Nearly three decades after Princess Diana's death, the silence that has long governed the relationship between the Spencer and Windsor families has broken open. Earl Spencer's new memoir, containing claims about King Charles's demeanor and words on the night Diana died in 1997, has drawn an unusually public rebuttal from Buckingham Palace—an institution that has historically preferred silence to self-defense. The dispute is less about a single conversation than about something far older and more contested: who holds the right to define what Diana's life, and death, meant.