When Princess Diana married Prince Charles in 1981, Lady Jane Fellowes was already living inside the world her sister was entering. Her husband, Robert Fellowes, was assistant private secretary to the Queen — one of the most sensitive positions in the royal household, a job that required absolute discretion, absolute loyalty, and the management of the precise information channels between the monarch and the government.
It has been suggested by some royal biographers that Jane's position as both Diana's sister and Robert's wife left her in a difficult position when Charles and Diana's marriage was ending. She was, in effect, sitting in the middle of a constitutional and personal crisis with family on both sides. Diana was her sister. Robert's employer was the Queen. The two interests did not always point in the same direction.
Lady Jane said nothing publicly during the years of the marriage's decline. She said nothing during the Morton biography. She said nothing during the Panorama interview. She attended events. She maintained her position. She kept the silence that her husband's role required and that her own instincts apparently endorsed.
When Diana died, Jane came forward once — at the funeral. She delivered the reading. She stood at the lectern in Westminster Abbey before an audience of 2.5 billion and read from the letters of Paul, and then she sat down and did not speak publicly again for years.
Lady Sarah McCorquodale retrieved locks of Diana's hair from Paris after the crash and presented them to the princes. It was Lady Jane who, according to those who were there, informed the rest of the family of Diana's death in the early hours of August 31, 1997 — calling Sarah, then Earl Spencer, with the news that none of them could have been prepared for.
She is now Baroness Fellowes. Her husband Robert died in July 2024. She continues to maintain, with extraordinary consistency, the silence she chose in 1981.
There is, in that silence, a kind of loyalty that outlasts everything.
