As family tensions sometimes threaten to pull the House of Windsor apart, there is, thankfully, one figure who enjoys the confidence of all the disparate Royal factions and quietly keeps the crucial lines of communication open when emotions are running high.
Princess Diana’s older sister Lady Jane Fellowes, who celebrated her 67th birthday, has always shunned the limelight – particularly since Diana’s tragic death in August 1997 – and it is this discretion that explains why she has been so successful in remaining close to King Charles and Queen Camilla, Prince William and, especially, to Prince Harry.
Lady Jane gave a reading from the Song of Solomon at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 2018 wedding at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in a deliberate echo of her touching address at Diana’s funeral two decades earlier. She was also one of the first to be invited to meet the couple’s first child, Archie – ahead even of Prince William.
In another nod to his close relationship with his mother’s family, Harry gave ‘stand out thanks’ to Lady Jane, her older sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale,68 and their brother Earl Spencer, 59, at the end of his tell-all memoir Spare, while failing to mention his grandmother the late Queen, King Charles or his brother the Prince of Wales.
Lady Jane is said to be one of the most academically gifted of the Spencer family, passing creditable selection of O- and A-Levels at West Heath boarding school near Sevenoaks, Kent, where she was a prefect.
The first of the three Spencer sisters to wed, she married Robert Fellowes, then assistant private secretary to the Queen, in a ceremony at the Guards’ Chapel overlooking London’s St James’s Park when she was 21 – beginning a family tradition that Spencer brides would wear the family tiara on their wedding day. Lady Diana Spencer, then just 16, was her bridesmaid.
The fact that her husband – later Sir Robert, then Lord Fellowes – became the Queen’s most trusted right hand man meant that Lady Jane rapidly had to become something of a tightrope walker after Diana and Charles’s marriage began to disintegrate.
Indeed, Lord Fellowes’s closeness to The Queen led to rumours of a rift between Lady Jane and Princess Diana after Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell claimed the sisters hadn’t spoken ‘in a number of years’ before Diana died.
However, other Palace insiders have denied any difficulty, pointing out that she and Princess Diana were neighbours in Kensington Palace. Diana lived with William and Harry in numbers eight and nine, while Lady Jane lived lived nearby in a house called the Old Barracks.
