Princess Diana’s Niece Eliza Spencer Had the Most Heartbreaking Response When She Learned Her Aunt Had Died

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“We thought it couldn’t be real.”

The Gist

• Princess Diana’s niece Lady Eliza Spencer was just five years old on August 31, 1997, when her aunt died at just 36 years old in a Paris car crash.
• After being told of Diana’s death by her father, Charles Spencer—Diana’s younger brother—Eliza’s response was heartbreaking.
• Along with her siblings, Eliza had moved to Cape Town, South Africa two years prior to escape the rampant press attention that followed the Spencers back in the U.K., and Diana had just visited not long before her untimely death.

Lady Eliza Spencer, now 32, was just five years old when she learned that her aunt Princess Diana had died in a Paris car accident on August 31, 1997.

To this devastating news, a young Eliza had just one question for her father Charles Spencer, Diana’s younger brother: “But not in real life, Daddy?”

Eliza and her siblings—including twin sister Lady Amelia Spencer and older sister Lady Kitty Spencer—moved to Cape Town, South Africa in 1995, in part to escape the rampant media attention surrounding their aunt, who was then at the height of her fame. Eliza told The Standard that Diana came to stay with the family in Cape Town “just a few months before she passed away.”

“We were five, but we remember going to the beach with her, and her being a very gentle and kind and sweet figure in our lives,” Eliza said. After her death at just 36 years old, Eliza said, “We thought it couldn’t be real.” 

Charles, for his part, called his older sister’s death “an amputation”: “You grow up with these people, they are your flesh and blood, they’re with you forever—and then they’re gone,” Charles said on ITV’s Loose Men (via The Daily Mail).

He went on to describe losing a sibling as “a really extraordinary thing,” and recalled that even years after Diana’s 1997 death, he’d pick up the phone and think to call her.

“For years after Diana died, I would think, ‘I must ring her and tell her something,’ because we shared the same sense of humor,” he said. “You just realize, of course, that’s not going to happen.”

Charles gave the eulogy for Diana at her funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997. Though Diana and Charles were two of the four Spencer siblings—they also shared sisters Sarah and Jane, who were older than Diana—Diana and Charles were the closest in age, extremely close to one another, and grew up together, having been just three years apart in age.

“I don’t share my childhood with anyone anymore,” he said on Loose Men. “That’s a great loss that you can never really put right.”

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Just last Saturday, Charles wrote on Instagram on June 21 that he had repainted Diana’s memorial temple at Althorp, the Spencer family ancestral home in West Northamptonshire, England. “Wonderful to see it looking so fine for the summer,” he wrote.

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