EARL Spencer, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, told yesterday how he read her his controversial eulogy as she lay in her coffin at St James's Palace.
The Earl described how he practised the famous address repeatedly in the days leading up to the funeral following her death in a car crash in Paris "trying to familiarise myself with the passages that might lead me to break down - a very real possibi
lity".
Then he decided to read it out loud to his sister. "I read it to Diana's coffin, in the chapel at St James's Palace," he said. "And at the conclusion heard a whisper that sounded like satisfaction in that sad, sad, place."
Later, watched by millions, Charles Spencer delivered the emotional eulogy at his sister's funeral in September 1997 to a congregation that included his former brother-in-law, Prince Charles.
He vowed that the Princess's "blood family" would protect Princes William and Harry - comments that were taken as an attack on the Royals.
Writing in a newspaper yesterday, the earl told how he wrestled with what to say. The original speech, he said, included a "particularly bitter section attacking tabloid media moguls", but he decided to remove it to make his eulogy about Diana and not the circumstances surrounding her death.
He said he had originally written down "20 or 30 headings", most of which related to his personal memories of Diana, but found he could not write more than "the first two sentences of the finished piece: the rest would not come".
"Always at the back of my mind was the need to write something worthy of Diana," he wrote. "There just never seemed the time to sit down and tackle it."
The earl explained how he went to bed, only to awake at 4am with the notion that he would not just be speaking for his family, but for Diana's global "fan base".
The two themes he had found most common in all the letters he received were concern that William and Harry would be "led away to an unhappy upbringing" and "revulsion at the gutter press", he wrote. The earl wrote that he made the decision to concentrate on a "celebration" of Diana's "extraordinary life", rather than his personal memories of her, and he finished his oration in two hours.
He described how pleased he was with the passage which pointed out that Diana, whose name meant "goddess of hunting", would become "the most hunted woman of the modern age". Those words would resonate in the ears of the people who heard the speech for years to come, he thought.
At the funeral, the earl declared: "I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative, loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men, so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned."
Spencer said that looking at his eulogy, his hope that their souls could "sing openly" felt "absolutely right".
The earl revealed how he felt "weak" as he walked to the lectern, and he "never heard" the applause as he finished. Having paid tribute to his sister, Spencer "slumped in grief" and was "dizzy from the emotional effort".
He said he wished his sister's funeral was still "decades in the future", his only consolation being that every word he said at the funeral was true.
His words were heard by 2,000 guests inside Westminster Abbey, and millions of viewers around the world watched the funeral on television. Over a million mourners lined the route of the funeral cortege to pay their respects and huge crowds watched on TV.
