His infant brother, John, was born four years before him, but died ten hours after his birth, thus leaving Charles as the eventual heir to the earldom.

[1] Spencer was three years old when his parents' troubled marriage ended in divorce due to his mother's affair with Peter Shand Kydd.

[5] Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at the age of just eight, how he was inflicted with beatings to the point of drawing blood and shares that he witnessed punishments including cutting naked "buttocks [of young children] several times with a cane and carrying on".

In an extract, Spencer detailed the sexual assaults and beatings he experienced at Maidwell, saying the school "sewed demons into the linings of the souls" of the abuse victims.

The boarding school Maidwell Hall has reported itself to the council following Spencer's accusations,[2][6][7] and in June 2024, Northamptonshire Police announced they had begun an investigation.

[10][11] On 31 August 1997, his older sister Diana died after a car crash in Paris and Spencer delivered the eulogy at her funeral service held at Westminster Abbey six days later.

[16] On several occasions, Spencer has been accused of refusing to allow his sister Diana to live in a cottage on the Althorp estate, despite her request at the height of her emotional difficulties.

[17] These allegations have repeatedly been proven to be untrue, as seen in an apology published by The Times in 2021, admitting that "having considered his sister's safety, and in line with police advice, the Earl offered the Princess of Wales a number of properties included Wormleighton Manor [in Warwickshire], the Spencer family's original ancestral home".

At this stage, Spencer began writing a series of books dealing with the estate itself and with his family history, beginning with an account of his ancestral home, Althorp: the Story of an English House, published in 1998.

Speakers at the annual event have included the authors Bill Bryson, Helen Fielding, Antonia Fraser, and Boris Johnson.

[21] In 2023, he began presenting the podcast The Rabbit Hole Detectives with Richard Coles and Cat Jarman, in which each of them is given an obscure topic and then they discuss their findings.