(solemn music) (sirens blaring) (narrator) We know how the story ends.

(anchor) Diana, Princess of Wales, has died in a car accident in Paris.

(anchor #2) The world has lost Princess Diana, age 36.

(anchor #3) The body of a princess, so loved by her people.

(anchor #4) ...views shared by many that the paparazzi bore some responsibility for her death.

(narrator) But, how did it begin?

Who was Diana before the paparazzi, before the palace, before the prince?

She may have become the people's princess, but Diana was born into the aristocracy.

♪ (Tessa) That's the irony.

We've called her fresh, and innocent, and a flower, and a fairy tale, almost like she was scooped up from rags into riches.

No, Diana came from one of the most powerful landed families in the country.

(Luke) The Spencer family contained a wide variety of dynamic, charismatic historical figures, who both were products of their ages, but also architects of their fortunes.

(Sarah) We don't think of Diana as someone who studied history, but I think she was aware of a heritage to live up to, and perhaps something to reclaim.

(triumphant music) (narrator) What made Diana Diana?

♪ It is a story that stretches back to her childhood and far beyond.

♪ This is how a family made a princess.

♪ (melancholic music) The Spencer family tree, one of Britain's grandest aristocratic lines.

Lords, ladies, dukes, and duchesses, troublesome sons, scandalous daughters, renegades, and rule breakers.

And on the first of July, 1961, they were joined by a baby girl.

Diana Frances Spencer.

She was the fourth child of the Viscount and Viscountess Althorp.

But, her birth was tinged with sadness and with disappointment.

(Joanna) She was born in the shadow of a terrible tragedy that affected Frances, her mother, and Johnny Spencer, her father.

Of course, they wanted a male heir.

They'd had two daughters up until then.

Frances got pregnant again, hopefully the boy, the heir, that they all wanted.

Unfortunately, he lived for 10 hours, he was born badly deformed, and Frances and Johnny were absolutely devastated.

(Tessa) To give birth to a baby that lives but for a few hours, that would leave you howling with grief for months.

Nowadays she'd have been in therapy for years.

But, she's back at it and pregnant again within a year.

(Anna) Even now, aristocratic families, titles, and land are passed down the male line, what's known as primogeniture, and so a son was absolutely necessary to inherit the family titles and wealth.

(Sarah) The pressure was really on for Diana's mother Frances to produce the son and heir.

But, two older sisters then were followed by guess what?

Another girl.

It was about a week before they even bothered to find a name for Diana.

(unsettling music) (narrator) Diana's parents were tortured by their lack of a son.

Centuries earlier, however, it was a missing heir that had helped make the family fortune.

♪ John Churchill rose from obscurity to become the greatest military commander of his age.

Early in the reign of Queen Anne, he was made the Duke of Marlborough, and given command of England's armies, but his influence was not limited to the battlefield.

Churchill led the coalition dominating Parliament, and his wife Sarah was the new Queen's closest advisor.

Together the Churchills were the most powerful couple in England.

(Tessa) They were greater than the sum of their parts, really, these two.

While Sarah was literally this mistress of the bedchamber, able to get right up close and personal with Anne, John meanwhile, he's a supremely able military man.

(James) John was obeying, and calm, persuasive, and easygoing, whereas Sarah was fiery, and argumentative, and robust in character, and couldn't bear to be thwarted or contradicted, and had they been the same in temperament, I don't think their relationship would've worked anywhere near as well as it did.

(ominous music) (narrator) At the beginning of Anne's reign, Europe was in turmoil.

♪ The French King Louis XIV had plans to dominate the continent.

Opposing him was a Grand Alliance of the English, the Austrians, and the Dutch.

Put in command of their joint forces was the new Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill.

(James) This was very controversial, as he had no experience of leading large numbers of troops in combat, and it was seen that he was being appointed because he was Queen Anne's favorite, but he soon put all fears to rest.

(Luke) This was particularly because of his skillful management of the Grand Alliance, where he worked with Dutch politicians and Dutch generals to forge a coherent army out of a potentially unwieldy force.

(James) His natural feel for the ground, his ability to see on the other side of the hill, to see what was on the other side of the horizon, to assess the threat, to move, to meet it, and then to deal with it on the day was quite astonishing.

(narrator) In 1704, the French armies threatened Vienna.

(neighing) If the city fell, Austria would be forced out of the Grand Alliance.

Europe would be Louis XIV's for the taking.

(dramatic music) Churchill marched his troops south from the low countries.

The battle was met in Germany at the village of Blenheim.

There, Churchill and his allies won an astonishing victory.

(clattering) (James) The victory at Blenheim in August 1704 was the first occasion for some hundreds of years that an English general had beaten the French outright in battle.

Unwounded prisoners, men giving up, that's a sign of defeat, and Marlborough took 13,000 unwounded French prisoners at Blenheim.

It was a catastrophic defeat for Louis XIV.

♪ (narrator) The balance of power in Europe tipped in England's favor.

♪ (peppy music) The Churchills were handsomely rewarded for John's success.

An estate in Oxfordshire was gifted to them, along with the funds to build a magnificent palace there.

(Anna) The gift of Blenheim Palace in a way is a sign both of their political and social significance, but also, of course, it consolidated their position economically in terms of massive wealth.

(Sarah) The house is a gigantic showpiece.

Some of the people who had to live in it, Sarah included, actually complained of that, that it wasn't really ever a home.

It was a monument to John Churchill's, to Marlborough's victory.

(narrator) When Churchill died in 1722, the Duke left no living son and heir.

But, so grateful was the nation for what he had done that Parliament allowed his eldest daughter to inherit the dukedom.

♪ Henrietta became the new duchess, but when she, too, died without an heir, the title passed to the son of her younger sister, a younger sister who had married a Spencer.

(dramatic music) Charles Spencer was now the third Duke of Marlborough, and master of Blenheim Palace.

His became the senior branch of the family, and was later known as the Spencer-Churchills.

British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was his direct descendant.

♪ But, while Charles Spencer inherited the Churchills' title, he did not get his hands on their money.

The fierce old Duchess Sarah Churchill disliked her grandson, and cut him out of her will.

When she died, her vast wealth passed not to Charles, but to his younger brother.

In 1765, the son of that younger brother was made the first Earl Spencer, and this man, John Spencer, was Princess Diana's great- great-great-great-grandfather.

♪ A missing heir had made the family wealthier than ever before, and every generation of Spencers afterwards would remember the need for a son.

The pressure on young couples like Diana's parents was immense.

Relief for Johnny and Frances finally came in 1964.

♪ But, the birth of Charles, the longed-for heir, could not mend the unhappiness of their marriage.

♪ Diana and her new little brother would enjoy a childhood of privilege unimaginable to most.

But, it would not always be a happy one.

♪ (atmospheric music) Diana Spencer was close to royalty from the very beginning.

♪ Her parents, Johnny and Frances, leased a house at the royal estate at Sandringham.

It was here that Diana was born and raised.

From the outside, Park House must have seemed an idyllic home.

It had 10 bedrooms, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and six full-time staff.

♪ But, behind closed doors, the house was the scene of furious rouse and resentful silences.

The marriages of Diana's parents was disintegrating.

♪ (Sarah) Frances hadn't found marriage easy from the start.

She'd found her husband not enormously emotionally literate, basically.

There'd been that huge pressure to produce a male heir, and when it seemed she couldn't, he seems to have blamed her for it.

(Joanna) Problems, though, went deeper than that.

Frances had married him quite young, there was a 12-year age gap.

She was lively, very sociable.

He was happy with the life of running the estate, and didn't really change so much with the times, you know, why should he?

(somber music) (narrator) Frances began an affair with a wealthy businessman.

Peter Shand Kydd was bohemian, and outgoing, amusing, everything Johnny was not.

In the summer of 1967, Frances left her husband for him.

♪ (Tessa) We think of the '60s as this kind of free-flowing decade of change.

Actually no, there was a lot of noise about change, but it was still a fairly conservative society.

So, the fact that Frances had taken a lover, had fallen in love with Peter Shand Kydd, and wanted a trial separation, was not just a shock, it was an extraordinary embarrassment.

The result is that Diana's mother Frances got branded a bolter, as they called it in aristocratic circles, a woman who'd run away and left her family, and that's actually not fair.

(peppy music) (narrator) Frances wanted the children to come with her, but Diana and her siblings were soon entangled in a bitter custody battle.

♪ (Luke) While the innate social conservativism of the time would generally have placed such custody battles in favor of the mother, she was against a lord in this instance, and a lord who had powerful witnesses to testify to his side.

(Joanna) Not only did he get all his chums to give him a character reference, he also managed to get Frances's own mother to speak against her daughter having custody of the children.

(Tessa) So, Lady Fermoy is so appalled by what her daughter's done, that disgrace she's brought upon the family, she talks against her own child, and in favor of the Viscout of Althorp.

(Anna) Ultimately, the outcome of the custody appeal was that her father would retain custody of the children, and again, this is remarkable.

The expectation would always have been that children would stay with their mother.

So, on all fronts, this is a devastating story, personally for Diana and her siblings.

It's the kind of last gasp of an old establishment world, where the aristocratic man would always win out over the woman.

♪ (narrator) The Spencers's marriage in 1954 had been called the wedding of the year.

Now their separation was the talk of high society.

(regal music) But, it was far from the first scandal in Spencer history.

200 years earlier in Georgian England, there had been another Spencer causing a stir.

♪ (Sarah) She was the ultimate late 18th century "it girl."

She was a hugely fashionable figure, but a controversial and a troubled one, too.

(Tessa) History would be a less much colorful place without her.

She was an extraordinary woman, and made her mark in a way that I don't think English society had ever seen before, certainly not from a woman.

I mean, this was the era to do it.

(peppy music) (narrator) Born in 1757, Georgiana was the daughter of the first Earl Spencer.

Unlike Diana, her childhood was a happy one.

Her parents loved her and each other, and Georgiana's idyllic life seemed set when, two days before her 17th birthday, she married the most eligible bachelor in England.

William Cavendish was the fifth Duke of Devonshire.

Wealthy and powerful, he owned a grand townhouse in Mayfair, and an even grander estate at Chatsworth.

♪ But, despite Georgiana's hopes, the marriage was not to be a happy one.

♪ (Tessa) People at the time said, "This ain't gonna work," and it was riven with complications and difficulties from the beginning.

(Sarah) She had great difficulty at first in having children of her own.

The children did come in the end, but nonetheless, there was very much this pressure on her to produce the heir, and that didn't help an already fractious marriage.

♪ (narrator) In 1782, Georgiana visited Bath.

It was there she met Lady Elizabeth Foster.

Bess, as she was known, had left her husband, and got by on her beauty and charm.

Georgiana was soon taken with her, and invited Bess to stay.

That she did, for 25 years.

Georgiana loved her, and so did her husband.

♪ (Joanna) Even by the slightly loose standards of the aristocracy at the time, this was quite a scandal.

It was an open secret.

London society was shocked.

She just had to carry on, bite her tongue, and smile her way through it, but one can only imagine the sort of inner turmoil that she felt.

♪ (Tessa) It was certainly a very intense threesome, and one that was full of accusation, deceit, possibly even blackmail.

I mean, people have had a field day with it every since, it's led to best sellers, Hollywood movies, and no wonder.

(narrator) But, there was far more to Georgiana than her unconventional love life.

She was another Spencer who broke the mold.

(Joanna) She surrounded herself with the great thinkers of the time.

She was interested in science and geology.

She even had a laboratory built in her own house.

(Luke) She was a social influencer, a fashion icon, a novelist, and a scientist, but her largest influence was in the realm of Whig politics.

(Sarah) She was actually out there on the streets, tramping till she got blisters, campaigning on behalf of the Whig party, which her families all supported.

(Joanna) She was heavily criticized for this.

It was not what women did, but she was undeterred.

Despite all the bad press, she kept on campaigning.

(Sarah) So, she really was a woman of an astonishing number of interests and abilities, which, however, um, you know, did not conspire to give her an easy life.

(narrator) Georgiana had an addictive personality.

Her gambling habit was notorious, but it was in drink and drugs that she found comfort from her troubles, and they took their toll.

In the 1790s, her health began to fail.

On the 30th of March, 1806, Georgiana died.

She was just 48.

(Sarah) Despite her demons, she was one of those Spencers who, whatever her troubles, whatever the controversies, did the family proud.

(pensive music) (narrator) Did Diana know the story of her ancestor?

Did she see how she walked in Georgiana's footsteps?

Diana's marriage would become just as unhappy.

But, she also shared with Georgiana that Spencer daring, that willingness to break taboos for the causes she believed in.

(Luke) Both were immortal style icons of their age that set media tongues wagging, and were the subject of continual scandal and interest.

(Joanna) They both also tried to break the mold of what was expected of women of their time.

But, of course, tragically, they also had demons.

(Tessa) Neither woman was conventionally pretty, but they were show-stoppingly beautiful.

Everybody around them wanted to be near them.

There was something about them, and it was that they didn't seem to be aware of it.

♪ (narrator) After the death of Georgiana, the Duke of Devonshire married her friend, his lover, Bess Foster.

It was a match despised by Georgiana's children.

More than 150 years later, the modern Spencer children would also be left unhappy by their father's choice of new wife.

♪ In 1973, Diana's father began a relationship with Raine Legge.

She was the daughter of Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, whose books the young Diana loved.

But, there was not the same affection for Raine.

With her mother and father remarrying, the young Diana was shuttled between two distant households.

The divorce had traumatized her.

She had every toy a child could wish for, but it was love she craved.

(Joanna) Diana was always plagued with insecurities, lack of self-worth.

"Why didn't they love me enough?

Wasn't I lovable enough for them to stay?"

This then became the story, really, of her childhood, and that sense of rejection was something that, no doubt, stayed with her in the years that followed.

♪ (narrator) The traumas of Diana's childhood may have scarred her, but they also taught her compassion.

It was a quality that would stay with Diana all her life, and one day lead her to fall in love with a prince.

♪ (contemplative music) In 1975, Diana Spencer was 13 years old.

Her parents had divorced.

She had a new stepfather, a new stepmother, and her life was about to be upended once again.

On the 9th of June, Diana's grandfather, the seventh Earl Spencer, died.

Her father became the new Earl, and the family had to move.

♪ Diana's beloved childhood home at Park House was traded for the grand Spencer Estate at Althorp.

(Luke) Althorp was an altogether more historic and forbidding place than Park House had ever been.

It was still decorated in a very old-fashioned manner, with the portraits of many illustrious Spencers past, gazing down at Diana from the walls.

(Anna) Diana could be under no illusion of the heritage of her family.

One could only imagine that they were something of an imposing, not particularly cozy, environment to--to grow up in.

(narrator) Diana had rarely visited Althorp as a child, and disliked it when she did.

Her grandfather had jealously guarded the estate's many treasures.

Even his own children and grandchildren were unwanted intruders, and the house could've been designed to frighten small children, with its dark corridors, twisting stairs, and countless ticking clocks.

The vast mansion creaked like an ancient warship.

(creaking) (Joanna) Even her father didn't like it.

He felt the ghost of his brooding, bullying father, and everybody found it, you know, rather chilly and uncomfortable.

♪ (Luke) It was not a place where history was a pleasant curiosity.

It was a place where history asked questions of people who lived there, questions which Diana and her siblings probably felt they needed to answer.

(whimsical music) (narrator) There had been Spencers at Althorp for almost 500 years.

In Tudor times in the reign of King henry VII, Sir John Spencer had grazed livestock there.

The family had grown wealthy on the backs of their sheep.

(Sarah) The wool trade was absolutely at the core of England's wealth throughout the Middle Ages and the Tudor period.

(Luke) Sheep farming was becoming incredibly lucrative, and the Spencers were one of the very small number of families who controlled a lot of sheep pasturing land, with their main estates being ideally suited for that purpose.

(narrator) In 1508, Sir John paid 800 pounds for the red-brick manor house at Althorp.

Soon, he expanded the estate into the surrounding countryside.

More land for their sheep meant more wealth for the Spencers.

(sheep bleating) (regal music) And with those riches came power.

A family of sheep farmers became barons and members of Parliament.

♪ By the 17th century, the family was said to be the richest in England.

A visit by Charles I in 1636 saw the house at Althorp expanded, with a new drawing room and a hall fit for a king.

♪ But, the Spencers's wealth and privileged position at the heart of the English establishment was soon under threat.

The country was sliding toward civil war, and the young lord of Althorp, Henry Spencer, would have to choose a side.

By 1642, the country split, they're taking sides.

It's a great polarization between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, as they will later be known.

(Luke) Henry Spencer was courted by both factions.

He was skeptical of the Royalists, because of the growing absolutist tendencies in the monarchy, and its tendency to ignore Parliament, but also suspicious of the Parliamentarians, who, as he saw it, was spoiling for a fight.

But, the age of the civil war was not a time for mild, moderate, peaceful men, and unfortunately, he had to choose.

(Anna) When it came to it, the idea of actually taking up arms against the King was simply too much for him.

It was a matter of honor.

♪ In August 1642, King Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham.

Henry Spencer answered the call.

♪ He would pay the price for his loyalty.

His home, Althorp, was quickly occupied by Parliamentary troops from Northampton.

♪ And far worse was to come in the fighting ahead.

At the Battle of Edgehill, the young Lord Spencer joined the Cavalry charge that swept through the Parliamentary forces.

As a reward for his bravery, the King made Spencer the Earl of Sunderland.

♪ But, the young man would not enjoy his new title for long.

Just three months later at the Battle of Newbury, he was struck by a cannonball and killed.

He was 23.

(ominous music) Althorp passed to his devastated wife Dorothy.

As the war raged on, it fell to this young widow to defend the family home.

(Luke) Neither warring faction, the Loyalists or the Parliamentarians, had much respect for these great houses.

(Tessa) In fact, the first great Spencer property was Wormleighton, which was sort of on the cusp of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, and it is absolutely trashed ironically by the Royalists, because they don't want the Parliamentarians to get their hands on it, and it was absolutely enormous.

It made Althorp look like a cottage, to be honest.

Because Henry Spencer had backed the Royalists, and then the Parliamentarians came to power, things were pretty tough for Althorp for a while.

Dorothy was an incredibly astute woman.

She was in a prime position to be able to preserve Althorp, because while Henry dies for the King and the Royalist cause, his uncle is a Parliamentarian, and backs his nephew's wife, and helps protect her.

(Sarah) Maybe we do see the canniness of the early Spencers in the fact that Althorp didn't really suffer too much in the civil war.

Occupied for a time, Parliamentary troops, but it didn't suffer the kind of devastation that some other houses did.

(dramatic music) (narrator) In time, peace returned to England, and to Althorp.

The Spencers began to rebuild the house, and reclaim their place in high society.

(Tessa) Dorothy leads the way on this, Henry's widow, and it cost quite a lot of money, you know, she covers over the courtyard, and there's that great, big wooden staircase running down into the saloon that still, 300 years on, looks pretty show-stopping.

(Anna) I mean, this was all part of a very deliberate, self-conscious exhibition, really, of power and of status.

It was about great noble families seeking to outdo each other in many ways, to have lavish houses, where they would host parties that would become political and cultural, hubs that people wanted to come to and be seen at.

(narrator) As each generation of Spencers passed through its halls, Althorp grew and changed.

In 1733, a magnificent Palladian stable block was completed.

Later, the old crumbling red-brick house was encased in gray tiles.

♪ There were times when Althorp was neglected, when the Spencers were consumed by the demands of politics, or by the diversions of London, but, like the family itself, the house survived.

♪ Until finally, in 1975, it passed to Diana's father.

Johnny became the eighth Earl Spencer.

Diana had a new title as well.

She was now the Lady Diana Spencer, but it only seemed to underline what society expected of her.

(Anna) For Diana, like her female predecessors, it was all about marriage, and then children.

There were no really greater aspirations and expectations than that.

(Luke) But, her father Johnny had, I think, broader ambitions for his daughter, and so did others.

The Queen mother, for example, had always had the view that Spencer women were potentially formidable and potentially difficult, so everyone knew that there could be something special in store for Diana.

(narrator) Diana was 16 when she first met Prince Charles.

The heir to the throne was dating Diana's older sister Sarah.

She was just the latest in a string of girlfriends for the young prince.

(Sarah) He was under huge pressure to marry from, on the one hand, the press, you know, who were-- were chasing any girl he'd even looked at, on the other, perhaps his own family.

I mean, there really was a feeling that he needed to get on with it.

(Tessa) The world is watching and writing about it.

It becomes increasingly difficult, I think, for this man to have natural relations with a woman, because they're immediately aware of who they're talking to, and probably become slightly affected, you know, it's corrupting, isn't it?

Power, fame, money.

♪ (narrator) Sarah was not to be the royal bride, of course.

She was too spiky for a royal spouse.

Her relationship with Charles didn't last.

But, the young Diana could not yet imagine the Prince would have any interest in her.

She was about to embark on a new life.

In 1979, Diana turned 18.

The gift from her parents was a three-bedroom flat in West London.

(Luke) Diana was the distinctive Sloane Ranger, living with some girl school friends in Coleherne Court.

She had fun, whizzed round in her Mini Metro, and took on a series of low-paid jobs, such as nannying, such as cleaning, and then enjoyed a lifestyle which was completely incommensurate with the kind of salaries that those jobs commanded.

(Sarah) We often think of young people moving away from home, moving to London, rebelling a bit perhaps, discovering themselves, but that wasn't the experience Diana was ever going to have.

To all appearances, it was this very, very staid, really quite old-fashioned, limited, upper-class life.

(narrator) But, the great change in Diana's life was just around the corner, for Prince Charles had not forgotten the younger Lady Spencer.

A story, a tragedy, to outshine all the Spencers before her was about to begin.

(indistinct remarks) (peppy music) It was 1980 that changed Diana Spencer's life forever.

She was still a teenager, and living with friends in a West London flat.

♪ Diana worked at a nursery school on some days, as a childminder on others.

She even took on cleaning jobs for her older sister and her friends.

It was a carefree existence, but all that changed in the summer of 1980, when Prince Charles turned his attention to her.

(Joanna) Things were changing for Prince Charles.

He was increasingly coming under pressure to settle down, to give up his bachelor ways, and one catalyst for him starting to think seriously about settling down was the death of his uncle Mountbatten.

(solemn music) (Tessa) Just after Mountbatten's death, which was a ghastly personal tragedy for Charles, this sort of surrogate father figure is blown up, and she meets him shortly after that, and is able, in that kind of fresh, teenage way of saying, "I'm really sorry about that."

I think he is impressed by her candor, and the way that she isn't tongue-tied around him, and seems to be unaffected by his status.

(Sarah) He was in a very vulnerable state in several different ways, and perhaps not only in need of a suitable bride, but in need of that particular strand of warm sympathy that Diana, throughout her life, seemed particularly well equipped to give.

(Tessa) And that's Diana's great gift.

Prince or pauper, she will make you feel like the most special person in the room, and it worked for her in that moment with Charles.

(regal music) (narrator) In July 1980, Diana was a weekend guest at a country house in Sussex.

There was a polo match.

Prince Charles was playing.

At the barbeque afterwards, he sat with Diana.

The 31-year-old prince called her Diana.

She called him sir.

But, that day was the beginning.

♪ Soon, Prince Charles was taking Diana to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

Then, it was a weekend at Cawes, aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia.

An invitation to the favorite royal retreat at Balmoral followed, and with it, an introduction to the family.

His intentions could not be clearer.

(Anna) In Diana it seemed he had got what he needed.

He'd got somebody who was clearly infatuated, in love with him, who was respectful of him and his position, who understood, who was glamorous without being too much of an exhibitionist.

(Tessa) She's unencumbered with any baggage.

The tabloids are not gonna get anything on Diana.

She's just come out a single-sex boarding school, and she works in a kindergarten a couple of times a week.

I mean, you can't get much purer than that.

She is pure as the driven snow.

She looks like an English rose, She's perfect.

(narrator) The couple had been seeing each other for six months when Charles told Diana he had something to ask her.

Late on the evening of the 6th of February, 1981, in the nursery at Windsor Castle, Charles asked her to marry him.

(triumphant music) (Joanna) Diana instantly said, "Yes."

She believed in romantic love.

She was infatuated with the prince, and she believed that her Prince Charming would come through in the end.

What little girl born in the 1960s didn't want to marry Charles Philip Arthur George?

I ask you.

Of course she wanted to marry Prince Charles.

So probably did all her peers.

That she should be a fairy tale princess and marry a fairy tale prince was something that she thought was entirely appropriate, and something that she had dreamed of since she was a small girl.

(Anna) Here was Diana now ready, betrothed to the Prince of Wales, marrying into the royal family, marrying the future King of England.

This was a step up for the Spencers like never before.

(peppy music) (narrator) But, she was not the first Spencer to be betrothed to a prince.

She was not even the first Diana.

♪ 250 years earlier, there had been another Lady Diana Spencer, who was set to be a royal bride.

It was the ambitious plan of Sarah, the old Duchess of Marlborough, who had dominated the Court of Queen Anne.

By the 1730s, her husband was dead, and her political power had waned, but there was one realm where she still ruled: Her family.

She was particularly attentive to her grandchildren, and in really shaping the Spencer family.

She wanted to very much make her mark on the next generation, and so having been at the very sort of apex of political society, in and around the Queen, she now turned her attention to her very own family.

(James) She felt she had both a duty and a right to school them in what they did, and how they should approach life, and conduct themselves, and who they should marry.

(narrator) The young Diana Spencer was Sarah's favorite.

She was courted by the richest and most eminent men in the land.

But, Sarah wanted more for her granddaughter.

She wanted the Prince of Wales, and she was willing to pay to get him.

♪ (James) Sarah's ambition for her grandchildren, especially those she liked, was--well, it was significant.

It is said that she actually offered the sum of 100,000 pounds by way of a dowry.

Now this was a fabulous sum, even to a king.

But, the Queen Caroline had the measure of Sarah Jennings, and she quickly put a stop to it.

(Sarah) That marriage came to nothing, and indeed, that Prince of Wales never inherited the throne.

No one could know at that time, of course, that the prince would die and not himself become king.

♪ (narrator) The Spencers would have to wait, but two centuries later, the dream of the old Duchess of Marlborough was finally realized.

On the 29th of July, 1981, Diana Spencer married her prince at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

She was made for this moment by the trauma and privilege of her upbringing, by her own romantic imagination, and by her family's history.

At long last, this sheep-farming dynasty had become royalty.

The wedding was watched by millions of people all around the globe.

Those millions would go on watching Diana and every twist in her story.

The disintegration of her marriage, her first steps into her new life, and her death on the streets of Paris.

(dramatic music) At Althorp, the Spencer family's ancient home, 36 oak trees line an avenue through the grounds, one for each year of Diana's life.

On an island on a lake in the heart of the estate is her final resting place.

♪ Like so many of the Spencers before her, Diana was someone whose personality, charisma, and image helped define her age.

(Tessa) She was born into one of the biggest, most famous dynasties in Britain, and she transcends that.

You know, and she chooses to live her life in a way that speaks to people who aren't privileged, who aren't entitled.

(Anna) She showed the royal family a different way of being, a different way of engaging with people.

She rocked the monarchy for a time.

She challenged it, but I also think she changed it for the better.

(Joanna) She was a Spencer woman through and through.

Characterful, strong, feisty.

Yes, she had demons, but she embodies, I think, the spirit of many women that came before her.

(Sarah) You do find those Spencer women with an odd kick in their gallop, with a readiness to-- to push the boundaries, and I think that somewhere along the line, as she grew up, Diana was aware of that, and that that played its part in molding her story.

(narrator) The grand history of the Spencer family had intimidated Diana as a child.

♪ Now she is a part of it, and of all those stories stretching back through centuries, hers is the most famous.

Diana became a princess, a mother, a campaigner, an icon, but she was always a Spencer.

♪ (melancholic music) ♪