The "It Girl," Her Grandmother, Her Father, and Diana, the Princess of Wales
A tempest in an aristocratic teapot
When twenty-five-year-old Lady Venetia Baring popped up recently as the “cover star” of Tatler’s March 2024 issue, it wasn’t her vivid image that caught my attention. Rather, I was struck by her assertions about her late grandmother, Esme, the Dowager Countess of Cromer, especially what she purportedly said about Diana, the Princess of Wales.
My interest was piqued even more when Lady Venetia’s father, the 4th Earl of Cromer, wrote a letter to The Times objecting to his daughter’s characterizations of the Dowager Countess, who was his mother. Why would I take more than passing notice of a dispute over loose talk from a model and actress who, as recounted in The Telegraph, is “covered in tattoos” and feels it is “OK” to be “unladylike”—despite being “descended from a long line of nobility?”
I spent time with Esme Cromer twice, in the 1990s when I interviewed her for Reflected Glory, my biography of her childhood friend, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, and then in 2008 for my biography of the late Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch. In the latter conversations, I gleaned facts and insights that align with some views expressed by the 4th Earl, and I’m sharing some of those on Royals Extra today. The late countess opened a fascinating window for me into her time as a “Lady of the Bedchamber,” one of Elizabeth II’s ladies-in-waiting, starting in 1967. She was an intelligent woman and astute observer who knew her boundaries as a royal courtier.
But let’s start with Venetia’s take as described in the press in late January 2024. Her grandmother, she told Tatler, “really didn’t like Diana,” and was present at Sandringham, the monarch’s estate in Norfolk, in 1982 when the Princess of Wales—then four months pregnant with the future Prince William—claimed she took drastic action to get the attention of Prince Charles. As Diana recounted a decade later to her biographer, Andrew Morton, “I threw myself down the stairs. The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking…I knew I wasn’t going to lose the baby, though I was quite bruised around the stomach.”
Back to Venetia, who described her grandmother as “one of those kinds of women that was like, ‘Bro, what’s wrong with you? Get a grip!’…So I think when Diana was going through her bulimia, stress and everything going on with Charles and Camilla, my granny said she used to throw herself down the stairs. When I hear that, I think she must have been going through hell. But [I think my granny thought] this crazy girl wouldn’t stop throwing herself down the stairs.”
Enter Venetia’s father, Lord Cromer. In his letter to The Times on February 7th, he wrote that his mother “served the late Queen for 17 years and was rewarded for her loyalty, work and affection by a CVO”— a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, an honor bestowed by the monarch for “distinguished personal service.” Furthermore, “Throughout her long service my mother was the soul of discretion…It would be totally alien to my mother to make a comment on a member of the royal family to anybody, least of all to one of her grandchildren and especially to Lady Venetia Baring, my daughter.”
I did not discuss Diana, the Princess of Wales, with Esme Cromer, but in our initial telephone conversation in September 2008, she spoke of admiring Queen Elizabeth II for her “tremendous sense of duty and sense of humor.” She added that other than through her official duties, “I don’t know her that well. I have never been to Sandringham or stayed a weekend.”
I think it’s also relevant to mention here that when I was working on my biography of the late Princess of Wales, Diana in Search of Herself, in November 1997 I interviewed a woman who was close to Diana during the 1980s and present at Sandringham for the alleged staircase incident. She was a first-hand witness and had spoken to Diana directly afterwards. Here is what she told me: “I didn’t talk to anyone other than she. She said she tripped and fell down the stairs and landed at the feet of the Queen. I didn’t get the impression it was more than an accident. The way [it] came across to me was she had fallen, a doctor had been called as a precaution, and it was no big deal. What struck me as so inconsistent in what she told Andrew Morton is that she would not have done anything to harm herself and that baby.”
I met with Esme Cromer at her handsome and spacious home on Douro Place in London’s Kensington neighborhood two weeks after our telephone chat. At age eighty-five, her renowned beauty was still evident.
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