Earl Charles Spencer
The brother of the late princess Diana revealed Saturday that he read his eulogy to her coffin before he delivered the emotional speech at her 1997 funeral, watched the world over.
Earl Charles Spencer’s address in September 1997 was outspoken and provoked an unprecedented wave of applause through Westminster Abbey in London.
He said Diana did not need the “Her Royal Highness” title, taken away after her 1996 divorce from Prince Charles, and vowed that her “blood family” would protect her children, Princes William and Harry — taken as an attack on the royals.
But Spencer wrote in The Guardian newspaper that he wrestled with what to say and repeatedly practiced delivering the eulogy.
I watched him reading the eulogy live on CNN and it was truly emotional. It even evoked a tear or two from a cold, heartless bitch like myself.
He said he initially struggled to write anything more than the first two sentences.
The earl then read letters from sympathisers, which had two main themes: disbelief and “revulsion at the gutter press,” and concerns that William and Harry would be “led away to an unhappy upbringing by the cold, dry, hand of the establishment.”
He decided to make his eulogy a “celebration of an extraordinary life, lived to the full, which had been cut off cruelly, and prematurely.
“I went to my study, powered up my computer, and wrote. Within two hours I had completed every word, a stream of writing that came more from my heart than my head.”
“I had practised the speech to myself repeatedly over the days preceding the funeral, trying to familiarise myself with the passages that might lead me to break down, a very real possibility.
“I read it to Diana’s coffin, in the chapel at Saint James’s Palace, and at the conclusion heard a whisper that sounded like satisfaction in that sad, sad, place.”
He said delivering the speech was “a terrible ordeal. I was emotionally in tatters.”
The earl revealed how he felt “weak” as he walked to the lectern, and “never heard” the applause as he finished.
But this shit is too morbid to digest. Repeatedly practising the eulogy I can grasp, but reading it to a coffin? What, did he expect Princess Diana to sit up, smile and nod in approval?
At the funeral, Earl Charles Spencer at most left, flanked by Prince William, Prince Harry and Prince Charles
“The last paragraphs, speaking to my nephews across their mother’s coffin, were extraordinarily difficult: I had to haul each word out of the pit of my stomach, through a tightening, hoarse, dry throat. I only just made it to the end.”
Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and his chauffeur Henri Paul were killed in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.
Spencer said his only consolation was that at her funeral, “every word I said was true.”
Haven’t you heard? If a person reiterates that something is true, the probability is, it’s not true. Though in those circumstance, I would agree that although his eulogy speaks truthfully, it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to Earl Charles Spencer’s intentions.
[SOURCE]
Posted by Caustic Hot Chick under British Trash & Deaths & Questionables | No Comments »
