Queen Elizabeth II offered to restore Princess Diana’s royal HRH title on the day of her funeral, according to a newly revealed memoir by Diana’s brother.
In Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, Earl Spencer recounts how the Queen proposed returning the Her Royal Highness title Diana had lost after her divorce from Prince Charles.
Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary and Earl Spencer’s brother-in-law, delivered the message as the two men travelled by Royal Train to Diana’s private burial at Althorp, the Spencer family’s 13,000-acre estate in Northamptonshire.
Spencer, 62, writes that Diana had been “dreadfully hurt” by what he described as the “petty and vindictive” removal of her HRH title a year earlier. Although he viewed the Queen’s gesture as well intentioned, he chose to turn down what he regarded as a posthumous consolation.
“I felt that I knew in my bones how she would view this posthumous award,” he writes. “That’s very kind of the Queen, of course. But what’s the point, Robert? Now? I mean – Diana’s dead.”
The account appears in the first extract from Spencer’s memoir, which examines his sister’s life, marriage and death.
The book has already unsettled the Royal Family. Spencer’s claim that Prince Charles told him, just days after Diana died in a car crash, “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough,” prompted a bitter public dispute.
The allegation led the Palace to issue an unusually forceful response. Royal aides questioned the accuracy of Spencer’s recollection, warning that grief can “cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory”.
Queen Elizabeth paid tribute to Diana on September 5, 1997, days after the Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash
Charles and Diana visit Venice during their tour of Italy in May 1985
Earl Spencer walks behind Diana’s funeral cortege with Prince Harry and Prince William
The Palace’s wording recalled Queen Elizabeth’s famous response that “recollections may vary” after Harry and Meghan’s 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Royal commentators said the intervention suggested King Charles was “absolutely incandescent” with Earl Spencer. In the latest extract, Spencer also claims:
When announcing the memoir last month, Spencer said he wanted to record his own memories and reflections before the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death next year, rather than continue reading accounts written by others.
The Mail reports that Prince Harry knew his uncle was writing the book but has not read it and was not given advance details of its most controversial claims, despite visiting Althorp this summer.
Diana lost her HRH designation when her divorce from Charles was finalised in August 1996. She was subsequently styled Diana, Princess of Wales.
Spencer says the Queen’s offer came only hours after he delivered his forceful eulogy at Diana’s funeral. He recalls: “When we had gone some miles, Robert beckoned me to follow him into a quiet corner of the carriage.
“‘I have just received a call from Her Majesty …and she would like to offer Diana her HRH title back.’” Fellowes died in 2024.
Spencer later questioned whether rejecting the offer had been the right decision, reflecting that “maybe Diana would have seen some point in having HRH carved on her tombstone”.
The Earl, Diana and Charles at the Earl’s 21st birthday party in 1985 at the Mirabelle restaurant in London
The front cover of Charles Spencer’s book ‘Swan Song, Diana: My Sister’
But he said he ‘had no doubt that the consolation prize was hollow, however well-meaning the Queen’s gesture’, adding: ‘The title should never have been removed during her life, in which case it would not have been necessary to offer it to her in death.’
The memoir provides, for the first time, Earl Spencer’s insight into his sister’s deeply unhappy 15-year marriage and the then Prince of Wales’s love for her rival Camilla.
He recalls that on the day of Diana’s magnificent wedding in July 1981, he visited her at Clarence House where he found her ‘sitting quietly in front of a mirror’.
‘Only much later would I discover that, as she confided to a close friend, her husband-to-be had told her the previous day that she needed to know that he was very happy to marry her, but he was not actually in love with her,’ he writes.
Royal watchers were stunned by the Palace’s highly unusual response to Earl Spencer’s book.
In the statement, released on Wednesday night, it said: ‘While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.’
One royal aide later described the earl’s account to the BBC as a ‘demonstrably untrue claim’ about a deeply compassionate man.
Julian Payne, the King’s former communications secretary, yesterday said the King had told staff never to criticise Diana for years after her death.
Mr Payne, who worked for the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall for five years from 2016, including during the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘He was absolutely emphatic that we were to respect her memory and not undermine it in any way.’
The Palace declined to comment on the earl’s further claims last night.
