The only one actually slain on the battlefield was a reluctant cavalier who thoroughly disliked his king and entertained grave doubts about the royal cause he died for. Of the nineteen individuals who have headed the Spencer family from the days of its founder, Sir John Spencer, back in the reign of King Henry VIII, only four saw any service for what might be broadly termed their ‘King and Country’.
Nor do the great majority of Spencers whose lives we do know about in detail seem to have been over eager to ‘fight for king and country through the centuries’. For except in the sense that all our families go back somewhere, the Spencers simply don’t ‘go back’ to the Saxons, and if there were any Saxon Spencers, no one knows if they kept pigs, tilled the fields or were hanged for cattle-stealing.
‘Honestly, what do I get out of it? You’ll say the glory, but is glory the word? My family go back to the Saxons, so that sort of thing’s not a bit new to me.’Įven allowing for the fact that history had never been the eighth Earl’s strongest suit, remarks like these appear distinctly odd, revealing as they do an extraordinary depth of ignorance about his own family. History was clearly on Johnnie Spencer’s mind around this time, for not long before, also in front of journalists, he had mused aloud, as was his wont, about the forthcoming royal marriage. She will be following the tradition of her ancestors, and will have at her side the man she loves.’
Today Diana is vowing to help her country for the rest of her life. ‘The Spencers have through the centuries fought for their king and country. Just before leaving home, he managed to read out to the journalists waiting by his doorstep a carefully prepared statement of three short sentences specially composed for the occasion with the help of his second wife, Raine, Countess Spencer, daughter of the romantic historical novelist Barbara Cartland. On the July morning in 1981 when Diana Spencer married Charles Windsor, Prince of Wales, the bride’s father left his flat in Grosvenor Square before being driven off to Clarence House, from where he would accompany the twenty-year-old virgin bride in the Royal Glass Coach to St Paul’s Cathedral.Ī tall, rather shaky figure in his pale grey morning coat, Edward John, eighth Earl Spencer, had never entirely recovered from the cerebral haemorrhage he had suffered three years earlier, and there were fears as to how he would cope walking his daughter up the aisle before the assembled royal family, the massed cathedral congregation and nearly a billion television viewers round the world.
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