Diana in Search of Herself (5 page)

Johnnie and Frances Burke Roche had met briefly during his visits to the royal residence at Sandringham in his role as equerry to King George VI, who died in February 1952. Frances was a daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy and his wife, Ruth, who had been such close friends of George VI that they leased one of his homes, Park House, on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.

Johnnie and Frances began what she described as a “
rather fast romantic courtship” after her London coming-out ball in April 1953, when he was twenty-nine and she was seventeen. Johnnie had been unofficially engaged for some months to seventeen-year-old Lady Anne Coke, the eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who found him “
sweet, amusing, charming … and a very good dancer.” But he was dazzled by Frances, one of the prettiest and most popular of the Season’s debutantes. That summer he broke his engagement to Lady Anne and
proposed marriage to Frances during a tennis game at Park House.

“
It was a real love match from his standpoint,” Robert Spencer said. “He wrote me a letter after they were engaged, and it was very passionate about her.” The age gap was never an issue, as Frances later explained, because “
for four generations we’ve married men much older than ourselves. My grandmother’s husband was fifteen years older than [she], and my parents had twenty-three years between them—he was double her age when they married.”

While the Spencers were pure English stock, Frances considered herself a “
mongrel.” “
It really upsets me when the papers say I’m English,” she once said. “There’s not a drop of English blood in my body. I’m half Scots, a quarter Irish and a quarter American.”
The Fermoys came from Ireland, where Diana’s great-great-grandfather Edmund Burke Roche was elected to Parliament and became a baron in the mid–nineteenth century. His son James Roche, who would succeed as the 3rd Baron Fermoy late in life, married an American named Frances (Fanny) Work, whose father was a prosperous stockbroker descended from one of the bricklayers who helped build Independence Hall in Philadelphia. As with many such alliances in the late nineteenth century, James Roche conferred a title on an eager American woman, and Fanny Work supplied a financial infusion to a cash-strapped aristocratic family.

But the marriage foundered, and Fanny took her three children, including twin sons Maurice and Francis, to New York. Having little use for
Europeans, Frank Work told his daughter that her children would inherit his fortune only if they became American citizens and never returned to England. Fanny educated Maurice and Francis at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire, and at Harvard.

In 1911, Frank Work died and left each of the twins $2.9 million (roughly $45 million apiece today). Neither son wished to become an American citizen, so they successfully challenged the conditions imposed by Frank Work’s will, collected most of their inheritance, and went to England in 1921. Their father, the 3rd Baron Fermoy, had died the previous year, which allowed Maurice to claim the title of 4th Baron. Instead of returning to Ireland, where civil unrest had made life inhospitable for the Anglo-Irish, Maurice settled in England at Norfolk and was elected to Parliament.

On a trip to Paris a decade later, Maurice met a Scottish woman named Ruth Gill, who was studying piano at the Paris Conservatoire of Music. The daughter of a colonel from Aberdeen, Ruth was “a very ambitious woman,” said a childhood friend of the Spencers. “Her roots were quite humble, and she had achieved everything herself. She had been a concert pianist, and she was very beautiful.” Maurice and Ruth fell in love and married in 1931, when she was twenty-three and he was forty-six.

By then Maurice was part of the inner circle of the Duke of York and his wife, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the youngest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore. When the Duke of York became King George VI, the Fermoys ascended the social ladder even further. Ruth and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, were inseparable friends, in part because of their shared love of music. Ruth would eventually become the Queen Mother’s Woman of the Bedchamber, a position she would hold until her death.

The Fermoys had three children: Mary in 1934, Frances in 1936, and Edmund in 1939. Like most aristocratic children, they were raised largely by nannies and governesses. Frances considered her father “
the most compassionate, sensitive, and glorious man I have ever met.” Charming and intelligent, but also austere and enigmatic, Ruth was a courtier to the core, well versed in protocol and intensely loyal to the monarch and his family. “
I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with as much confidence,” Frances recalled. “She made up her mind and went for it. She didn’t waver over anything.” Both Frances and her sister fulfilled Ruth’s social aspirations by finding suitable upper-class husbands: Mary married Anthony Berry, the son of Viscount Kemsley, but the alliance of Frances with the more prestigious Spencer family was even more satisfying.

A streak of instability ran through the Roche family. Frances’s sister Mary struggled through three failed marriages and lived reclusively in London after her mother’s death. Edmund Roche, who became the 5th Baron Fermoy in 1955, had a history of depression for which he sought
treatment in 1969, but continued to suffer from black moods.
In 1984, at age forty-five, he died after shooting himself in the chest.

Although Frances grew eccentric as she aged, she was always tough and determined. Educated at Downham, a second-tier boarding school for girls in Hertfordshire, she displayed a keen intelligence, a strong interest in art history and music, and a natural athleticism. “
She has a very quick mind,” said Johnnie’s first cousin Fiona Fraser, “stronger on the cerebral side rather than the imaginative, intuitive side.” According to a friend of the Spencers, Frances was clever: “She could do the
Times
crossword puzzle in six minutes, things like that.” To some, she seemed brittle and coolly matter-of-fact. Yet according to Fraser, she was “
good with people, and she could bring out the best in them.” Much like Johnnie, Frances was known to be democratic rather than snobbish, with a rollicking sense of humor. Above all, she seemed sure of herself at an early age. “
Frances has an inner strength,” continued Fraser. “She is the most confident woman I have ever spent time with.”

Shortly after Frances and Johnnie’s engagement, Johnnie left for a six-month royal tour. He had previously served as an aide to the governor of South Australia after World War II, and while an equerry to King George VI, Johnnie Spencer had pledged to help him when he visited Australia. After the King’s death, Johnnie kept his commitment to the new Queen, Elizabeth II. Decades later, Diana confronted a similar situation when Charles spent five weeks in Australia soon after their engagement. While Diana was traumatized by the departure of her fiancé for even a short trip,
her mother took Johnnie’s commitment to his duty in stride, occupying herself by traveling to Florence and Paris with Johnnie’s cousin Fiona to study art history and languages.

Frances and Johnnie were married in June 1954 in Westminster Abbey, with more than 1,000 guests, including Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and numerous members of the royal family. Decades later, Frances would describe her wedding—and Diana’s as well—as “
mirages of happiness.” Yet she would also say, paradoxically, that she had been “
immensely happy for a long time” with Johnnie. For their honeymoon, Frances and Johnnie toured Europe, then spent their first year together in a house on the grounds of Althorp. Nine months after their wedding, their first daughter, Sarah, was born—a “
honeymoon baby,” as Frances liked to call her.

Frances didn’t care for Althorp, which she considered a place of “
enormous sadness” that was “strange … like you’re … locked in [a museum] after it’s shut.” The gloomy atmosphere was aggravated by the tension between Johnnie and his father. In the beginning, Jack Spencer got along reasonably well with Frances. “
She was very attractive and intelligent and forthright and a strong woman,” Fiona Fraser said. “And he respected all
that,” but Frances had an independent streak that didn’t sit well with the Spencers. “They were a very, very conservative family,” recalled another cousin. “Frances could have stepped out of line and they could have been sharp with her. Frances didn’t fit in. They always expected her to do the right thing and open the right show, but … Frances had quite a bit of character.”

After the death of Frances’s father in 1955, she and Johnnie moved away from Althorp and into Park House at Sandringham, where she had grown up, and Johnnie became a gentleman farmer.
Frances’s substantial inheritance from her American forebears enabled her to spend £20,000 ($317,000 at today’s values) on 236 acres of land to double her husband’s holding.

At the beginning, Frances and Johnnie seemed the ideal couple, with her forthrightness balancing his diffidence. They lived the country life, traveled abroad, and socialized with their aristocratic friends. “
I was blissfully happy and immensely busy having children,” Frances recalled.

It was in building their family that Frances and Johnnie encountered their first heartache. As in any aristocratic dynasty, they felt considerable pressure to produce a boy who would inherit the Spencer title and estate. Two years after Sarah’s birth, they had a second daughter, Jane, who was born six weeks prematurely. Then on January 12, 1960, Frances gave birth at Park House to a boy. “
I never saw him, never held him,” she said years later. “I was told he needed help and I could see him later on. He never came back…. He was an eight-pound baby who had a lung malfunction, which meant he couldn’t survive.” The boy, named John Spencer, died when he was eleven hours old.

The death of their son shattered Frances and Johnnie and had a profound impact on their marriage. A number of accounts have alleged that Johnnie responded cruelly to Frances afterward. “
Thwarted in his wish for a son, he lashed out,” wrote Johnnie’s biographer Angela Levin. According to Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, Johnnie forced Frances to visit doctors in London “
for intimate tests” to determine if she had a problem—an ordeal Morton described as a “humiliating and unjust experience.”

“
It was a dreadful time for my parents,” Charles Spencer said years later, “and probably the root of their divorce, because I don’t think they ever got over it.” Like most men of his upbringing and class, Johnnie Spencer probably lacked what Angela Levin described as an “
instinctive understanding of how to help his young wife recover from a severe emotional and physical trauma.” Frances did say years later, with a trace of bitterness, “
One had to keep a stiff upper lip and get on with it. I was crying about what had happened, and I was told, ‘You’ll have another child.’ ”

“
The death of John was a deep tragedy in their lives,” Fiona Fraser said. “Afterwards, there was a sadness in both of them that had not been there.”
The death hit Frances especially hard. “
She had been married six years, and the marriage went wrong,” said Robert Spencer. “Frances was depressed, and, not surprisingly, she became pregnant again as soon as possible.”

The result of that pregnancy was Diana, born on July 1, 1961, eighteen months after the birth and death of John. Diana’s father was thirty-seven at the time, and her mother twenty-five. Johnnie declared Diana “
a perfect physical specimen,” but he still needed an heir. In Diana’s adult life, the circumstances of her birth—“
the girl who was supposed to be a boy”—assumed enormous significance in her mind as the first of a series of rejections that would splinter her self-esteem. Diana recalled wondering during her childhood if she was a “
nuisance to have around.” As she analyzed those feelings later, she came to believe that she had been a disappointment because she followed the son who died, that her parents had still longed for a son and had considered it a “bore” to have to “try again.” Frances and Johnnie did try again, and on May 20, 1964, when Diana was nearly three, her mother gave birth to Charles Edward Maurice Spencer.

By all accounts, Frances and Johnnie treated Diana as they had their two other girls—and didn’t consider her an inferior substitute for their dead son. “
Diana was a different soul [from John],” Frances said later, “so it is wrong that a child should ever be considered a replacement.” Friends and family didn’t recall Diana’s talking about feelings of rejection or unworthiness during her childhood. “
I don’t know what to say about Diana[’s] saying she was unwanted because she was born a girl,” said Robert Spencer. “I never saw any of that, but I don’t know what was going on inside her head.”

Nor is it possible to know what signals Diana may have picked up from her parents in her first few years, when maternal attachment is considered so vital to forming a secure sense of self. It was a time, as Robert Spencer observed, when Frances “
was feeling pressure to have another boy, and the marriage seemed to be under stress.” The nub of Diana’s insecurity was her nagging belief that had John survived, she would not have been born. “She said she felt rejected because the whole family was under the shock of John’s birth and death,” said one of her close friends. “They didn’t treat her differently, but she always felt this way. Her father liked her very much, but maybe at the first moment he didn’t. Or maybe it was her own imagination. Her mother had five children, and Diana felt rejected. Her self-esteem was very low.”