Why Diana's mother abandoned her as a child: the difficult story of Frances Roche, the woman who eloped with another man and scandalized the UK
The marriage of Frances Roche and John Spencer, from which the future Princess Diana would be born, ended in disaster. Frances left the family home to elope with a businessman. When her daughter married Carlos, they stopped talking.
As The Crown tries not to dwell on the stories that do not directly affect the queen, we have missed in this fourth season one of the most dramatic moments in the life of Diana of Wales: when her mother, Frances Roche, who left the family home When Lady Di was six years old, she collapsed over Diana's marriage to Charles of England. The Princess of Wales discussed the issue with Andrew Morton in the must-see Diana: Her True Story, after a half-hearted reconciliation and several family trips together. "My mother disappointed me terribly with the wedding (...). She wouldn't stop crying and she said she couldn't handle the pressure." Perhaps because, in that marriage, Roche saw a reflection of her own failure in trying to play aristocratic marriages.
Roche, a descendant of the Barons Fermoy lineage, had married Viscount Althorp, Johnn Spencer, in 1954. A wedding that was the social event of the year, blessed with the presence of royals, and that united two lineages close to the British Crown. Frances was 18 years old. Thirteen years, three daughters and a son later, Frances was the protagonist of a major scandal: she eloped with Peter Shand Kydd, an Australian businessman, and left home and marriage. Such an un-royal fact that her mother, Diana's grandmother, the strict Lady Fermoy, who we can see in The Crown teaching her granddaughter the lessons of the court, testified in the divorce trial in favor of Spencer, who was left with child custody. Diana was six when Frances left with the businessman, and eight when she and Shand Kydd were married.
The shadow of those decisions of her mother was always in Diana's life, both in a childhood raised by nannies and with fleeting appearances of her mother (who lived on a large estate with her new husband), as in the encounters with her in adulthood. Frances's dramas and her intrusions into Diana's life led the princess and the aristocrat to withdraw the word on several occasions: after the wedding with Carlos, as we have already pointed out, when they spent "three or four years without speaking to us," as Diana was telling Morton. As in Diana's last years, that she died without having reconnected with her mother.
In between there was a reconciliation that included a golden family vacation with Harry and Guillermo on the island of millionaire Richard Branson. At that time Shand Kydd had left Frances for a younger woman, although the story that was sold to the media is that the marriage had not been able to withstand the media pressure brought by the wedding of Charles and Diana and, especially, that Diana become the superstar princess. Also, it was another way for Frances to put the blame on Diana, something she tended to do. In her wedding to Carlos, in her second divorce and in Diana's decisions after divorcing herself. But at the turn of the nineties, with Roche redivorced (in 1988) and Diana considering a separation that she needed but to which she was reluctant (because she did not want for her little princes what she had happened with her parents), mother and daughter reconciled.
In 1992, Frances' insistence on meddling in her daughter's love affairs led Diana to call her back again. Reconciliation this time was impossible: Frances's indiscretion in 1997, who was telling gossip about her daughter to gossip magazines, led Diana to die months later as she had lived most of her adulthood: without speaking to her mother her. A year earlier, in 1996, Frances had had her license withdrawn for drunk driving at the age of 60.
Frances would convert to Catholicism and dedicate herself to charitable causes, with one last ironic twist of fate: the day she went to testify at the trial against Diana's ex-butler, Paul Burrell, for appropriating a lot of personal belongings from the family, thieves broke into her home in Scotland, where she lived in retirement, and took her jewelry. She died at the age of 68, at a funeral attended by her grandsons William and Harry, but not hers, her ex-son Carlos of England.
