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When Prince Harry married Meghan Markle in 2018, the spotlight swung to one of the guests. She wore an emerald-green Dolce & Gabbana dress, hand-painted with orange flowers. A matching green fascinator was pinned to her blonde hair. A slip of netting covered her eyes. The world’s press was captivated by the serenely beautiful Kitty Spencer, and her resemblance to her late aunt, Princess Diana. Lady Kitty would later comment that the rapid jump in the number of people following her on Instagram was alarming. “I thought I was on someone else’s account,” she said. “I hung up my phone – it was a bit overpowering, I felt like someone was watching me!” She does not court the media. Nor, for the most part, do her siblings.
Lady Kitty, her sisters Lady Eliza and Lady Amelia, and their younger brother, Louis, Viscount Althorp, are foremost among the new generation of the House of Spencer, whose aristocratic history dates back to the 16th century.
Once the word “viscountess” conjured images of corsets, tiaras and long white gloves, or perhaps tweeds and coiffed halos of hair. That was until 1990, when model Victoria Lockwood met the British aristocracy’s most eligible bachelor and posed for the cover of Tatler magazine. The new Viscountess Althorp made her debut in a skin-tight armour of copper sequins, black velvet gloves and rock ‘n’ roll mascara. Instead of courtly pearls, she wore jewel-studded black earrings that were part disco-ball, part medieval mace, symbolic of the two elements she and her new husband would bring to the Earldom – modern glamour and ancient power.
Victoria Lockwood had just married Althorp heir Charles Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana. Charles, then 25, had proposed 10 days after meeting Victoria at a house party in 1989. The model had attended with her boyfriend, but Charles was not shy about pursuing what he wanted. He had previously described himself as “a very impetuous man when it comes to matters of the heart” and was in line to inherit a title and land worth more than £89 million. His family lived in a 90-room home whose gothic stone walls were decked with Rubens’ oil paintings. Its wine cellar dates back to the Napoleonic Wars.
“People have suggested that things have gone a little too fast, but I never had a moment’s doubt,” Charles told The Daily Mail around the time of the engagement.
Victoria agreed: “As soon as we spoke, I felt something quite unusual and extraordinary. We both did.”
The bright, brash young lovers were radically different from Charles’ father, the 8th Earl Spencer, and his wife, Raine, whose lives revolved around royal and civic service. Charles worked as a roving reporter for NBC’s Today show and had covered Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s wedding in 1986. Victoria had modelled for Dior and Levi’s. “We’re both young and have plenty we want to do,” Victoria said in 1989.
Their marriage produced one son, their heir, Louis, now 30 and an aspiring actor, and three daughters with honey-blonde hair. Kitty, 34, is a muse of Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana. When she married billionaire Michael Lewis in 2022 she wore a procession of custom-made Dolce & Gabbana gowns, the most elaborate of which took six months to create. Twins Eliza and Amelia, 32, have similarly pursued careers in fashion. Unsurprisingly, the British press is fascinated with the latest generation of Spencers.
The Spencer sisters regularly socialise with their royal relatives, most recently supporting Prince William at the British Museum for the Centrepoint Awards last October. When Kitty followed her mother’s example with her own Tatler cover story in 2009, she’d spent the previous night carousing with her cousin, Prince Harry, and was a little hungover. Prince Harry, the magazine reported, was at the elegant Halkin hotel in Belgravia, sleeping off the previous night’s revelry.
However, the relationship between the Spencers and the Windsors hasn’t always been smooth. At the funeral of the most famous Spencer, Diana, Charles gave a eulogy that rattled the rafters of Westminster Abbey.
“I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling,” he said.
Matthew Engel, writing in The Guardian, said the Spencers and the Windsors were “Montagues and Capulets for our times but with the war outlasting both love and death”.
The Windsors meet the Spencers
It started, as many society marriages do, with an ambitious mother’s scheme. Lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, Ruth Roche, wanted her daughter to marry the son of an earl. She arranged for Frances Roche to meet Johhny Spencer, and they wed in 1954. Frances was 18 and Johnny, 30.
Nine months later, their daughter, Sarah, was born. Then came Jane, and in 1961, Lady Diana Spencer was born at their home, Park House, whose grounds abut the Royal family’s retreat, Sandringham. As the daughter-in-law of an earl, Frances was under pressure to produce an heir. After Diana was born, Frances was sent to a gynecologist to “cure” her inability to produce a son. She was 23.
Charles Spencer was born in May 1964. Johnny felt thrilled to finally have an heir, and had his son christened at Westminster Abbey. The Queen agreed to be Charles’ godmother. To the outside world it was a moment of triumph. But Earl Spencer’s marriage had been strained by the crushing grief of a son, John, delivered between Jane and Diana, who had died shortly after birth. The atmosphere in the Spencer marriage became “poisonous”, according to biographer Andrew Morton.
Charles Spencer recounts the end of his parents’ marriage in his memoir, A Very Private School. “My parents went on a skiing holiday with two couples, and my mother and one of the husbands fell in love. They left their families and moved for six months to Australia, where they enjoyed life far from judgment,” he wrote.
He recalls the arrival of a postcard from Australia. “My mother, I knew with a thud in my chest, wasn’t coming home,” Charles wrote.
The British press branded Frances “the bolter” for taking off with wallpaper tycoon Peter Shand Kydd. On the advice of her sister, Frances came home and moved Charles and Diana into her flat in Knightsbridge. They spent some weekends with their father at Althorp until Christmas 1967, when he hired a phalanx of lawyers to prevent Frances from taking them back.
Frances’ own mother testified in divorce proceedings that she was “a bad mother” and Johnny was awarded full custody. The divorce rattled young Charles and there was worse to come. From the age of eight he attended a draconian boarding school, Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire, where others brutally bullied and abused him.
“Our soft little nerve endings were crushed by an experience that was irreversible in its distress,” he wrote in the searing memoir. He detailed ritualistic beatings, humiliation, and sexual assault. The book includes an account of a fellow student being knocked unconscious in the classroom. It was dehumanising. “My parents weren’t being deliberately cruel, they were simply being true to the customs of their class,” he wrote.
Charles was in his last year at Maidwell when his father remarried. Raine McCorquodale, the daughter of eccentric romance novelist Barbara Cartland, had been an unfriendly spectre at Althorp long before she became its mistress. Charles and Diana would chant, “Rain, rain, go away,” and refer to her as “Acid Raine”.
The wedding took place at a London registry office in 1976. They didn’t invite any of the children. The following year, Lady Sarah Spencer began dating England’s most eligible bachelor, Prince Charles, but the romance ended after she gave an indiscreet interview.
“Charles makes me laugh a lot,” she said, then clarified, “there is no chance of my marrying him. I’m not in love with him.” Biographer Tina Brown reported Prince Charles was not happy, telling Sarah, “You’ve just done something extremely stupid.”
In 1981, Charles married another Spencer sister, Diana. With the Prince off the market, Charles Spencer became arguably the most desirable bachelor of the upper classes. Convivial, intelligent and articulate, the British press dubbed him “Champagne Charlie” until Victoria came along. He paid a reported £10,000 for an antique ring of diamonds and rubies arranged in the shape of a heart.
A cherubic Prince Harry, dressed in a shirt trimmed with ruffles, was pageboy at the 1990 wedding. Victoria hired designer Tomasz Starzewski to create a dress modelled on 18th century Spencer family portraits. Starzewski used yards of antique lace and silk, and a sable trim, which sat around Victoria’s slim hips. The look was completed with the Spencer Tiara, made famous eight years earlier when it had sailed down the aisle of Westminster Abbey atop Diana’s blonde waves.
The happiness was short-lived. Six months later, Charles phoned an old flame and asked her to come with him to Paris. Charles Spencer had first met journalist Sally Ann Lasson when she interviewed him in 1986. They began a friendship, which became a fling. After he fell for Victoria, Charles called Sally Ann to warn her his engagement notice would be in the paper.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Sally Ann said. “As far as I was concerned, we were having a relationship.”
Sally Ann rankled at reports of the Spencers’ wedded bliss. Victoria, however, had been having a difficult time as Viscountess. “She was firmly middle class and quite unused to the peculiar and particular demands of what used to be called the ruling class,” wrote Richard Barber in his book, Earl Spencer: Saint or Sinner?
Victoria had been on the international model circuit from age 17. Later, it emerged she’d struggled with alcoholism and eating disorders. In 1990, however, she professed to be happy. “All I want to do is look after Charles,” she said, and she became a doting mother when her first child, Catherine “Kitty” Spencer, was born in December 1990.
When Kitty was just one month old, Charles learned Sally Ann Lasson had sold her story to the tabloid press, and in order to pre-empt her, he gave an extensive, exclusive mea culpa to The Daily Mail. Sally Ann’s account was published the day after. This sparked a volley of public attacks. Charles issued a further statement saying, “the experience so sickened me that I did not stay the second night in Paris, but returned to London”.
Sally Ann returned fire. “I don’t know what he means … when we made love in Paris, he was more romantic and sensual than I’d ever known him.”
The ordeal was tough for an already brittle Victoria. “It turned me overnight from a deeply contented, first-time mother to a hurt, scared and devastated woman,” she told Hello! in 2008.
In 1992 the couple faced more upheaval when Johnny Spencer died, and Charles became the 9th Earl Spencer at 27. His first act as Earl was to evict his stepmother.
“His father died at 4 o’clock in the afternoon; from one minute past four, Raine was no longer welcome in Althorp House or its grounds,” wrote Richard Barber. Raine returned to Mayfair and, in what would come to prove an eerie coincidence, was appointed to the board of Harrods by Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1996.
In July 1992, twins Eliza Victoria and Katya Amelia were born via caesarian. Victoria gave birth to Louis in 1994, but the Spencer marriage couldn’t be saved. In 1995, Victoria and Charles separated, and Victoria moved into a rehabilitation clinic. She would later say that Princess Diana had been an ally and support to her. “I suppose Diana and I had quite a bit in common, with our eating disorders and broken marriages, and she was compassionate,” Victoria said in 2009.
Charles moved his brood – including Victoria – to Cape Town to escape the British press. It was there that, two years later, he made the statement that would be reprinted around the globe. “I always believed the press would kill her in the end.” His sister, Diana, had died in a car accident.
Charles returned to England, and on September 6, 1997, climbed into Westminster Abbey’s pulpit to give the eulogy for Diana. What followed was a speech as excoriating as it was loving.
“A girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age,” he said. The Earl was praised for his bold defence of Diana. Time magazine called him “a powerful executor of her spiritual will”.
However, journalist and royal biographer Anthony Holden scoffed at Earl Spencer’s indignance. “The Spencers are quite as dysfunctional a family – if not more so – as the Windsors,” he said.
Charles and Victoria formally divorced in 1997. In 2001, Charles Spencer married Caroline Freud. They have two children, Edmund and Lara. They divorced, and in 2011 Charles married Karen Gordon, a Canadian philanthropist. Together, they have a daughter, Lady Charlotte Diana Spencer, now 12.
The new generation of Spencers
If the new generation of Spencers is in the press at all, they’re more likely to be found in the fashion than the gossip pages. The three sisters all have stable, long-term partners and jobs. Louis has a degree from one of London’s top drama schools and has signed with the illustrious Tavistock Wood talent agency, which represents performers including Dustin Hoffman, Charles Dance and Dominic West, who portrayed Prince Charles in The Crown.
Kitty, Eliza and Amelia maintain Instagram accounts, but their posts are mostly professional photoshoots, with occasional glimpses into their private lives. The picture that emerges shows a close, blended family. Interviews are confined to polite comments about their family, including the unending interest shown in their aunt.
“She always made an effort to connect with us as children and had a talent for reading children’s hearts,” Eliza told Tatler. They don’t discuss their famous cousins, Princes Harry and William.
Photographers regularly capture Eliza and Amelia at fashion and society events, and for magazine stories. Their lives are not as flawless as they appear online. When Eliza was 16, her then-boyfriend, Chris Elliot, was killed in a car accident. As she revealed in a 2021 Tatler cover story with Amelia, she still sees the therapist who helped her through that period of grief.
“I went through a very difficult time and had an incredible [support] team, who I am so grateful to,” Eliza told Tatler. “They helped me get through it, along with support from my family and friends.”
Amelia says Eliza “is the strongest person I know”. Eliza and Kitty were bridesmaids when Amelia married Greg Mallett, in March 2023 in a Versace dress. Her father, Charles, didn’t attend. His explosive memoir, released last March, lays bare the demons he has battled.
In it, he wrote how dredging up his boarding school experiences made him his “most distracted, tetchy and wrung out,” and thanked his wife, Karen, for her support. Having completed the book, he hoped to achieve catharsis. A few months later he announced he was divorcing Karen. Charles Spencer is now seeing Norwegian archaeologist Cat Jarman, with whom he co-hosts a podcast.
Despite his traumatic upbringing, Charles forged a flourishing career as a historian, journalist and author. In interviews, post-memoir he exhibits understanding and forgiveness towards his parents. “My mother had a very tricky mother herself. No doubt these things can get passed down generationally,” he told The Guardian. He added that he used to drink “to anaesthetise things” but has made an effort to stop.
As a father, Charles has tried to be more present with his seven children. He does the school run with his youngest, Charlotte. Candid family snaps shared by Eliza and Amelia indicate the Spencer children have a tight bond. They pose hip-to-hip at glitzy events.
Last year, Amelia shared a photo of all three Spencer sisters together in their school uniforms. “Nothing has changed,” she wrote.
As Kitty told Hello! in 2009, “From the outside, the structure looks so dysfunctional. However, every single member of my family is part of my happiness.”
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