She Was the Countess Diana Refused To Speak To and Never Forgave: Raine Spencer

In this documentary, we explore the life of Raine, Countess Spencer, the only daughter of romance novelist Barbara Cartland who became stepmother to Diana Princess of Wales, saved Althorp from financial ruin during her husband's four-year coma, was pushed down the grand saloon staircase by her stepdaughter in 1989, and was thrown out of the house forty-eight hours after his death in 1992 with her clothes packed into black plastic bin liners by the Princess herself. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- On March 31, 1992, two days after the 8th Earl Spencer died of a heart attack at Althorp, a maid named Pauline Shaw knelt folding a countess's wardrobe into four open Louis Vuitton suitcases while Diana, Princess of Wales, stood guard at the door. When Diana noticed the embossed letter S on the suitcase locks, she decided the luggage itself was Spencer property and could not leave the house. So the clothes came out again, the furs and the couture and the evening gowns, and they went into black plastic bin liners instead. Then the new 9th Earl, Diana's younger brother Charles, gathered up the sacks and kicked them down the grand saloon staircase, the same staircase where, three years before, Diana had shoved the same woman and watched her fall. The 8th Earl's will had asked his children to grant his widow six months to gather her life and go, and she was given forty-eight hours instead. Raine McCorquodale was born on September 9, 1929 at 6 Culross Street in Mayfair, the only child of Captain Alexander McCorquodale and the romance novelist Barbara Cartland, who had married him in 1927 after, by her own telling, declining forty-nine previous proposals. She became Debutante of the Year in 1947, the youngest woman ever elected to Westminster City Council at twenty-three, and by twenty-four was married to Gerald Legge, later the 9th Earl of Dartmouth. In 1972 she met Johnnie Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, at a Foyle's literary luncheon, and by 1976 both had left their spouses. She married him just sixteen weeks after his divorce, in a Caxton Hall register office ceremony none of his four children attended. Diana, then fourteen, learned of the marriage in the pages of a national newspaper. The children called her Acid Raine and sang a nursery rhyme at her that they never finished. Diana would spit at her across dinner tables. In September 1978 Johnnie collapsed of a massive cerebral hemorrhage that left him in a coma the doctors did not expect him to survive, and Raine sat by his bed for months, playing Puccini, refusing to accept the prognosis. She acquired a then-experimental East German drug called Aslocillin, smuggled through diplomatic channels at her own expense, and Johnnie eventually woke up. She then took over the running of Althorp, opened the estate to the public with a gift shop and tea room, sold roughly sixty percent of the paintings and heirlooms to fund the roof and the accounts, and took the blame for every canvas that left the walls. She survived being pushed down the grand staircase by Diana in 1989 with only bruises. Diana never apologized. After Johnnie's death in 1992 she married a French count named Jean-François de Chambrun in 1993, divorced him in 1995, and reverted to Countess Spencer, the name she would keep for the rest of her life. In the late 1980s Diana had cut all contact with her stepmother, but sometime around 1993 the Princess made a phone call to Raine's flat in Grosvenor Square and asked if they might see each other. At their reconciliation lunch at the Connaught, Diana told her, according to Raine's own later account, that she was the mother she had never had. Diana died in Paris in August of 1997, and Raine attended the funeral in Westminster Abbey seated with the Spencer family in the front rows. Raine, Countess Spencer, died on October 21, 2016 at the age of eighty-seven. Charles Spencer, the man who had once kicked her clothes down the staircase, walked behind her coffin.