The biggest question mark hung over his second wife Raine, who would have turned 96 today, the bouffant-haired woman hated by Diana and her sisters but who’d more than once saved the Johnnie Spencer’s life.
The jolly, avuncular Lord Spencer died of a heart attack aged 68 on March 29, 1992 in the Wellington Hospital in London, where he was being treated for heart problems.
That morning he had been visited by his wife Raine, dubbed ‘Acid Raine’ by her stepdaughters, but according to royal biographer and journalist James Whitaker she left his hospital room after a furious row.
‘His last words to her were, “Get out! Go away! Leave me – go!”‘, wrote Whitaker.
But in the days before Lord Spencer’s death, staff recalled he signed away a vast number of cheques – one, and maybe two, cheque-books’ worth – to his wife. During this time she had kept his children at bay and would only allow them to visit his bedside while she was present.
What was occurring alarmed his solicitor, to such an extent he asked the peer, in front of Raine, ‘Lord Spencer – I feel I must ask you, before you sign your will, do you really wish to leave ALL of this money to your wife?’
Spencer, who even at his advanced age was sexually besotted with her (they’d sometimes stop their chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce on long journeys to spend an hour or two in a motel room) – responded, ‘If I could leave her even more, I would.’
Raine received £6million in his will, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Along with the cash came a Mayfair townhouse, other country homes, a Rolls Royce, and innumerable pieces of high-end jewellery and other items.
To his daughters, Sarah, Jane and Diana, Spencer left just £10,000 apiece, but his whole estate was estimated to be worth £200million (£450million today).
Raine and Johnnie had spent years plundering the Spencer estate, Althorp.
Priceless oil paintings, including eleven Van Dycks, disappeared overnight. Charles Spencer, the current earl, bitterly recalled Raine selling ‘many other dozens of other works, collected over 500 years by my family, and now dispersed around the world, having sometimes been sent to London art dealers in laundry baskets from Althorp’s back door to guarantee the anonymity of the sale’.
Those sales – sometimes public, sometimes clandestine – raised millions which went straight into Lord Spencer’s pocket. And he spent a lot of it at SJ Phillips, the Bond Street jeweller.
Released by Raine from his almost obsessive penny-pinching in earlier life, Johnnie learned to enjoy splashing the cash. He bought her a house in Mayfair and the couple travelled far and wide – first-class, naturally.
‘They really did live high on the hog,’ a friend recalled.
Driving around Sussex one day, Johnnie spotted a Spanish-style beachside villa in the deeply unfashionable town of Bognor Regis and snapped it up.
He then went on to buy two more adjoining properties – one for his servants, the other for Diana, William and Harry to come and enjoy their holidays. They visited just once.
When the main house, Trade Winds, was later sold, it was said photos left behind showed Diana and the boys splashing about in Johnnie’s swimming pool. But if they did come to stay, it was a one-off – neighbours later reported they never saw the Princess or her children there.
What did Raine do with her overblown legacy? She found a new husband less than a year after Lord Spencer died, the French Count Jean-Francois de Chambrun, and paid off his debts.
Raine was at a Monte Carlo dinner party when she was introduced to de Chambrun, seven years her junior. Twenty-five days later, they announced their intention to marry.
‘With him she undoubtedly enjoyed some of the best sex of her life,’ wrote her biographer Tina Gaudoin. But it came at a price.
De Chambrun owed £350,000 to a businessman in part payment for a swimming-pool outfit he and his brother had bought.
The day before de Chambrun and Raine’s wedding at Marylebone Register Office – just 16 months after Johnnie Spencer’s death – the debt was paid in full – with Spencer money.
Raine could afford it, and she had lots more stashed away Though, as it turned out, her new husband wasn’t a great investment, with the marriage lasting less than a year.
Lady Anne Glenconner, one of the wedding guests, recalled: ‘To my mind it was rather odd. There we all were thinking it was unlikely to work – and he [de Chambrun] was winking at all the pretty girls as he came back down the aisle.’
Within weeks, Raine was confiding her husband – who’d failed to pay the bill for the sumptuous wedding reception, so she had to cough up – had gone back to his mistress. It was a colossally expensive mistake, though after their divorce it is said the couple still enjoyed the occasional sexual encounter.
When Raine, Countess Spencer (she resumed the title after her divorce) died in 2016 at the age of 87, she left behind £5.8million – almost exactly the money she’d received from Johnnie Spencer 24 years earlier.
It was Spencer money she’d been living on in the intervening years. But not one penny of it went back to her Spencer stepchildren – though she did leave her faithful chauffeur £75,000 and the Rolls Royce Johnnie had bought her.
Charles Spencer, her stepson, current earl, and head of the family, never forgave her.
