Lord Fellowes was born at Sandringham in 1941. His father Sir William ‘Billy’ Fellowes was its estate manager from 1936 to 1964; and his mother Jane Fellowes, was the daughter of Brigadier General Algernon Ferguson, high sheriff of Northamptonshire.

He spent three years in the Army between 1960 and 1963 – and married Lady Jane Spencer in 1978, the elder sister of the late Princess Diana, who was a bridesmaid at their wedding.

In February 2008, during the British inquest into the death of the late Princess Diana, Lord Fellowes was forced to deny that he was in Paris directing a plot to kill her in 1997.

Lord Fellowes testified at the coroner’s inquest that he was in Norfolk in eastern England on the August night that Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed were killed in a fatal car accident in Paris.

British police concluded that the Paris crash was an accident and that there was no murder conspiracy or cover-up.

They agreed with French investigators that the couple’s driver Henri Paul, who also died, was over the legal limit for alcohol and driving too fast.