DIANA’S BROTHER’S TRAGIC ADMISSION
Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, has written a very brave memoir detailing the abuse he suffered both at home and at boarding school. It’s quite shocking to read about his experience at a Northamptonshire prep school, where he was sent aged eight. In his book, A Very Private School, Charles wrote how he was molested by a female assistant matron at the age of 11.
Describing his abuser as a ‘voracious paedophile’, he claims she preyed on him and other young boys, grooming and then abusing them in their dormitory beds at night.
He also talked about the then headmaster’s ‘terrifying and sadistic’ behaviour, inflicting brutal beatings on the young boys and seemingly gaining sexual pleasure from the violence.
It’s a stark reminder that for all the gilded life we think aristocrats and royalty lead, the reality can be very different behind the stately home walls.
Charles, now Earl Spencer, has had, at times, a rocky relationship with the royals since the death of his sister in 1997, and his relationship with his own children came under the spotlight recently after he was absent from two of his daughters’ weddings.
Yet in a BBC interview to publicise the book, he revealed the terrible childhood trauma that led him to seek therapy in a residential treatment centre after he had finished writing it.
Talking to Laura Kuenssberg, Earl Spencer started the interview by describing his confusion at his parents’ decision. He spoke of letters he sent home in which he apologised a lot; as the only way he could make sense of being sent away was that he had somehow ‘failed as a son’.
Discussing how Diana felt about being sent to a (different) boarding school, Kuenssberg quoted the earl’s book, in which he revealed she told her father, ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t leave me here.’
Diana was sent to Riddlesworth Hall School, in Norfolk, at the age of nine after her mother Frances left her father John, the eighth Earl Spencer, for wallpaper millionaire Peter Shand Kydd.
Charles also revealed how his nanny used to ‘crack our heads together’ when he and Diana were ‘naughty’, and that their two older sisters were given laxatives as punishment by another nanny.
There is little sense that the earl is looking for sympathy. He seems to be seeking to tell his story for himself, almost as a form of therapy, and on the behalf of others who suffered the same kind of abuse – to encourage them to speak out.
Instead he is proof that privilege is no protection from violence or abuse, nor, as the world witnessed through his sister’s troubled life, any guarantee of being happy.