All About Princess Diana’s Brother, Charles Spencer

Charles Spencer spent decades writing about British history before publishing a memoir about his late older sister, Princess Diana, in 2026

NEED TO KNOW

• Charles Spencer is Princess Diana’s youngest sibling
• The 9th Earl Spencer has worked to preserve Diana’s legacy in the years since the late royal’s death
• In September 2026, he published a memoir titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister

Charles Spencer was one of Princess Diana‘s closest confidants — but even he didn’t always understand the pressures she faced in the royal spotlight.

“I used to feel this extraordinary thing about Diana, that it was almost like people had no idea how much they were taking from her,” he told PEOPLE in September 2026. “And I’m talking about innocent members of the public, who adored her, but she felt the need to give. I think it made her feel better about life, but it was draining.”

Though Charles grew up with three older sisters — Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Lady Jane Fellowes and the future people’s princess — he was closest with Diana. The two siblings remained in the care of their father, John Spencer, who received custody of the children following his 1969 divorce from their mother, Frances Shand Kydd. As a result, their bond was strong throughout their childhood and remained that way as they became adults, despite tabloid rumors to the contrary.

When Diana was killed in a car crash on Aug. 31, 1997, it was Charles who stood at the pulpit of Westminster Abbey and delivered her eulogy.

“You always think, God, I wish I could’ve protected her. It was just … it was devastating,” he told PEOPLE in August 2017. “I always felt … intensely protective towards her.”

In the decades since Diana’s tragic death, Charles has continued to protect his older sister’s memory by becoming an outspoken defender of her legacy. Most recently, he penned a memoir titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister that chronicles her life and the aftermath of her death. “What I really came to appreciate when writing this was she was living this unique life of pressure, where she was dissected every day,” he told PEOPLE in September 2026.

Here’s everything to know about Princess Diana’s younger brother, Charles Spencer.

Charles is Diana’s youngest sibling

Born on May 20, 1964, in London, Charles Edward Maurice Spencer is the youngest of five children born to John and Frances. He grew up with his three older sisters: Sarah, the eldest, born in 1955, followed by Jane in 1957 and Diana in 1961. Charles also had an older brother named John, who was born in 1960 but died just hours later — making Charles the only son and the heir to the earldom.

Though Charles never met his late brother, he honored his memory in May 2022 by having his tombstone restored. Charles shared before-and-after photos of the restoration on Instagram, along with a touching tribute to his older brother.

“Looking as it should, now,” Charles wrote alongside two photos of the grave. “I never knew my older brother, John, and live 100 miles from his grave — but, seeing it last summer, realised serious action was required.”

Their parents divorced when he was a toddler

Charles’ parents divorced in 1969 when he was just 3 years old. John was awarded full custody of his four children and Diana and Charles lived at Althorp, the 500-year-old Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire, England, with him while Sarah and Jane attended boarding school.

The split was particularly “tough on Diana,” Charles previously told PEOPLE. “While she [Frances] was packing her stuff to leave, she promised Diana [then aged 5] she’d come back to see her. Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came,” he told The Sunday Times in September 2020.

Charles also had his own issues as a result of his parents’ divorce, telling The Sunday Times that he’d been “in and out of therapy for 20 years” and had done “a lot of very profound work on my unhappy childhood.”

But “coming out the other side has been good,” he shared.

Charles has said there are “many myths” about his childhood with Diana

In 2017, Charles shared with PEOPLE that there are “many myths” about his upbringing, especially regarding his late sister.

“First of all, none of us ever called her ‘Di’ at home,” he explained, adding that the perception of Diana as timid was also incorrect. “I just think she was never shy, but she was canny about people and she was reserved to start with. And she would take a judgment of somebody before reacting to them. So, that’s not shy … that’s actually quite clever.”

Charles also described Diana as “incredibly brave,” sharing an example from their childhood when he and his sisters were catching lobsters while visiting their mother in Scotland.

“We pulled up [a pot] and there was a really massive conger eel,” he said. “It was black and it had teeth was very long and it was flapping around the boat. And Diana just got a pen knife out and just dealt with it. It was hand-to-hand and she just got stuck in. This thing was really a creature from the deep. And she just dealt with it.”

He opened up about sexual abuse he endured as a childhood in his 2024 memoir

In his 2024 memoir A Very Private School, Charles revealed that he was sexually abused as an 11-year-old child by a 19- or 20-year-old assistant matron while attending Maidwell Hall, one of Britain’s most prestigious boarding schools.

“[She] seemed to have an unofficial hierarchy among her prey: We learned, from our secret conversations, that she chose one of us each term to share her bed and would use him for intercourse … She added me to the second rank of her victims: those she intimately touched,” Charles wrote. “The effect of what she did to me was profound and immediate, awakening in me basic desires that had no place in one so young.”

Although Charles was incredibly close with Diana growing up, neither she nor his other sisters knew of the abuse that he endured. When he did finally tell his sisters, Jane and Sarah, it wasn’t until the end of 2022 — and they were both “stunned and appalled,” Charles told PEOPLE.

Charles is a father of seven and a grandfather

Charles is the father of seven children.

He and his first wife, Victoria Lockwood, share four children: daughters Lady Kitty Eleanor Spencer, Lady Eliza Victoria Spencer and Lady Katya Amelia Spencer and son Louis Spencer, Viscount Althorp.

His second marriage to Caroline Freud resulted in two more children: a son, the Honourable Edmund Spencer, and a daughter, Lady Lara Spencer.

After his second divorce, Charles married for the third time in 2011 to Canadian philanthropist Karen Spencer (née Gordon). His six children were all present at the nuptials, which were held at Althorp. The couple went on to welcome one child together, a daughter named Lady Charlotte Diana Spencer — after Charles’ late sister, Diana — before splitting up in June 2024.

In March 2024, Charles became a grandparent after his daughter, Kitty, welcomed a little girl with her husband, Michael Lewis. One of his other daughters, Amelia, is also married: She wed Greg Mallett, her boyfriend of 11 years, in March 2023.

He delivered Diana’s eulogy

At Diana’s funeral on Sept. 6, 1997, Charles stood in front of the thousands of gathered mourners to deliver her heart-wrenching eulogy.

Serving as “the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning, before a world in shock,” Charles paid tribute to his late sister as the “very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty.” But he also took the opportunity to condemn the treatment Diana had received from the tabloid media, describing her as “the most hunted person of the modern age.”

Charles previously told PEOPLE that the now iconic line “summed up so much of the anger I felt toward those who had done that to her.” In addition to his anger, Charles also described the experience as physically and emotionally draining.

“In the final paragraph I had run out of energy, almost out of oxygen,” he shared with PEOPLE. “I had to punch each syllable out of the base of my stomach.”

Charles has written nine books

Charles is a renowned historian and best-selling author who has written nine nonfiction books over the course of his career, focusing much of his work on British history. Three of his books were Sunday Times bestsellers: Killers of the King, The White Ship and Blenheim: Battle for Europe.

“It is a compulsion,” Charles, who has also worked as a journalist and broadcaster, said in an October 2017 interview with Linda’s Book Bag about his writing. “It’s hard work, it’s solitary, and it’s sometimes exasperating. But, at the end of the day, holding a new book that you’ve written remains one of life’s more thrilling experiences.”

In 2026, Charles turned his attention to his own family history with Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, a memoir about the life and death of his late sister. The book chronicles Diana’s rise to global fame and her death in 1997 and includes claims about King Charles’ unusual “elated” reaction to her death and how his sister allegedly told him that her husband was “in love with his valet.”

He lives at his family’s 500-year-old estate, Althorp

When Charles’ father John died in 1992, Charles became the 9th Earl Spencer and inherited his childhood home, Althorp. It was built in 1508 and has housed 19 generations of the Spencer family, including Charles and his sister Diana.

Althorp is also the final resting place of Diana, who is buried at Oval Lake Grave — a small, secluded island found on the property’s 550 acres. Charles selected that location, as opposed to the family vault at St. Mary the Virgin church in Great Brington, due to concerns over public safety and privacy. He also oversaw a multimillion-dollar renovation of the burial site in 2016.

“We all agreed that, with its beauty and tranquility, this was the place for Diana to be,” he wrote in his 1998 book, Althorp: The Story of an English House.

Charles has kept Diana’s memory and legacy alive

Charles’ powerful bond with his sister Diana remained strong in the decades after her 1997 death. Though his older sisters rarely speak about Diana publicly, he regularly shares photographs from their childhood and memories of his late sister on his social media, commemorating events like her birthday, All Souls’ Day and the anniversary of her death.

Outside of social media, Charles has often spoken about how Diana’s memory lives on in her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.

“I love seeing the sort of uncomplicated way that they deal with people, and put them at their ease,” he told PEOPLE in August 2017. “It’s so easy to connect the dots between them and their mother.”

The Earl Spencer also visits his sister’s grave frequently throughout the year. “Every landmark day, such as birthday, Mother’s Day, I always take flowers,” he told Good Morning Britain in 2021. “I do go a lot, and it’s an oasis of calm, and it’s a lovely place to go.”

He married Cat Jarman in 2026

Following his split from Karen, Charles began dating Cat Jarman, a Norwegian archaeologist with whom he co-hosts the history podcast The Rabbit Hole Detectives. The couple married in Arizona in May 2026, telling PEOPLE in a joint statement that they both “feel so incredibly lucky” for how their relationship progressed from colleagues “to deep love and connection.”

They continued, “Each stage of our relationship has been underpinned by laughter and we share a passion for life.”

Read the full article here