Charles Hits Back

Buckingham Palace issued a rare, forceful denial this week. Earl Charles Spencer had written that King Charles vowed his sister, Princess Diana, would soon be forgotten.

In an excerpt of his memoir "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister," reported by NBC News, Spencer says Charles told him "we'll forget her soon enough" during a phone call days after Diana died in a 1997 Paris car crash. The fight was over whether Princes William and Harry, then 15 and 12, should walk behind their mother's coffin. Spencer wanted to spare them the ordeal. Charles insisted they walk.

The palace pushed back hard. "His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss," the palace said in a statement quoted by BBC News.

Spencer didn't back down. In his first interview since the statement, he told the BBC he stands by every word. "I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said," he said. Asked whether grief had clouded his memory, he shot back: "They've sort of smudged that one, haven't they?"

The phone call, he said, was one of only two he ever had with Charles. He told friends and family about it at the time "because it was so monstrous."

The memoir goes further. Charles sounded "giddily elated" and like "a lottery winner" when he called after Diana's death, Spencer writes in a second excerpt reported by BBC News. Spencer suggests Charles was thinking more of his freedom to marry the woman he loved than of the wife he'd lost.

Diana herself, according to The Guardian's report on the book, told a friend on the eve of her wedding that Charles said he was happy to marry her but not in love with her.

India McTaggart, a royal correspondent for The Telegraph, told NBC News the palace may be trying to get ahead of the memoir's other claims. "Earl Spencer's book is expected to contain a number of incendiary claims," she said.

Buckingham Palace has declined to respond to Spencer's latest comments, according to BBC News.

Tuesday, September 22. That's when "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister" hits shelves, Cosmopolitan reported.

Asked which version of events the public should believe, Spencer told BBC News: "I'm telling the truth."