Husband Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
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Died:
Buried:
Father: Living
Mother: Living
Marriage: - [MRIN:272]
Wife Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
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Died:
Buried:
Children
1 F Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Husband Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Marriage: - [MRIN:326]
Wife Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
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Died:
Buried:
Children
1 M Ralph Griffin [750] 12
Born: Abt 1190 - Gomundeley, Gumley, Leister, England
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Spouse: Alice de Weston [761] (Abt 1190- ) 13
Marr: [MRIN:331]
Spouse: Juliana De Leye [739] (Abt 1215- ) 12
Marr: [MRIN:325]
Husband Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Father: Daniel Witter, Jr. [110] ( - )
Mother: Living
Marriage: - [MRIN:866]
Wife Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Children
1 F Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Spouse: Living
Husband Henri IV , King of France [807]
Born: 1553
Christened:
Died: 1610
Buried:
Father: Antoine De Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme [808] (1518-1562)
Mother:
Marriage: - [MRIN:353]
Wife
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Children
1 F Henrietta Maria De Bourbon, of France [531]
Born: 26 Nov 1609 - Hotel du Louvre, Paris, France
Christened:
Died: 21 Aug 1669 - Château St Colombes, Near Paris, France
Buried: - St. Denis Cathedral, France
Spouse: King, Charles I [530] (1600-1649)
Marr: 13 Jun 1625 - St Agustine's Church, Canterbury, Kent, England [MRIN:248]
Husband Johan Strijcker [2918] 2
Born: 1495 - Ommen, Overijssel, Holland
Christened:
Died: 1565
Buried:
Father: Derck Strijcker [2807] (1460- ) 2
Mother:
Marriage: - [MRIN:1158]
Wife Hille [3029] 2
Born:
Christened:
Died: 1569 - Zwolle, Overijssel, Holland
Buried:
Children
1 M Herman Strijcker, Modet [3140] 2
Born: 1525 - Zwolle, Overijssel, Holland
Christened:
Died: 1612
Buried:
Spouse: Living
Spouse: Living
Spouse: Living
2 M Johan Strijcker [3251] 2
Born: 1520 - Zwolle, Overijssel, Holland
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
3 F Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
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General Notes (Husband)
Husband Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Father: Living
Mother: Living
Marriage: - [MRIN:169]
Wife Diana Frances Spencer [334]
Born: 1 Jul 1961 - Park House, Sandringham, Norfolk, England
Christened: After 1 Jul 1961 - Sandringham Church, Norfolk, United Kingdom
Died: 31 Aug 1997 - Killed in car crash, Paris, France
Buried: Sep 1997 - On an island at the Spencer Family Home (Althorp Estate in Northamptonshire, England.
Father: Edward John, 8th Earl of Spencer [325] (1924-1992)
Mother: Living
Noted events in her life were:
• Funeral, Westminster Abby, London, Middlesex, England
Children
1 M Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
2 M Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
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Died:
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General Notes (Wife)
Diana [née Lady Diana Frances Spencer], princess of Wales (1961-1997), was born on 1 July 1961 at Park House, Sandringham, Norfolk, the third daughter of (Edward) John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, later eighth Earl Spencer (1924-1992), and his first wife, the Hon. Frances Ruth Burke Roche (b. 1936), younger daughter of Edmund Maurice Burke Roche, fourth Baron Fermoy. Her only surviving brother, Charles, was born in 1964. Her parents divorced in 1969 and her mother married Peter Shand Kydd, but in most respects she enjoyed the kind of childhood reserved for the daughters of the British aristocracy for much of the twentieth century. Her early education was at Silfield Nursery School, King's Lynn, Norfolk, and (from 1970) Riddlesworth Hall, a girls' preparatory school at Diss, Norfolk. After her father succeeded to the earldom in 1975, her time was divided between the Spencer family estate at Althorp in Northamptonshire, her mother's London home, and West Heath boarding-school at Sevenoaks, Kent, which she had entered in 1974. A popular, essentially jolly girl with a talent for making friends, she had no academic success (twice failing all her O levels). But, arguably, none was required for girls of her class, who had no need to earn a living; indeed, displays of intellect could be frowned upon by the largely philistine county set. Instead she developed the physical skills of swimming and dancing (although not the quintessential country pursuit of riding) and, like many teenage girls in the 1970s, developed a crush on the prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George; b. 1948) . Unlike most of them, however, her family had close connections with the court: both her grandmothers and her father had held court positions; one sister, Jane, married Robert Fellowes, the son of the Sandringham agent and eventually himself private secretary to the queen; the other, Sarah, dated the prince of Wales during 1977. Diana first met the prince that year in November when he visited Althorp to shoot.
Lady Diana left West Heath at the end of 1977 and spent a term at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, a finishing school near Gstaad, Switzerland, where she enjoyed skiing but little else. She returned home in April 1978 and joined the London and county social round of the upper-class wealthy young, soon popularly known as Sloane Rangers. In between the parties and commitments of the season she had a series of jobs working with children. For a few months in 1978 she helped to teach toddlers dancing at Madame Vacani's school. In 1979 she began working three afternoons a week at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico, and in the following year she was for two days a week a nanny to the baby son of an American businesswoman. It was not that she needed the money: she had received an inheritance from her great-grandmother, Frances, Lady Fermoy, on her eighteenth birthday, and her parents had bought her a flat at 60 Coleherne Court, Kensington, as a coming-of-age present. It was rather that she needed something to do and that she had a natural talent with children. She had boyfriends but no serious relationship. She clung to the romantic expectation that her ideal man would come along, and that she would marry him and have a crowd of children of her own; she also apparently continued to believe that the ideal man would probably be the prince of Wales.
Engagement and the royal wedding
It was not until July 1980 that Lady Diana met the prince again, this time at a house party in Sussex after a polo match. Her directness and sympathy over the death the previous year of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, caught his attention: she was not afflicted by the usual constraints on people dealing with royalty, and was neither tongue-tied nor overly deferential. Her credentials as a potential royal bride were obvious, and over the next months she was brought into the prince's circle. The prince, at thirty-one, was under great pressure, both from his family and from an expectant press, to marry, and to marry soon. He proposed, and was accepted, on 6 February 1981. The engagement was officially announced on 24 February. At a press conference that day the couple were asked if they were in love. Diana immediately responded 'Of course'; Charles qualified her answer with 'Whatever "in love" means'. Much was later made of this exchange and of the light it shed on the divergent approaches of the couple to their marriage. But the fact that the question could be asked directly by journalists, and an answer expected, was as important: public scrutiny, comment, praise, and criticism were to shape and distort their relationship from the outset in an unprecedented manner.
On the day before the engagement was announced Lady Diana moved into Clarence House, the residence of the queen mother, and a few days later into a suite at Buckingham Palace, where she remained until the wedding. There she was insulated from the press, but also isolated from her friends, and she was left to confront the arcane procedures and practices of life in the royal household virtually alone. The prince of Wales had numerous commitments, including a tour that took him abroad from mid-March to early May. An inevitably difficult period of adjustment was made more so by her discovery of the prince's former attachment to Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, and by Lady Diana's fear that the relationship was continuing. Dogged by the press whenever she left the palace, largely removed from her network of friends and family, her fiancé often absent, Lady Diana understandably felt some doubt about going through with the wedding. Between the engagement and the wedding she also lost a great deal of weight, possibly marking the beginning of the eating disorders which were to trouble her throughout her life.
The wedding took place on 29 July 1981 at St Paul's Cathedral. That venue was chosen over the more traditional Westminster Abbey at least partly in order to accommodate the huge numbers of people who were expected to pack the route of the procession. Throughout the summer media coverage reached saturation point. The wedding itself was the biggest outside broadcasting venture ever undertaken by the BBC or ITV, and both networks drove themselves into a frenzy over the details of the event. The American networks, too, came out in force, and the BBC broadcast live to an audience of 750 million in seventy-four countries. 'The royal wedding' (as it was universally known, as if there had never been another) was possibly the last true gala occasion of the British monarchy. Of course there were critics, both public and private, and claims that 'the whole of the British people' were enthralled by the event were as exaggerated as such claims always are, but their voices were muted in the clamour of 'wedding fever'. The 'fairy-tale wedding' was a refrain that echoed over and over again: the myth was developed of Lady Diana as a commoner, an ordinary girl, plucked from obscurity to marry the world's most eligible bachelor, to become a princess and eventually a queen, to live happily ever after. Even the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who performed the ceremony, used the metaphor in his sermon: 'This is the stuff of which fairytales are made; the Prince and Princess on their wedding day'. The wedding-complete with glass coach, ivory silk crinoline frock with 25 foot train designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, uniformed groom, 2700 distinguished guests, and cheering crowds of thousands-certainly followed the fantasy script. The marriage which followed it did not.
Wife, mother, and media icon
No modern princess of Wales has enjoyed an entirely satisfactory marriage: princes of Wales have been serial adulterers, domestic tyrants, even (in the case of George IV) bigamists. But until Diana, all the princesses of Wales went into their marriages with their eyes open. Some, it is true, loved, or came to love, their husbands, but for none was love a prerequisite of the marriage, and none expected its return. Diana, in love with Charles and seeing in her marriage the fulfilment of her youthful fantasies, and, crucially, not bred in the royal tradition of dynastic marriage, was doomed to disappointment.
After a honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia, the prince and princess of Wales paid an extended visit to Balmoral, the queen's residence in Scotland, and the press (tipped off by insiders) began to report cracks in the marriage. Diana, who by the end of September was pregnant, was seen to be bored by the traditional country pursuits of the royal family. It was also evident that she was uncomfortable with the prince's devoted circle of friends, who belonged to an older generation than that of the princess, had known the prince for many years, and shared his interests. But she made an instant sensation when in late October the couple undertook their first tour together, of Wales. She had the gift of empathy with strangers and a talent for repartee which made her accessible to the crowds of well-wishers and contrasted starkly with the normally formal, restrained manners of the royal family when confronted with the ranks of their subjects. She also had the undoubted advantage of youthful good looks, which rapidly matured into well-groomed glamour: blonde, with cornflower blue eyes, and the classic pink-and-white complexion of the 'English rose' to which she was so often compared, it was her dazzling smile and general animation which attracted so many people. The enthusiasm of her reception in Wales was repeated time and again over the years, in Britain and abroad; Princess Diana (as she was universally, and inaccurately, known) soon became a much bigger popular draw than her husband.
The prince and princess of Wales returned to London in November, but they had no home of their own there until May 1983, when their apartments in Kensington Palace were completed. Until then they lived in a suite of rooms in Buckingham Palace, and at the prince's country house, Highgrove, in Gloucestershire. The prince of Wales soon resumed his usual round of public duties. Like all princes of Wales, he was in the invidious position of having no clearly defined role, and he had worked hard over the years to carve out a meaningful niche for himself in public life without intruding on the prerogatives of the queen or involving himself in party politics. But if his role was poorly scripted, that of his wife hardly existed at all. The position of women in society generally had changed drastically since the days of the last princess of Wales, later Queen Mary, when a royal wife could be expected to smile graciously on the populace, to bear children, to lend her name-and occasionally her presence-to the charitable endeavours of carefully selected good causes, and otherwise to blend gracefully and silently into the background.
Diana had a difficult pregnancy, possibly exacerbated by bulimia, but her unhappiness at discovering the difference between the fairy tales (which end at the altar) and the realities of a royal marriage was not merely hormonal. From a broken home herself, she had, by many accounts, hoped for a 'normal' family life based on a close partnership between husband and wife. Instead she found-as perhaps she should have realized, and as she certainly could have been warned-that her husband, however loving, was frequently required to be absent and had public priorities and obligations which he placed above the needs and wishes of his wife. She had to cope with becoming royal, adapting to her place in the royal family and in the royal household, a process begun during her engagement but only ever fitfully completed. In addition she had to come to terms with the constant presence of the media in her life: even a holiday at a private estate in the Bahamas resulted in the appearance in the papers of long-lens photographs of the couple enjoying themselves on the beach. The birth of a son, Prince William, on 21 June 1982, the day after the ending of the Falklands War, brought the prince and princess together for a time, but the princess suffered badly from postnatal depression, heightening once more the emotional temperature at Kensington Palace. In September 1982 Diana represented the royal family at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco. It was the first time she had carried out such a duty by herself, and she performed admirably. She later claimed to have received no congratulations or praise from the royal family for her efforts, despite the favourable press coverage; her desire to impress and support the royal family and their lack of regard for her efforts became a regular refrain.
From 1982 to 1987 Diana captured perfectly something of the Zeitgeist. Especially after the birth of her second son, Prince Henry, on 15 September 1984, the princess of Wales became an icon of fashion, her clothes reported and copied slavishly, while changes to her hairstyle became front-page news. With the prince or without him, she drew huge crowds at her public engagements, and the attention given to their international tours, especially those to Australia and New Zealand in 1983 and to the United States in 1985, was unprecedented. Diana was the only member of the British royal family to arouse widespread popular interest outside the old 'white' British colonies: her face on the cover of a magazine would enhance sales in America, in Europe, and in the Far East.
The deterioration of the Waleses' marriage continued apace. While the popular press generally idolized the princess and mocked her husband, it periodically turned on her, and some publications, notably Private Eye, had never stopped their insinuations about the state of her marriage, the fidelity of her husband, and the shallowness of her lifestyle. Diana read the press avidly, deeply concerned about the way she was portrayed. By the summer of 1986 both the prince and princess had taken lovers. The prince returned to his friend Camilla Parker Bowles, and the princess fell in love with a captain in the guards, James Hewitt, with whom she began an affair which lasted until 1989 and which was renewed late in 1990, continuing until the following year. Her craving for romance partially satisfied, the princess sought to redefine her public image with the assistance of her new equerry, Patrick Jephson. She was no longer satisfied to be regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world; her new image was to be invested with moral stature and emotional depth.
Patron of suffering
Diana had an affinity with the helpless, the ill, and the suffering which first showed itself in her schooldays, when she regularly visited a home for the handicapped as part of a community project. Like her talent with children, it rested on her ability to communicate in an unaffected way and on her empathy with the individual in front of her. From June 1987, when she visited the first ward for AIDS sufferers in Britain, she associated herself closely with a huge number of causes and organizations devoted to different kinds of sufferers, from large organizations such as the Red Cross to small projects such as the Rainbow House Hospice for sick children, from Relate (the marriage guidance organization) to shelters for battered wives, and for every shade of illness, disease, and injury, from leprosy to AIDS. Her patronage was widely sought and widely bestowed: whatever disadvantages might accrue from having a notoriously temperamental and, as time passed, increasingly unpredictable royal patron, Diana's name-and more especially her presence-were guaranteed to raise the profile of issues and organizations, and to increase revenue significantly. There was nothing novel about the association of a royal woman with good causes of these kinds: charity was the traditional outlet for women of the upper classes. But Diana brought glamour to the work and a degree of publicity which was never available to her less photogenic but no less hard-working sister-in-law, the princess royal, among others.
Much as she intended, her connections with charity provided the princess with a radically different public profile between 1987 and 1992 from that of the preceding five years: where she had previously been portrayed merely as a glamorous woman with an ill-disguisedly unhappy marriage, now she claimed the moral high ground as the royal who cared, who empathized, who suffered with the suffering, and who made lives better by the light of her countenance and sympathy. Hers was not the patronage of the letterhead, the official visit to headquarters, and the charity dinner (although she did those things as well); her preference was to visit the sufferers themselves and the workers in the field, and to chat informally, to hold hands, and to hug the patients. Semi-miraculous healing powers were sometimes attributed to the princess in what has been viewed as a late twentieth-century revival of the ancient practice of 'touching for the king's evil'. (The royal touch was in medieval times said to have curative powers, as evidence of the divine right of kingship.) Diana revelled in the limelight of these occasions, made endless use of the photo opportunities they provided, and deliberately cultivated this new image of caring royalty; and for every press report praising her work there was another accusing her of shameless manipulation, of using the sick, the helpless, the dying, for her own advantage. But whatever her motivations-and they were probably as mixed as those of everyone else-they mattered little or nothing to those whom she met. If her much vaunted caring was an act, it was a thoroughly successful one; if her interest was feigned, for her public the impersonation was good enough to be taken for the real thing. People who met her, from hospital patients and charity workers to hardened journalists, spoke of her charm, her apparently genuine sympathy and interest; men in particular were entranced by a flirtatious manner which made them feel, for the time being, the most important person in the room. While the more cynical dismissed her as irrelevant, the princess built up a huge constituency of admirers among the general public, both in Britain and abroad, a constituency that was to stand her in good stead during the public dissolution of her marriage.
The War of the Waleses
In January 1990 an indiscreet telephone conversation between the princess and someone who was apparently a lover (subsequently identified as James Gilbey, a car salesman) was recorded by a radio ham and offered to the press. Although the papers did not at that time make the information public, the princess knew they had the tapes. Knowledge of the damage they could do to her reputation-and her ability to secure her own terms should she separate from the prince of Wales, as she had apparently decided to do-coloured her subsequent actions. There followed what has been termed the 'War of the Waleses', in which the increasingly antagonistic camps of the prince and princess briefed the press against each other. From Diana's side came information about the prince's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles and, more hurtfully, suggestions eagerly seized upon by an already hostile media that the prince was an absent, uncaring father. From the prince's side came damaging insinuations about the princess's mental health: claims were made that she was unstable, that insane jealousy had driven the couple apart, even that she had a condition known as 'borderline personality disorder'.
This unedifying spectacle of personal misery had kept the tabloids and their readers amused for two full years when in early 1992 Diana seized the initiative by deciding to co-operate with Andrew Morton, a journalist and author, on her biography. Her friends were told they could talk to him, and she herself made a series of tape recordings which were given to Morton. The condition of her assistance was that she have 'total, utter deniability' (Clayton and Craig, 221): if challenged by the royal family or the press she would repudiate any connection with the book. The Waleses made one of their last joint tours in February 1992, to India, where the princess was photographed alone at the Taj Mahal on Valentine's day. Diana: her True Story was published and serialized in the Sunday Times in June. It caused a sensation: Diana was portrayed as the victim of a callous royal family, the wronged wife of an uncaring and unfaithful husband, a devoted mother betrayed. Claims of serious eating disorders and suicide attempts were made, and the media had another field day. The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), Lord McGregor of Durris, condemned the book as 'an odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people's souls' (The Times, 9 June 1992). He was deeply embarrassed when, despite her assertions to the contrary, it became obvious that Diana must have authorized the book: her relations with the PCC were fatally damaged, and later complaints against media intrusion were treated with scepticism.
In August 1992 the long-withheld tapes of Diana's telephone conversation with James Gilbey were published in full by The Sun; but Diana had got her version of events out first, and the damage caused by 'Squidgy-gate' (so called from a term of endearment used on the tape) was limited. In the autumn the prince and princess carried out their final foreign engagement together, a tour to Korea, where a photograph of the unhappy couple looking in different directions encapsulated their collapsing marriage. On 25 November the prince of Wales asked for a formal separation, which was duly announced in the House of Commons on 9 December. There was, according to the prime minister, John Major, no intention of seeking a divorce, and when the prince of Wales succeeded to the throne there would be no constitutional reason why his wife should not be crowned queen.
Diana's popularity reached a peak in 1993. Tapes made of conversations between the prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles in 1989 and published in part in November 1992 and in full in January 1993 proved her assertions that her husband had been unfaithful, and carefully timed excursions (often with her sons) regularly drove more traditional royal activities from the front pages of the papers. She made triumphant official visits abroad, to Nepal and Zimbabwe, and continued her high-profile charitable work. In private a stream of alternative therapists, counsellors, psychics, fitness instructors, and psychologists provided her with reassurance, and a succession of friends were subjected to constant pleas for advice, affirmation, and love. She demanded complete loyalty, and those who did not meet her requirements were ruthlessly excised from her life. In November 1993 she dispensed with her round-the-clock police protection in order to pursue her private life without constant surveillance. But instead of the observation of a few security men she unwittingly exposed herself to the constant harassment of press photographers (or paparazzi), who, unrestrained by the presence of her policemen, followed her everywhere, often shouting abuse and physically intimidating her: photographs of Diana angry, or Diana in tears, Diana at the gym or the corner shop, commanded a far higher price than photographs of Diana carrying out public engagements.
On 3 December 1993, in a speech for the Headway charity, Diana announced her withdrawal from public life. But public interest did not diminish, and was refuelled in June 1994 by a television programme made by Jonathan Dimbleby during 1993 about the prince of Wales, in which the prince admitted his infidelity, and by Dimbleby's fully authorized biography of the prince published later that year. Also James Hewitt discussed his affair with Diana with a journalist: Anna Pasternak's book Princess in Love came out in October 1994. Damaging revelations about Diana's relationships with an art dealer and the England rugby captain-both married-excited the Diana-watchers further, but they did not get hold of the story of her affair with Dr Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon with whom she fell in love in September 1995, for over a year. She had long had the habit of making secret visits to hospital wards to meet patients (which were sometimes strategically leaked to the press); now she used some of these visits as cover for meeting Khan.
Queen of Hearts
It was obvious by now that divorce was inevitable, but the revelations of the previous year had been damaging to the princess, and it was probably with the intention of putting herself in the best possible position with regard to the divorce settlement that Diana agreed to give a television interview to Martin Bashir for the BBC programme Panorama. It was broadcast on 20 November 1995 to an audience of more than 23 million, and caused yet another furore. She wanted to be 'queen of people's hearts', her husband was not suitable to be king, and she herself would not 'go quietly', she said. Regarded in some circles as a piece of self-serving melodrama, in others the interview consolidated Diana's position as a brave victim, standing up for oppressed women everywhere. It finally prompted the queen to propose that a rapid divorce was now the most desirable outcome for all concerned. On 28 February 1996, after a meeting with the prince of Wales, Diana announced that she had agreed to his request for a divorce, by mutual consent. The decree nisi was granted on 15 July 1996, and the decree absolute on 28 August. In the settlement the princess received something in the order of £17 million, and was deprived of the title 'her royal highness'. Henceforth she was to be known as Diana, princess of Wales. In the immediate aftermath of the divorce Diana announced that she was dropping her work with all but six charities: she said she wanted to make a fresh start, and that the other charities should be able to choose a royal patron, but it looked like petulance.
In conversation with the Conservative prime minister, John Major, Diana had expressed a wish to make use of her celebrity and ability to communicate with people to be a 'roving ambassador' on humanitarian issues for Britain, but no such official role was forthcoming. At the end of 1996 she became interested in the campaign by the Red Cross to ban the use of landmines, which cause terrible injuries long after the conflicts which lead to their planting have ended. In January 1997 she accompanied a Red Cross mission to Angola to see for herself the devastation caused by their extensive use. Although Diana had given up her patronage of the Red Cross on her divorce, the charity agreed to the visit in the hope that her presence would raise the profile of its campaign. It succeeded: pictures of the princess among the injured children of Angola and of the princess walking by a partially cleared minefield made news the world over. Powerful vested interests opposed the landmine ban, and Conservative MPs went on record accusing the princess of being a 'loose cannon', interfering in politics beyond her remit, but her championing of the cause was a significant factor in the promotion of the treaty banning the mines.
1997 was a year of dramatic contrasts. On the one hand, there was Angola; on the other, Diana was firmly establishing herself as one of the international jet set, spending a considerable amount of her time in New York, where in June she gave a large portion of her wardrobe to be auctioned for charity: it raised over $3 million. And in July 1997 she accepted an invitation from the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al Fayed to take her sons on a holiday on his yacht in the Mediterranean. On the yacht she met Al Fayed's eldest son, Dodi, with whom she began a romance. She visited him in Paris in July, and on 21 August returned to the yacht with him, having spent four days in Bosnia as part of the anti-landmine campaign. On 30 August they returned to Paris, pursued by photographers and journalists. After several changes of plan, at 12.20 on the morning of Sunday 31 August 1997 Diana and Dodi left the Ritz Hotel by a back exit, but they were spotted by photographers. There followed a high-speed chase, and about 12.24 Diana's car crashed into a pillar in the tunnel under the Pont de l'Alma. Dodi Al Fayed and the driver of the car, the bodyguard Henri Paul, were killed instantly; the other passenger, the bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, was unconscious for two weeks before eventually recovering. Diana herself was severely injured and had to be cut free from the car. She was taken to La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where for two hours attempts were made to resuscitate her, until at 4 a.m. she was pronounced dead. The prince of Wales and Diana's sisters flew to Paris to accompany her body home, and at 7 p.m. her coffin arrived at RAF Northolt, west of London. After being taken to a private mortuary her body was taken to the chapel at St James's Palace, where it remained until Friday. That evening it was moved to Kensington Palace, and thence to her funeral in Westminster Abbey on Saturday 6 September. Following the funeral her remains were interred on an island in a lake on the Spencer family estate at Althorp in Northamptonshire.
There were many immediate suggestions for memorials to the princess, including renaming Heathrow airport after her, but it was five years before a national memorial-a water feature in Hyde Park-was commissioned. The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, set up shortly after her death, received public donations in the order of £19 million, considerably enhanced by the proceeds from sales of licensed products: by 1999 it had funds in the order of £100 million. A sister fund set up in the United States received a further $2 million. Both organizations are committed to continuing humanitarian work in Diana's name, working particularly with young people, with prisoners' families, with displaced persons, with palliative care and AIDS/HIV organizations, and on the issue of landmines.
Mourning the People's Princess
Diana's death swept every other issue off the news agenda in Britain and much of the rest of the world for the entire week that followed: even the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (whom Diana had met several times in India) on 5 September was reduced to a footnote. On the morning of Sunday 31 August Britain woke up to blanket media coverage of the crash in Paris and its aftermath. Most of the Sunday newspapers had been printed before the princess's death, and while some carried the already outdated information of her injury in a car accident, others appeared on the shelves with critical coverage of her relationship with Dodi Al Fayed. In London people began laying flowers outside Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace, and by the evening crowds had gathered to watch the arrival of the princess's coffin. The royal family remained with Diana's sons at Balmoral, where they attended the usual Sunday morning service at Crathie Kirk. It was left to the recently elected prime minister, Tony Blair, to address the nation, speaking in his Sedgefield constituency of 'a nation in shock', and describing Diana as 'the People's Princess'. Responsibility for the accident was placed initially on the paparazzi who had been pursuing Diana and Dodi, and blame was soon attributed to the media more generally-Diana's brother, Lord Spencer, saying 'I always believed the press would kill her in the end'.
Self-recrimination by the newspapers on Monday gave way to relief on Tuesday, when it was announced that the driver of the car had been under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and self-righteousness on Wednesday, when the paparazzi who pursued Diana into the tunnel were arrested on charges of manslaughter (charges which were dropped two years later). In the meantime the mountain of flowers and other tributes outside the palaces grew by the hour; in towns and cities across the country sites (often statues of Queen Victoria) were found for people who could not make the journey to London to pay homage; florists ran out of flowers. Books of condolence were opened, and in London people queued for up to twelve hours to write their messages of grief, anger, and pain. Soon the crowds of mourners themselves became the dominant story. Foreign observers-who came in droves-were particularly fascinated by the sight of the supposedly repressed British weeping in the streets. The extensive coverage of the events in London brought yet more people to the scene, eager to participate in a historic event.
Genuine anger had been expressed towards press photographers by some of the mourners, but by Wednesday it was redirected towards the royal family. Criticism of their treatment of Diana during her lifetime was mingled with complaints that they remained in seclusion in Scotland while 'the country' grieved; attention soon focused on the empty flagpole at Buckingham Palace, where traditionally only the royal standard was raised when the queen was in residence. Flags elsewhere were brought out to fly at half mast (few flags ever flew at full mast in Britain in the late twentieth century), and the absence of a lowered flag at Buckingham Palace was interpreted in some quarters as a gesture of disrespect to Diana. Demands for the royal family to return to London were directed principally at the queen, who for a week was subjected to a degree of personal public criticism hitherto unknown. Commentators, carried away in the heat of the moment, spoke of the events as a turning point in the history of the monarchy. But it was not republican fervour: few of the mourners wanted to do away with the institution. Some called for the exclusion of the prince of Wales from the succession, seeing in Diana's fifteen-year-old son a more sympathetic heir to the throne; but most were satisfied first by the appearance of the princes at the gates of Balmoral, and then on Friday 5 September by the return of the royal family to London and the live broadcast of a carefully worded address by the queen, paying tribute to 'an exceptional and gifted human being'. Such had been the hostility that for the first time in her reign serious doubts were raised about the reception of the queen by the crowds; in the event her appearance was welcomed with respectful applause.
Diana's funeral, on Saturday 6 September, was broadcast live around the world to an estimated audience of two billion, considerably larger than that of the wedding in 1981. Hundreds of thousands lined the route from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey; the service was relayed to huge crowds on screens in Hyde Park. The congregation-friends, political leaders, charity workers, entertainers, and royalty-heard a mixture of popular, traditional, and classical music, including the 'Libera me' from Verdi's Requiem and a hastily rewritten version of 'Candle in the Wind' performed by Elton John, before Lord Spencer delivered a eulogy to his sister that captured a sense of anger and loss which was widely shared. He rounded on the press, and implicitly criticized the royal family for their attitude to Diana in an emotive address which drew applause from the previously silent crowds outside the abbey; it was then taken up by the congregation inside. As the hearse drove along the long route out of London to the motorway to Northamptonshire, the mourners paid their last respects and Diana left London for the last time along a road strewn with flowers.
Legacy
The mourning for Diana bore many hallmarks of a popular cult: the sea of flowers at Kensington Palace, the ubiquity of her image, the miniature shrines, the stories told of miraculous cures effected by her visits to the sick, led some to view her as a secular saint. With muddled theology, others saw her as a martyr (though it was not clear in what cause she was martyred), still others as a tragic heroine, destroyed not by any character flaw of her own but by the flaws in modern society, especially family dysfunction and a free press run wild. Slogans adopted by mourners included 'Born a lady, made a princess, died a saint', and 'Diana, Queen of Hearts', in a reference to her Panorama interview. Public mourning for Diana was perhaps unprecedented in scale, enhanced by her international profile and the speed of media communications: memorial services were held in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, in Central Park in New York, in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, in Paris, and in Rome. Condolence books were opened around the world: in Brussels, Germany, Johannesburg, and Tokyo among others. Much of Britain closed down for the funeral: shops closed, sporting fixtures were cancelled or postponed, and political campaigning prior to the Scottish referendum on devolution on 11 September was suspended. A minute's silence was widely observed at 11 a.m. on the day of the funeral. But for all the hundreds of thousands-even millions-who wept at her passing, placed tributes at impromptu shrines, queued for hours to sign the books of condolence, created memorial websites, or devoured the daily outpourings of the press, there were many more who did not-for whom the death of Diana was a matter of no personal interest, and who regarded the extravagances of the mourners with indifference, incomprehension, amusement, embarrassment, scepticism, or hostility. In the first week of September 1997 these millions had at best a muted voice; as time passed they came to dominate journalistic and academic assessments of Diana, though her popular appeal remained undimmed.
In the wake of 31 August extravagant claims were made for the significance of Diana's death and its impact on institutions from the monarchy to the press, from the church to the national psyche. Committed republicans knew that unhappiness with particular members of the house of Windsor would not translate into a serious threat to the throne because it was not underpinned by any structural alternative: the crowds demanding to see the queen in London wanted the reassurance of her presence and a public affirmation that she shared their feelings, not her removal; those demanding the exclusion of the prince of Wales from the succession did so because they wanted to see Diana's son the heir to the throne, not because they wanted to substitute an elected head of state. But the Windsors did learn from the popular response to Diana's death: the speed of reaction from Buckingham Palace to the attacks on America on 11 September 2001, for example, owed something to the events of four years earlier. The press, threatened with privacy legislation, agreed to a stronger regime of self-regulation, and in particular accepted a self-denying ordinance with regard to coverage of Diana's sons while they remained in education. If no other public figure after Diana received the same degree of intrusive press attention, it was more because nobody achieved the same degree of celebrity than because the press was more restrained. The churches, which had filled on 7 September, soon emptied again, and if-as was often asserted-the demonstrations of public grief represented a longing for a more spiritual dimension to life in an essentially secular society, the longings found little respite in traditional religion.
Where the life and death of Diana had perhaps their greatest impact was on the acceptability of public displays of emotion. It was her willingness to show emotion, to derive strength from admission of weakness, to empathize with victims, that attracted many of her admirers. Her adoption of the language of psychotherapy, her patronage of the culture of alternative therapies and lifestyle gurus, her confessional approach, all reflected and amplified the move of parts of British society away from the traditional culture of stiff upper lips and repressed emotion, exemplified by the royal family, but still shared by many. Diana's place in the feminist pantheon is similarly equivocal. Some regarded her as a symbol of oppressed and unliberated womanhood, destroyed by the patriarchal institutions of marriage and monarchy, while others interpreted her rejection of the double sexual standard and her championship of other victimized women as a triumph for feminist ideals.
A huge publishing industry grew up around Diana: dozens of biographies appeared in the year after her death, and there seemed no end either to the supply of or in the demand for new volumes, many of them portraying the princess in terms of unequivocal admiration which echoed popular sentiments at the time of her death. Friends and employees wrote memoirs (the book by her former private secretary Patrick Jephson struck a particular chord with those who emphasized the erratic, moody, temperamental side of Diana's character); in the United States Diana's life was regularly retold as an exemplary tale for young readers. At least two books were written by mediums claiming to be channelling Diana's thoughts from beyond the grave, and one compiled accounts of dreams about the princess. Conspiracy theories about Diana's death (which began appearing on the internet within hours of the accident), many pointing to a conspiracy between the CIA, MI5, and Mossad (which were supposed to have assassinated her to prevent her from marrying the Muslim Dodi Al Fayed), also flourished and multiplied. Academics wrote about Diana in the language of cultural studies as the iconic figure of the end of the millennium, studied the interconnections between princess and media, and speculated about the significance of the popular demonstrations of grief after her death. Historians, for the most part, wisely left the subject alone until more perspective could be brought to bear.
Parallels between Diana and the American Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe were frequently drawn: both women were thirty-six at their deaths, both had difficult personal lives, both were adored by huge publics, and both were subjected to intense scrutiny by the media on behalf of those publics. Both received the latterday accolade of celebrity, the use of a single name identifier. The comparison was highlighted by the popular musician Elton John, who rewrote 'Candle in the Wind', originally an elegy for Marilyn, as a tribute to Diana and performed it at her funeral. The recording became the best-selling single of all time and generated large sums for the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. Diana had been the inspiration of photographers and fashion designers, but she did not inspire any visual art comparable in significance to Andy Warhol's pop art images of the actress. A musical about her life toured in Germany for a time, and in 2002 Jonathan Dove's controversial television opera, When she Died, was screened.
Adored and vilified, loved and loathed, for almost twenty years Diana personified celebrity. She brought glamour and international prestige to an otherwise grey Britain suffering from economic dislocation and decreasing significance on the world stage. She used the spotlight that followed her everywhere to bring attention to unfashionable causes and to help relieve suffering. Her ready smile found reflections around the world; by her death millions felt diminished.
Husband Jack [670]
Born: 1917
Christened:
Died: 1993
Buried:
Father: Living
Mother: Maude Hayward [153] (Abt 1877-1943)
Marriage: - [MRIN:302]
Wife
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Children
1 M Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Husband James I , King of Britain [596]
Born: 19 Jun 1566 - Edinburgh Castle, Scotland
Christened:
Died: 27 Mar 1625 - Theobalds Park, Hertfordshire, England
Buried: - Westminster Abbey, London, England
Father: James VI , King of Scotland [791] (1566-1625)
Mother: Anna , Princess of Denmark [792] (1574-1619)
Marriage: 23 Nov 1589 - Oslo, Norway [MRIN:276]
Wife Anna Oldenburg, Princess of Denmark [597]
Born: 14 Oct 1574 - Skanderborg Castle, Jutland, Denmark
Christened:
Died: 4 Mar 1619 - Hampton Court Palace, Richmond, England
Buried: - Westminster Abbey, London, England
Children
1 M King, Charles I [530]
Born: 19 Nov 1600 - Dunfermline Palace, Fife, Scotland
Christened:
Died: 30 Jun 1649 - Whitehall, London, England
Buried: - St.George's Chapel, Windor Castle, England
Spouse: Henrietta Maria De Bourbon, of France [531] (1609-1669)
Marr: 13 Jun 1625 - St Agustine's Church, Canterbury, Kent, England [MRIN:248]
General Notes (Husband)
James VI of Scotland from 1567. Burke says he Married Anne on 20 Aug 1590.
See Europäisch Stammtafeln Band II tafel 64.
The Complete Peerage vol.VII,p.600.
Husband Peter Stryker [2528] 2
Born: 8 Apr 1775 - Harlingen, Somerset, NJ
Christened:
Died: 14 Sep 1843 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
Father: Joseph Stryker [3329] (1743-1800) 2
Mother: Living
Marriage: - [MRIN:1028]
Wife Jane [2946] 2
Born: 6 Aug 1776
Christened:
Died: 9 Apr 1862 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
Children
1 M John Stryker [2947] 2
Born: 1801
Christened:
Died: 2 Nov 1816 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
2 F Amy Stryker [2948] 2
Born: 1803
Christened:
Died: 25 Apr 1838 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
Spouse: Living
3 F Betsey Stryker [2949] 2
Born: 1805
Christened:
Died: 14 Mar 1835 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
4 F Living (details have been suppressed)
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
5 F Catherine Ann Stryker [2951] 2
Born: 1810
Christened:
Died: 11 Jan 1835 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
6 M Isaac Stryker [2953] 2
Born: 1815
Christened:
Died: 1 Jan 1838 - Richfield, NY
Buried:
Husband John Striker [1365] 2
Born: 23 May 1819
Christened:
Died: 28 Aug 1887 - Chili, NY
Buried:
Father: Peter Striker [2850] (1788- ) 2
Mother: Elizabeth Wood [2857] (1799-1854) 2
Marriage: 28 Aug 1887 - [MRIN:588]
Wife Jane [1368] 2
Born: 3 May 1829
Christened:
Died: 25 Feb 1903 - Chili, NY
Buried: