Word: earls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Early in 1971 the future 8th Earl Spencer, two years divorced, found himself casting about for a new nanny to tend to the day-to-day needs of his youngest children, Diana, 9, and Charles, 6. He had sent his two older daughters Jane (today the wife of the Queen's private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes) and Sarah away to boarding school, but he needed someone to watch over the younger children, who were living with him at Park House, a 10-bedroom manse on the grounds of the Queen's Sandringham estate. His daughter Diana was sufficiently lively...
When Charles, now the 9th Earl Spencer, was introduced to most of the world from a pulpit in Westminster Abbey on Sept. 6, he did not seem to be a man innately diffident. As he paid tribute to his sister's glorious, pained life in the most watched eulogy in history, he inveighed against a rapacious press, denounced, however subtly, the monarchy's benighted stoicism and emerged suddenly as a controversial hero in the drama of Princess Diana's death--a powerful executor of her spiritual will...
Whether or not Earl Spencer's speech ends up as a watershed moment in the history of the royal family's relationship to the people of Britain, it should, many hope, mark a profound personal turning point in the life of a man who at 33 has often conducted himself with an embarrassing lack of gravitas. Although he received good grades as a student at Eton and then at Oxford University, he was dubbed "Champagne Charlie" by the press for his partying ways. In 1989, at 25, Spencer became engaged to Victoria Lockwood, a fashion model whom he had known...
...number of nannies came through Park House and later Althorp, where the children moved with their father in 1975. According to biographer Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story, the future 9th Earl did not sit down to a meal with his father in the downstairs dining room until he was seven. The arrival of a new mistress in 1977 brought no burst of happiness to the manor. Charles first discovered that his father had married Raine, the former Countess of Dartmouth and daughter of novelist Barbara Cartland, from his headmaster at boarding school. He and Diana quickly came...
...hard to believe she was 36 years old. She was truly a cliche of the age itself. Much of the angst of this troubled fin de siecle was indexed in her brief life. Wars and poverty, sickness and prejudice, uncertainty and despair--this daughter of an earl, this mother of a putative King of England was paradoxically familiar with them all: and when the end came, it was a properly symbolic end as, with her playboy lover, she was driven at midnight by a drunken driver much too fast in a Mercedes through a city underpass, pursued by photographers...