Earl Spencer's attack both on the queen and the royal family was no ill-judged slight or exercise in bad taste. He knew just what he was doing. As Barbara Cartland pointed out with her inimitable sense of timing earlier this week, the Windsors are German upstarts compared with the ancient line of Spencers.
And for Charles Spencer, who read history at Oxford, the history of England and his family's place in it has been an abiding passion since he was a boy. His other abiding passion is his sister, Diana.
"I never met any truly happy adults in all the time I was there," wrote Mary Clarke in Diana - Once Upon A Time, an account of her two years as nanny to the Spencer children. Charles Spencer, the youngest of the family, was her main charge. He was six. Three years earlier, his mother had bolted with Johnny Shand-Kydd, leaving all four Spencer siblings in the custody of their father.
The two elder sisters, Sarah and Jane, had been at boarding school in Kent since he was a baby, so it was Diana who became his emotional anchor at this critical time. The two little Spencers went to the same local school, but it wasn't long before he and Diana were separated. The high turnover in nannies was attributed to Diana's "high spirits and pranks" so she was sent away to board. Her brother would regularly cry himself to sleep.
In the Spencer children's memories, Park House on the Sandringham Estate was never as oppressive as the family seat in Althorp, where they moved in 1975 on the death of their grandfather, but nonetheless life there was lived on a pre-war pattern, where children were rarely seen and never heard. Their father on the far side of the sound-proofed baize door was a remote man.
When he was at home he would cross the divide twice a day, once in the morning just before Charles set off for school, and at bedtime, when the talk was of family history and battles. In the long periods when he was alone, the rather solemn little boy's greatest pleasure was playing with his collection of toy soldiers.
The Spencers have been part of the fabric of English history since the 15th century when the boom in the English wool trade secured the first Lord Spencer an earldom through a timely loan of £10,000 to Charles I during the civil war. They have always been political animals and no strangers to controversy.
The third earl was chancellor of the exchequer, responsible for carrying through the Reform Bill of 1832, and who resigned over the Irish coercion bill. The fifth Earl was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who, at a time when the English aristocracy went over en masse to the Tories over Gladstone's Home Rule campaign, stood his liberal ground.
Charles Spencer's bitter statement immediately following Diana's death triggered the country's anger against the media, but his war with the press is of long standing, starting when his sister's engagement seemed to make him fair game as well. Already deeply angry on Diana's behalf, he took each one up with the Press Complaints Commission.
But these were pin pricks compared to what would come later when his marriage was put under the media microscope in a series of unedifying revelations of his own behaviour. His wife's subsequent breakdown was also given the full tabloid treatment of prying lenses and shock-horror headlines.
Earl Spencer's most celebrated run-in with the press, however, was his friendship with Darius Guppy, found guilty in 1994 for a £1.8 million insurance fraud. When the Daily Express suggested he might have benefited from the ill-gotten gains, he successfully sued for libel, to the tune of £50,000.
The two men had been close friends since they had met at Eton. Charles Spencer had been best man at his wedding. Spencer, who now lives in South Africa, never disowned him and gave his old friend the use of a cottage on the Althorp Estate when he came out of prison. "I don't go in for ditching friends, whatever they've done," he said afterwards. His loyalty to those he loves is fierce.
Much of the public perception of Diana's unhappy childhood comes from Diana - Her True Story, written by Andrew Morton in 1992.
Spencer's co-operation was part of the tacit acceptance that even at the cost of being underhand - which one suspects didn't come easily to someone from his background - the myth of the marriage had to be dispelled. It may be that in the eyes of a man whose family motto is God Defend the Right, only through pointing the finger at those he believes were complicit in her betrayal can honour be finally satisfied.