name. And so when Diana died, it fell to Sarah, alongside their mother, to administer the estate. It was a very great estate. When probate was granted, the sworn value of everything Diana left came to almost twenty-two million pounds.
Sarah, the sister who had walked away to a quiet farm in Lincolnshire, was now the keeper of the most famous fortune in Britain. The work brought trouble almost at once. Diana had left a written note of her wishes, asking that a quarter of her personal possessions be set aside for her seventeen godchildren. But a note of wishes in law is only a wish, and it could not bind the people who ran the estate.
Late in 1997, the executors went to court and obtained a variation that handed them full discretion over those possessions. In the end, each godchild received not a share of the chattels, which might have been worth a great deal apiece, but a single selected keepsake. When the story surfaced years afterward, the reaction among the families involved was reported as one of real shock and anger. We give that as reported, since no named parent stands on the public record.
But the court order itself is a plain matter of fact, and Sarah was one of the people who obtained it. Then came the affair that stands as the single greatest failure of her public life, and her own name was on it. Diana’s death had loosed a tidal wave of public giving, and out of that flood grew the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. Sarah was its president.
Across its life, the fund raised more than twelve million pounds for charity. Some thirty-four million came from the public and from companies. A great deal more came from the sale of the rewritten Elton John single, the one performed at the funeral, and the rest came from investments and commercial ventures and a touring exhibition. The fund gave most of that money away and closed its doors in 2012.
But somewhere in the middle of its life, it walked straight into disaster. An American company had begun turning out Diana memorabilia without the fund’s blessing. The fund, together with the estate, sued the company in the American courts to stop it, and the fund lost. An American federal appeals court ruled against it in 2002, on the ground that British law recognized no such right for a dead person’s estate to claim.
Worse came behind it. The company turned and countersued for malicious prosecution, and it named the fund’s trustees personally, Lady Sarah McCorquodale among them, and demanded a fortune in damages. In 2003 the fund announced that it was legally obliged to freeze its grants, and payments to more than 120 organizations were suspended, among them the clearing of landmines, the very cause Diana had made her own in the last year of her life. The case was finally settled in 2004, with the fund paying out something on the order of 13.
5 million pounds into charitable hands to bring it to an end. The sources differ on the precise figures, so we give the pound figure and leave the rest alone. And through the whole ordeal, Sarah said not one public word. There is a smaller detail from these years that belongs beside the grand ones, because it shows the life she was actually leading away from all of it.
In 2009, she was appointed high sheriff of Lincolnshire, the old ceremonial office of the county, for a single year. Her husband had held the very same post more than twenty years before her. It is the only public office she has ever held, and it is a county one, rooted in the shire and the farm, rather than in any palace. Weigh the arithmetic of that for a moment.
The most famous fortune in Britain passed through her hands, and the largest charity of its day answered to her, and the only title she ever carried in her own right was that of a Lincolnshire sheriff for twelve months near her home. Then, in the winter of 2008, she was called to give evidence at the inquest into her sister’s death, and at last the record caught her own voice, clipped and careful and unmistakably hers. She spoke of Diana’s fear that a yacht had been bugged. She spoke of a last telephone call in which her sister had been badly upset over a newspaper article about landmines, so upset that Sarah had privately concluded the romance with Dodi did not have much longer left to run.
She questioned the talk of an engagement and dismissed the talk of a pregnancy. And she answered plainly the ugly suggestion that she had destroyed her sister’s papers. She and her mother had got rid of some things they found distressing, she said, private letters and notes of a certain kind, because she did not want the two boys ever to come across them. But nothing of any history had been destroyed.
Her conscience, she said, was clear on what she had done. She was forced to say even that much because there were people determined to weave her into something monstrous. In that same inquest, Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, laid out an alleged conspiracy to murder Diana, and the roll of names he accused was long and wild, sweeping in a prince, a prime minister, an intelligence service, and among all of them, Diana’s own sister, Sarah. It came to nothing whatsoever.
The inquest found that Diana had been unlawfully killed by the reckless driving of her own car and the cars that chased it, and it found no conspiracy of any kind. But stop and take in what had happened to Sarah by then. The woman who had flown to Paris to carry her sister home, who had read the poem in the abbey, who had chosen the very music of the funeral, now stood in a courtroom and heard herself named in a plot to kill the sister she had buried. For nearly fifty years, the world has told one story about Sarah Spencer, and the story is wrong.
The story it tells is a punchline: Sarah is the sister who blew it, the girl who chatted her way out of a crown and handed it gift-wrapped to Diana, the one who must surely have spent the rest of her days quietly eaten alive with envy for the throne she lost. That version has hardened over the decades into common knowledge, and it is built entirely on reading the story backward from the great wedding at St. Paul’s toward the past, so that a whole living woman shrinks down into nothing more than the person who failed to become a princess. But turn it the right way round.
Read it forward, the way she actually lived it out, from that restaurant table in 1978, when nobody yet knew how anything would end. What you find there is a young woman who said in print, and on the record, that she was not in love with the future king, and would not marry a man she did not love if he were the dustman or the king of England, and who then went off and married a Guards officer from Lincolnshire, and stayed married to him for forty-six years and counting. She was the only woman in that entire generation of royal girlfriends who ever told the plain truth about what the whole business was really like from the inside. And her reward for telling it was to be recast forever as the one who failed.
Here is the deeper thing. The institution that decided Sarah Spencer was not suitable to marry into it never actually let her go. It kept her. She was made, in all but the formal title, a lady-in-waiting to her own sister.
She was made an executor of her own sister’s estate. She was made the president of the charity built out of her own sister’s death. She was made a witness in a courtroom about her own sister’s belongings, and a name in a fantasy about her own sister’s killing. Decade after decade, she performed unpaid and unhonored and almost entirely silent service to a family that had judged her unfit to join it.
And all the while the public story about her held fast: jealous, bitter, the sister who lost. There is no medal anywhere on her, no title of her own, no decoration of any kind, for a lifetime of the hardest family work imaginable. There is only the work. Look at the shape of the whole thing from a distance, and it is almost unbearable in its symmetry.
She dated him first. She brought him home and introduced him to the girl he would one day marry. She stood in the newspaper the morning after the engagement and claimed the introduction with a smile on her face. And then she spent the rest of her life as the keeper of the marriage she had sparked, and of the death that finally ended it.
Four separate threads binding her to the crown, running side by side across fifty years. And every last one of them leads back to a young woman who once sat in a restaurant and said out loud that she did not want any of it. The record leaves one small private line that says more than all the rest, and a friend reported it, so hear it as reported. Whenever the prince came up in conversation, even in her later years, Sarah would still quietly enter her claim.
“Of course,” she would say, “he was my boyfriend first. ” She said it without any pride, in a voice smaller and sadder than a boast. It was a woman gently reminding the room that before she was the sister who lost, before she was the aunt and the executor and the keeper of the flame, she had been the one he chose first of all; that the door had once stood open; that she had for one season been standing inside it. That is the cruelty the old punchline hides.
She was kept close and used and worked across the whole of her adult life by the very family that had decided it did not want her as one of its own. She did it without any complaint that anyone ever wrote down, and without any reward that anyone ever pinned to her chest. Come back one last time to that restaurant in the early months of 1978. A young woman of twenty-three, red-haired and fearless, sits down with two reporters and decides to tell them the truth: the whole unguarded truth about her drinking and her illness and her thousands of boyfriends, and the man she would not marry for all the crowns in England.
She has no idea that the sentence she is about to speak will follow her to the end of her days. She has no idea that the crown she is refusing will slide quietly across the table to a girl of sixteen already asleep in a bedroom at Althorp. She knows only that she will not pretend, not even for a throne. That is the secret life of Sarah Spencer.
She never wanted the crown. She said so out loud, cheerfully, at a lunch. And the world has spent the fifty years since refusing to believe a single word of it, and left her standing on the wrong side of the door she closed with her own hand.
