Three Times a Countess by Tina Gaudoin

Author:Tina Gaudoin [Gaudoin, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2022-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

8

Tipping Point

Once the wedding was out of the way the couple returned to Althorp. For Johnnie, buoyant with the happiness and pride of his daughter’s wedding and its attendant press, pomp and circumstance: this was one of the happiest periods of his life. He was ‘still here, thanks to Raine’ as he liked to tell everyone he met and he contented himself with the two things he seemed to like best: pottering on the estate and spending money, particularly at his favourite store: Harrods. He’d been visiting the store since he was a teenager and liked to tell people that he knew the staff (and they him) by name.

For Raine, the couple’s situation was much more fraught with difficulty. For starters, the estate was still losing money despite the glut of tourists; the renovations were by no means finished and Johnnie had developed a penchant for buying things. Over the next few years his purchases would include three homes in Bognor, a Silver Spur Rolls-Royce, a flat in Grosvenor Square and the house in Farm Street. The added bonus of rubberneckers flocking to view the home of the future Queen, the place they mistakenly believed that she had ‘grown up’, did not make up the shortfall. The pressure made itself felt when Raine, interviewed by the Daily Mail expostulated that ‘Of course we have had a bit of luck with Diana … but all the extra visitors have cracked the Library ceiling.’

As for the Diana connection, whilst Raine’s detractors carped that she was ‘cashing in’, friends saw it differently: ‘She never once lorded it over us in relation to Diana’ says a friend, ‘but you could quite see how people would interpret her actions as self-interest.’ In his book, Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals, John Pearson recounts how once firmly in charge of ‘double-glazed and tourist friendly Althorp’, Raine would refer to the extra income the increase in visitors produced dismissively as ‘my Di money’. Art consultant John Somerville offered an insight into the aristocracy’s view of Raine when he recounted meeting Mary Roxburghe, granddaughter of Lord Rosebery (who was briefly British Prime Minister) at a Sotheby’s luncheon: ‘I was on Mary’s right and, during the pudding she said to me sotto voce, “My dear if I suddenly get up to go it is not because you are boring me, but I am not having her (indicating Lady Spencer with her spoon) do her usual and try – as she thinks she can, as the stepmother of our future Queen – to be the first to leave and pull rank on me”. Although she was not prepared to give so much as an inch when it came to who she was’, notes Somerville, ‘she travelled to and from Bond Street by bus, whereas Countess Spencer arrived and departed in a chauffeured Rolls.’1

It was Johnnie who had captured the public’s hearts though and the press never tired of relating the antics of the Earl, who would occasionally let a little of his infamous temper break through the smiling veneer.

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