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 and social for her age, so he searched specifically for someone who might help his young son come out of his shell. Spencer was worried that Charles was ill prepared for the boarding-school life that soon awaited him. The boy was simply so shy.
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.
While his speech, which he reportedly showed no one prior to delivering it, obviously had detractors among Windsor-family loyalists and some others, Spencer's sentiments largely drew applause around the globe. Encouraged by the 27,000 letters he received in support of his criticism of the media, Spencer on Thursday met with Chancellor Gordon Brown to discuss plans for a memorial for Diana and ended up pressing the government to enact privacy legislation. Partly as a result of Spencer's oration, many British tabloids had already announced that they would respect the privacy of Princes William and Harry while they are young, committing themselves to publish only those photos of the boys issued by the royals.
By virtue of his 1,200 words, Spencer, it seems, has been assigned a more prominent position in Britain's history than he might have anticipated. As Burke's Peerage publisher Harold Brooks-Baker boldly put it, "He will be seen as the catalyst who will bring about a change that will give us and the Commonwealth either another thousand years of monarchy, or a republic."
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 for just 10 days. Serving as best man at his wedding was Spencer's Oxford chum Darius Guppy, who was later imprisoned for staging a jewelry theft intended to collect $2.8 million in insurance money from Lloyd's of London. Spencer has stuck by Guppy, first supplying half his bail and later allowing the former convict to live in a house on the Althorp estate, the family's Northamptonshire ancestral seat.