She “couldn’t cope with the pressure.”
Watching your child get married should, in theory, be one of the happiest moments of your life. However, for Princess Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, it was anything but. In fact, their strained relationship, which was years in the making, came to a head during Diana’s July 29, 1981, wedding day to then-Prince Charles.
Diana was “let down terribly” during her nuptials when her mother kept crying because “she couldn’t cope with the pressure,” according to Andrew Morton’s bombshell 1992 book Diana: Her True Story (for which Morton received ample help from the Princess of Wales herself).
“She kept crying and being all valiant and saying that she couldn’t cope with the pressure—I tended to think I was the one under pressure because I was the bride,” Diana explained to Morton.
Shand Kydd was also apparently “hurt” that she wasn’t included in any of the preparation in the lead-up to the big day. Diana even claimed that her mother began taking anxiety medication as the wedding approached.
The mother-daughter duo’s fraught relationship can be traced back to 1969, when Shand Kydd divorced her husband and Diana’s father, John Spencer; Diana was seven years old at the time. After their contentious divorce, Spencer gained custody of the children. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Diana’s younger brother Charles Spencer said that while their mother “was packing her stuff to leave, she promised Diana she’d come back to see her.”
“Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came,” he continued, adding that their father John Spencer “was a quiet, constant source of love, but our mother wasn’t cut out for maternity—she couldn’t do it. She was in love with someone else—infatuated, really.”
That someone else was Diana’s stepfather Peter Shand Kydd, who she left Diana’s father for in 1967. They ultimately married in 1969 and divorced in 1988. Per The Daily Mail, Shand Kydd partially blamed Diana and her fame for the breakup of her second marriage, as “Peter allegedly felt overshadowed by his more famous wife after Diana skyrocketed the popularity of the Spencers,” the outlet reported.
In The Guardian’s 2004 obituary for Shand Kydd, they quoted her as saying, “I think the pressure of it all was overwhelming and, finally, impossible for Peter. They didn’t want him. They wanted me. I became Diana’s mum, and not his wife.”
After Diana’s separation from Charles in 1992 and eventual divorce in 1996, Shand Kydd did not approve of her daughter’s relationship choices, per Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell. Burrell said he overheard a phone call between Diana and “the slurring voice of Mrs. Frances Shand Kydd.”
“What I heard was a torrent of abuse, swearing, and upsetting innuendo towards the princess and towards the male company she was keeping,” he continued, adding that the call left Diana “crumpled on the sitting room carpet, sobbing into her white bathrobe,” according to The Daily Mail.
The final straw in their relationship came after Diana’s Her Royal Highness title was stripped in 1996, as her divorce from Charles was finalized. Months before Diana’s death on August 31, 1997, Shand Kydd said in an interview that Diana losing her HRH title was “absolutely wonderful”—and afterwards, “Diana never spoke to her again,” The Daily Mail reported.
