Raine Spencer, the socialite stepmother of Diana, Princess of Wales, and daughter of the prolific romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, has died aged 87.
Countess Spencer passed away on Friday morning at her London home following a short illness, her son William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth and a Ukip MEP confirmed.
A society figure and a local politician, she married three times, and amassed various aristocratic titles. She was born Raine McCorquodale – the only child of Cartland and Alexander McCorquodale, an army officer and heir to a printing fortune.
During her life she was known as the Honourable Mrs Gerald Legge, Viscountess Lewisham, the Countess of Dartmouth, Countess Spencer, the Dowager Countess Spencer and Countess Jean-François de Chambrun.
She grew up in the rarefied world of upper class England – she was named “Deb of the Year” in 1947 – and throughout her life was instantly recognisable for her bouffant hair, pearls, clipped accent and immaculate dress sense.
She married Gerald Legge, later Viscount Lewisham, in 1948 and they had four children. As a young mother, aged 23, she became the youngest member of Westminster city council, and went on to hold positions on many other bodies.
She married Diana’s father, the eighth Earl Spencer in 1976. She was not very popular with the young Diana and her three siblings who reportedly referred to her as “Acid Raine”. Many years later, Diana’s younger brother, now the ninth Earl Spencer, reportedly described her taste in decor at the Spencer’s ancestral Althorp home in Northamptonshire as having “the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco”.
Much was written about the “strained” relationship between the countess and her world-famous stepdaughter, but in the years immediately before Diana’s death there was a reported reconciliation between them. In an interview with the Gentlewoman magazine last summer, Spencer said of Diana: “She had incredibly heavy pressures put upon her, but we ended up huge friends. She used to come and sit on my sofa and tell me her troubles.”
After the death of her second husband in 1992, she moved out of Althorp. In July 1993 she married her third husband, Count Jean-François Pineton de Chambrun. They divorced in 1995.
For many years she sat on the board of directors at Harrods, and also worked on the shop floor. Giving evidence at the 2007 inquest into Diana’s death, she revealed: “I never went shopping at Harrods. It was my husband [Earl Spencer] who practically lived there.”
Also at the inquest, she made a rare public comment about her relationship with Diana, who died in 1997. “She always said I had no hidden agenda,” she said in her evidence. “So many people, because she was so popular and so world famous, wanted something out of her. It was a very draining life.”