The Diana Chronicles

by Tina Brown

There was no greater catch in the early 1950s than Diana’s father, Johnnie. The image of the 8th Earl Spencer will forever be defined by the truncheon-faced old buffer who squired his daughter with labored pride up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But when Frances Fermoy first laid eyes on Johnnie Spencer, he was tall, debonair, and desirable. As Viscount Althorp, eldest son of the seventh Earl, he was the presumptive heir to Althorp House, a 121-room stately home with 14,000 acres (21.875 square miles) of rolling Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, and Norfolk farmland, complete with cottages, farms, and villages. The family was older by 250 years than that Hanoverian import of the eighteenth century, King George I, whose descendants are today’s House of Windsor. The Spencers could trace themselves back to 1469, when they were a respected clan of prospering sheep farmers in Warwickshire, already in a position to lend money to the monarchy. In 1603, James I repaid the royal debts with the traditional Get Out Of Jail Free card—a barony, conferred on the prosperous Robert Spencer, which forty years later included the earldom of Sunderland.