Charles Spencer has revealed he had a different eulogy planned for Princess Diana.
In an interview with Gyles Brandreth The Rosebud podcast, the 61-year-old shared that he initially wanted someone else to speak at her funeral.
“I had a big, thick address book, and I thought, ‘I want to find someone who’s going to make the speech for her.’ And I got to ‘Z’ and I hadn’t found anyone,” he said.
The 9th Earl Spencer was living in South Africa when his sister passed away, and admitted that he was “in bits” during the flight home.
“[I] got off the plane in Heathrow [Airport], called my mother, I said, ‘I can’t think who’s going to give the eulogy. And I’ve got an awful feeling it’s going to have to be me,'” he continued.
“And she said, ‘Well, it is going to be you. Your sisters and I have decided it.'”
He explained that when he started writing the tribute for his late sister, it was very traditional.
“[It was a] very traditional eulogy, almost … ‘She was very good at this as a child’ and all that. And then I thought, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, that’s not who she was,'” he said.
“And then overnight, I must have been chuntering away and I realised that my job actually wasn’t to do that, but it was almost to speak for her.”
Princess Diana passed away on August 1997. During his tribute, Earl Spencer denounced the mistreatment of his late sister. He also vowed that he would make sure her sons were raised so that heir souls “can sing openly as you planned.”
“And I knew I’d been left at that stage – it had no legal standing – but I knew she’d left me as guardian of her sons,” he continued, referring to his nephews, Prince William and Prince Harry.
“Obviously, the other parent being alive, that meant nothing, but it meant something to me,” he added.
“That sort of duty, I think. And then I wrote it in an hour and a half and, yeah, that was it, really.”
He also revealed that he cut out a bit about Rupert Murdoch in the tribute.
“I did take one bit out, actually, because I did give a rather unnecessary name check to Rupert Murdoch and I thought, ‘Why bother?’ Why give him the publicity?” he added.
Earl Spencer has previously opened up about Diana’s death and her funeral.
In 2017, he opened up about the decision to have William and Harry – who were in their teens at the time – follow their late mother’s coffin at the funeral procession as “the most horrifying half an hour of my life.”
“It was just ghastly. And it was far worse than having to deliver a speech at the end of it,” he told Radio 4’s Today program.
“It was the worst part of the day by a considerable margin, walking behind, well, my sister’s body, with two boys who were obviously massively grieving their mother,” he recalled.
Image: The Rosebud/ Hendra Sumatera / Shutterstock.com
