Diana, Princess of Wales
| Diana | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Princess of Wales | |||||
 | |||||
| Burial | 6 September 1997 | ||||
| Spouse | Charles, Prince of Wales (1981–1996) | ||||
| Issue | Prince William of Wales Prince Henry of Wales | ||||
| |||||
| House | House of Windsor | ||||
| Father | Edward, Earl Spencer | ||||
| Mother | Frances, Viscountess Althorp | ||||
Diana, Princess of Wales (Diana Frances Mountbatten-Windsor; née Spencer; 1 July, 1961 – 31 August, 1997) was the first wife of The Prince of Wales, eldest son and heir apparent of Elizabeth II. Her two sons, Princes William and Harry, are second and third, respectively, in line to the thrones of the United Kingdom and the other 15 Commonwealth Realms.
Early life
The Honourable Diana Frances Spencer was born the youngest daughter of Edward Spencer, Viscount Althorp, and his first wife, Frances Spencer, Viscountess Althorp (formerly the Honourable Frances Burke Roche) at Park House on the Sandringham estate. She was baptised at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, by Rt. Rev. Percy Herbert (rector of the church and former Bishop of Norwich and Blackburn); her godparents included John Floyd (the chairman of Christie's) and Mary Colman (a niece of the Queen Mother).
Diana came from a royal and aristocratic background. On her mother's side, Diana was partially American in ancestry; one of her great-grandmothers was the American heiress Frances Work. On her father's side, Diana was also a direct descendant of King Charles II through two illegitimate sons and King James II through an illegitimate daughter. And, according to her biographer Lady Colin Campbell, Diana's great-great-great-grandmother Eliza Kewark (some sources spell the surname Kevork or Kevorkian) was a native of Bombay, India and likely of Indian descent, though family lore identifies Kevork/Kewark as of Armenian ancestry.[1]
During her parents' acrimonious divorce over Lady Althorp's adultery with wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd, Diana's mother sued for custody of her children, but Lord Althorp's rank, aided by Lady Althorp's mother's testimony against her daughter during the trial, meant that custody of Diana and her brother was awarded to their father. On the death of her paternal grandfather, Albert Spencer, 7th Earl Spencer, in 1975, Diana's father became the 8th Earl Spencer, at which time she became Lady Diana Spencer and moved from her childhood home at Park House to her family's sixteenth-century ancestral home of Althorp. A year later, Lord Spencer married Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, the only daughter of the romance novelist Barbara Cartland, after being named as the "other party" in the Earl and Countess of Dartmouth's divorce.
Education
Diana was educated at Riddlesworth Hall in Norfolk and at West Heath Girls' School (later reorganised as the New School at West Heath, a special school for boys and girls) in Sevenoaks, Kent, where she was regarded as an academically below-average student, having failed all of her O-level examinations on two attempts [[1]]. In 1977, aged 16, she left West Heath and briefly attended Institut Alpin Videmanette, a finishing school in Rougemont, Switzerland. At about that time, she first met her future husband, who was dating her sister, Lady Sarah. Diana was a talented amateur singer, excelled in sports and reportedly longed to be a ballerina. Her favorite band was allegedly Duran Duran.
Marriage
The Spencers had been close to the British Royal Family for decades. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a longtime friend and a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother.
The Prince's love life had always been the subject of press speculation, and he was linked to numerous women. Nearing his mid-thirties, he was under increasing pressure to marry. Legally, the only requirement was that he could not marry a Roman Catholic, but a member of the Church of England was preferred. His great-uncle Lord Mountbatten of Burma, who was assassinated in 1979, had advised him to marry a virginal young woman who would look up to him. In order to gain the approval of his family and their advisors, any potential bride was expected to have a royal or aristocratic background, as well as be Protestant and, preferably, a virgin. Diana seemed to meet all of these qualifications.
Reportedly (though this has never been confirmed), the Prince's former girlfriend and, later, his second wife, Camilla Parker Bowles, helped him select the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer as a potential bride, when Diana was working as a part-time assistant at the "Young England Kindergarten", a day care centre and nursery school in Pimlico. Contrary to claims, she was not a "kindergarten teacher", since she had no educational qualifications to teach, and "Young England" was not a kindergarten, despite its name. It was at this school that the famous iconic snap of a 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer was taken by John Minihan with the morning sun to her back, her legs in silhouette through her skirt.
Buckingham Palace announced the engagement on 24 February 1981, and the wedding took place in St Paul's Cathedral in London on Wednesday, 29 July, 1981, before 3,500 invited guests and an estimated 1 billion television viewers around the world. Among other performers, the acclaimed New Zealand soprano Kiri Te Kanawa sang Handel's "Let the Bright Seraphim" during the wedding ceremony, at the request of Prince Charles.
Diana was the first Englishwoman to marry the heir to the throne since 1659, when Lady Anne Hyde married the Duke of York and Albany, the future King James II (although, unlike Charles, James was heir presumptive and not heir apparent). Upon her marriage, Diana became Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales and was ranked as the third most senior royal woman in the United Kingdom after HM The Queen and HM The Queen Mother.
The Prince and Princess of Wales had two children within three years of their marriage, Prince William of Wales, on 21 June 1982, and Prince Henry of Wales (commonly called Prince Harry), on 15 September 1984.
Health
After the birth of Prince William, the Princess of Wales apparently suffered from postpartum depression.[2] She had previously (before her marriage) suffered from bulimia nervosa, which recurred, and even before the birth of Prince William, she made some half-hearted suicide attempts. (Her sister, Lady Sarah, who had previously dated Charles, had suffered from anorexia nervosa, suggesting a possible family pathology.) In one interview, years later, Diana claimed that she had attempted to mutilate herself with a lemon slicer and that, while pregnant with Prince William, she had thrown herself down a set of stairs and had been discovered by her mother-in-law (that is, Queen Elizabeth II).
Some commentators suggested that Diana had not, in fact, intended to end her life but had merely been demanding more overt emotional support and praise from a family that was not traditionally accustomed to providing the sort of attention and adulation that this very young and insecure woman needed and wanted. In the same interview in which she told of the suicide attempt while pregnant with Prince William, she said her husband had accused her of crying wolf when she threatened to kill herself.
In 2004, seven years after her death, the American TV network NBC broadcast videotapes of Diana discussing her marriage to the Prince of Wales, including her description of her suicide attempts.[3] The tapes were in the possession of the Princess during her lifetime; however, after her death, her butler took possession, and after numerous legal wranglings, they were given to the Princess's voice coach, who had originally filmed them. These tapes have not been broadcast in the United Kingdom
Separation and divorce
In the mid-1980s, the marriage of Diana and Charles fell apart, an event at first suppressed, but then sensationalised, by the world media. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales allegedly spoke to the press through friends, each blaming the other for the marriage's demise.[4]
The Prince and Princess of Wales were separated on 9 December 1992; their divorce was finalised on 28 August 1996. The Princess lost the style Her Royal Highness[5] and instead was styled as Diana, Princess of Wales.[6] However, since the divorce, Buckingham Palace has maintained that Diana was officially a member of the Royal Family, since she was the mother of the second- and third-in-line to the throne.
Contemporary opinions
An iconic presence on the world stage, Diana was noted for her high-profile charity work, yet her philanthropic endeavours were overshadowed by her scandal-plagued marriage to Prince Charles. Her bitter claims, via friends and biographers, of adultery, mental cruelty, and emotional distress visited upon her by her husband and the royal family in general, riveted the world for much of the 1990s, spawning books, tabloid newspaper and magazine articles, and television movies. During her lifetime, Diana appeared on the cover of People more times than any other individual.
From the time of her engagement to the Prince of Wales, in 1981, until her death in a car accident in 1997, Diana was one of the most famous women in the world - the pre-eminent female celebrity of her generation. During her lifetime, she was often described as the world's most photographed person. To her admirers, the Princess of Wales was a role model — after her death, there were even calls for her to be nominated for sainthood — while her detractors consider her to have been mentally ill (possibly suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, of which she showed a series of classic symptoms.[7])
Charity work
Starting in the mid-to-late 1980s, the Princess of Wales became well known for her support of charity projects. This stemmed naturally from her role as Princess of Wales -- she was expected to engage in hospital visiting and the comforting of the sick and to assume the patronage of a variety of charitable organizations -- and from a personal interest in certain illnesses and areas. Owing to PR efforts in which she agreed to appear as a figurehead, Diana is credited with some minor influence in the campaign against the use of landmines and with helping to decrease discrimination against victims of AIDS.
AIDS
In April 1987, the Princess of Wales was one of the first high-profile celebrities to be photographed touching a person infected with HIV. Her contribution to changing the public opinion of AIDS sufferers was summarised in December 2001 by Bill Clinton at the 'Diana, Princess of Wales Lecture on AIDS', when he said:
- In 1987, when so many still believed that AIDS could be contracted through casual contact, Princess Diana sat on the sickbed of a man with AIDS and held his hand. She showed the world that people with AIDS deserve no isolation, but compassion and kindness. It helped change world opinion, and gave hope to people with AIDS with an outcome of saved lives of people at risk.
Diana also supposedly made clandestine visits to show kindness to terminally ill AIDS patients. According to nurses, she would turn up unannounced, for example, at the Mildmay Hospice in London, with specific instructions that these visits were to be concealed from the media.[citation needed] In fact, information about these "private" visits regularly appeared in the media.
Landmines
Perhaps her most well-publicised charity appearance was her visit to Angola in January 1997, when, serving as an International Red Cross VIP volunteer, she visited landmine survivors in hospitals, toured de-mining projects run by the HALO Trust, and attended "mine awareness education classes about the dangers of mines immediately surrounding homes and villages."[8]
The pictures of Diana touring a minefield, in a ballistic helmet and flak jacket, were seen worldwide, although mine experts had already cleared the course of her walk. In August that year, she visited Bosnia with the Landmine Survivors Network. Her interest in landmines was focused on the injuries they create, often to children, long after a conflict is over.
She is believed to have influenced (though only after and perhaps as a result of her death) the signing, by the governments of the UK and other nations in December, 1997, of the Ottawa Treaty, which created an international ban on the use of anti-personnel landmines.[9] Introducing the Second Reading of the Landmines Bill 1998 to the British House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, paid tribute to Diana's work on landmines:
- All Honourable Members will be aware from their postbags of the immense contribution made by Diana, Princess of Wales to bringing home to many of our constituents the human costs of landmines. The best way in which to record our appreciation of her work, and the work of NGOs that have campaigned against landmines, is to pass the Bill, and to pave the way towards a global ban on landmines.[2]
As of January 2005, however, Diana's activities regarding landmines had borne little fruit. The United Nations appealed to the nations which produced and stockpiled the largest numbers of landmines (China, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States) to sign the Ottawa Treaty forbidding their production and use, for which Diana had campaigned. Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said that landmines remained "a deadly attraction for children, whose innate curiosity and need for play often lure them directly into harm's way".[10]
Death
On 31 August 1997 Diana was killed in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, along with Dodi Al-Fayed, and their driver Henri Paul. Their Mercedes-Benz S280 sedan crashed on the thirteenth pillar of the tunnel. The two-lane tunnel was built without metal barriers between the pillars, so a slight change in vehicle direction could easily result in a head-on collision with the tunnel pillar.
Fayed's bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was closest to the point of impact and yet the only survivor of the crash. He was the only occupant of the car who was wearing a seatbelt, which is not the normal practice of bodyguards - who don't wear seatbelts, so as to have freedom of movement in case of an assassination attempt[citation needed] - and later claimed that he had no memory of the crash. Henri Paul and Dodi Fayed were killed instantly, and Diana - unbelted in the back seat - slid forward during the impact and "submarined" under the seat in front of her, causing massive internal bleeding. She was transported to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital where, despite lengthy resuscitation attempts, she died at 4am. Her funeral on 6 September 1997 was broadcast and watched by over 1 billion people worldwide.
Controversy
The death of Diana has been the subject of widespread conspiracy theories, supported by Mohamed Al-Fayed, whose son died in the accident. These were rejected by French investigators and British officials, who stated that the driver, Henri Paul, was drunk and on drugs. Nonetheless, in 2004 the authorities ordered an independent inquiry by Lord Stevens, a former chief of the Metropolitan Police, and he suggested that the case was "far more complex than any of us thought" and reported "new forensic evidence" and witnesses [3]. The French authorities have also decided to reopen the case.[4]
Several press photos were taken of the crash scene within moments of the crash. On 13 July 2006 Italian magazine Chi published photographs showing Diana in her "last moments" despite an unofficial blackout on such photographs being published.[citation needed] The photographs were taken minutes after the accident and show the Princess slumped in the back seat while a paramedic attempts to fit an oxygen mask over her face. The photographs were also published in other Italian and Spanish magazines and newspapers.[citation needed]
The editor of Chi defended his decision by saying he published the photographs for the "simple reason that they haven't been seen before" and that he felt the images do not disrespect the memory of the Princess.[citation needed] The British media publicly refused to publish the images, with the exception of tabloid newspaper, The Sun, which printed the picture but with the face blacked out.[citation needed]
Final resting place
Diana's final resting place is said to be in the grounds of Althorp Park, her family home. [5] The original plan was for her to be buried in the Spencer family vault at the local church in nearby Great Brington, but Diana's brother, Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, said that he was concerned about public safety and security and the onslaught of visitors that might overwhelm Great Brington. He decided that he wanted his sister to be buried where her grave could be easily cared for and visited in privacy by her sons and other relations.
Lord Spencer selected a burial site on an island in an ornamental lake known as The Oval within Althorp Park's Pleasure Garden. A path with 36 oak trees, marking each year of her life, leads to the Oval. Four black swans swim in the lake, symbolizing sentinels guarding the island. In the water there are several water lilies. White roses and lilies were Diana's favorite flowers.[6] On the southern verge of the Round Oval sits the Summerhouse, previously in the gardens of Admiralty House, London, and now serving as a memorial to Diana. [7] An ancient arboretum stands nearby, which contains trees planted by Prince William and Prince Harry, other members of her family and the princess herself.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
Titles
- 1961-1975: The Honourable Diana Frances Spencer
- 1975-1981: Lady Diana Frances Spencer
- 1981-1996: Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales
- 1996-1997: Diana, Princess of Wales
Styles
Posthumously, she is most popularly referred to as Princess Diana, a title she never held[11], although the frequency with which she is referred to as Lady Diana Spencer, or simply Lady Diana, is increasing.
Diana's full title was The Princess Charles, Princess of Wales and Countess of Chester, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Rothesay, Countess of Carrick, Baroness of Renfrew, Lady of the Isles, Princess of Scotland.
Arms
As the wife of the Prince of Wales, Diana's arms were the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom, with a plain three-point label, and inescutcheon of the Coat of Arms of the Principality of Wales (the arms of the Prince of Wales) impaled with a shield bearing 1st and 4th quarters plain white, and the 2nd and 3rd quarters bearing a golden fret on a red background defaced with three escallopes (the arms of the Earl Spencer, her father). The supporters were the crowned golden lion from the Royal Arms, and a winged griffin from the Spencer arms. The shield was topped by the Prince of Wales crown. Her motto was Dieu Defend le Droit (English: God defends the right), also used in the Spencer arms.
Following her divorce, Diana used the arms of the Spencer family, crowned by a royal coronet.
Legacy
Diana's interest in supporting and helping young people led to the establishment of the Diana Memorial Award, awarded to youths who have demonstrated the unselfish devotion and commitment to causes advocated by the Princess.
Footnotes
- ^ Lady Colin Campbell, "The Real Diana", NY: St. Martin's Press.
- ^ Transcript of "Panorama" interview with Martin Bashir, BBC
- ^ Curry, Ann (2004-11-30). "Tapes reveal more from Princess Diana". NBC News. Retrieved 2006-06-02.
- ^ The suggestion that Charles authorised his story of the split to be communicated is disputed by his friends, who claim that he told his friends not to speak, a prohibition some of them breached under anonymity.
- ^ Although some continued, erroneously, to style Diana HRH even after she had lost the style following her divorce.
- ^ When Diana Spencer divorced the Prince of Wales in 1996 she did not lose her title, Princess of Wales. She merely lost the prefix HRH; thus assuming the title Diana, Princess of Wales.
- ^ Bedell Smith, 1999
- ^ "Princess Diana". The No More Landmines Trust. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
- ^ Reiss, Charles (1998-07-10). "MPs to pass Diana mines Bill". London Evening Standard/This is London. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
- ^ "Landmines pose gravest risk for children". UNICEF. 2004-12-02. Retrieved 2006-11-25.
- ^ The style "Princess Diana", though often used by the public and the media, was always incorrect. With rare exceptions (such as Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester) only women born to the title (such as Princess Anne) may use it before their given names. After her divorce in 1996, Diana was officially styled Diana, Princess of Wales, based in the lost the prefix HRH; thus assuming the title Diana, Princess of Wales.
See also
- Frances Shand Kydd (Diana's mother)
- Spencer family
- British Royal Family
- Squidgygate
- Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund
- Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain
- The New School at West Heath, Mr. Al-Fayed's memorial to Diana
- Burrell affair
- Diana Memorial Award
- The Queen (2006 film)
- Princess Diana's Revenge (2006 novel)
- Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
- Princess Diana Institute of Peace (PDIP, A Think Tank)
External links
- Last Will and Testament of Diana, Princess of Wales
- Belfast Telegraph Inquiry set to shock
- Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund
- Diana, Princess of Wales illustrated
- The Royal Family Tree of Europe
- Princess Diana Death Documentary about the death of Diana.
- Tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales
- The TV Seance to Contact the Spirit of Diana, Princess of Wales
- Critics