‘He falls in love very intensely’: Has ladies’ man Earl Spencer finally met his match?

His union with sensible-seeming archaeologist Cat Jarman is the latest chapter of the aristocratic soap opera that is the Earl’s love life

Who knew that discussing Mao Zedong, the Bermuda Triangle and Kaiser Wilhelm’s pet dachshunds would prove such an aphrodisiac? Love has blossomed between Earl Spencer and archaeologist Professor Catrine “Cat” Jarman, co-hosts (along with the Reverend Richard Coles) since February 2023, of highbrow history podcast The Rabbit Hole Detectives.
The Earl, 60, confirmed their romance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Wednesday, stating that the “brilliant” Jarman, 42, is now his partner. He said they were introduced by their mutual publisher and reunited when “she came to dig up a Roman villa on some land I’ve got”, which doubles as an excellent humblebrag and unusual meet-cute. 
In 2021, the striking blonde archaeologist visited the Earl’s ancestral home, the Grade I-listed Althorp, in Northamptonshire – both the place where he grew up with sister Princess Diana, and her final resting place. Jarman was searching for the medieval village of Ollethorp for a Channel 4 documentary. The Earl took to X (formerly Twitter) to post a picture of them together, with Jarman wielding what he called a “terrifying Mattock”.
Although that particular find in Althorp’s 13,000-acre grounds still eludes Jarman, the Earl proudly boasted on Good Morning Britain that she had been named Nordic Person of the Year 2024, which “sounds like an Alan Partridge title”, he admitted, but was still a great achievement since it normally goes to “someone like Sven-Goran Eriksson or a composer”.
Jarman was born in Norway and completed her doctorate in Viking archaeology at Bristol University. She appeared on the BBC Two programme Digging Up Britain and has published two historical works. The Earl is also an author, his most recent work a revealing 2024 memoir, A Very Private School. 
The pair were spied out on the town together in June attending a performance of satirical West End musical The Book of Mormon. Speaking to The Times earlier this month, Spencer addressed speculation about their growing closeness by teasing that they were “close enough”, while Coles jokingly compared the podcast-fostered amour to the frequent affairs on Strictly Come Dancing. 
Now the besotted Earl has made it official, could this meeting of minds finally spell happiness for the notorious ladies’ man? Their very green relationship has a major test on the horizon in the form of an acrimonious court battle. On October 10, Jarman lodged a High Court claim against the Earl’s third wife, Countess Spencer, for alleged misuse of private information. Jarman is being represented by the legal firm Simons Muirhead Burton, while the countess currently appears to be representing herself.
It certainly appears to have been a fast transition: the Earl only announced his separation from Canadian philanthropist Karen Gordon in April and confirmed in June that they were divorcing following a 13-year marriage. 
To oversee proceedings, he has hired Belgravia lawyer Baroness Fiona Shackleton, known variously as the “demon negotiator” and the “steel magnolia”. She represented Prince Charles during his divorce from the Earl’s sister, Diana, in 1996, and her other high-profile clients have included Prince Andrew, Madonna and Paul McCartney. Queen Elizabeth II made her a life peer in 2010. Jarman meanwhile is reportedly separated from her husband, with whom she has two children.
It’s a fascinating new chapter in the extremely colourful story that is the Earl’s love life, which involves seven children from three marriages. Richard Barber, author of the book Earl Spencer: Saint or Sinner?, says: “He falls in love very intensely. He’s not a man who likes to be on his own – so there might well be an area of overlap between relationships. He’s a very dramatic figure.”
As a young man, notes Barber, the Earl was well aware of his family’s status as one of the oldest in the country, and the fact that made him an extremely eligible bachelor. “He apparently told a News of the World reporter in the early 80s: ‘Mothers always push their daughters at me, usually something fat that rides.’”
Perhaps the fact that Jarman is also a public figure will help her deal with the inevitable attention that comes with dating the Earl. As Barber quips: “His romantic history is an endless source of column inches.”
The Earl married his first wife, glamorous fashion model Victoria Lockwood – who Ralph Lauren once described as “the most beautiful girl in the world” – in some style in September 1989. Lockwood wore a Tomasz Starzewski-designed wedding dress complete with a Russian sable trim, the Prince and Princess of Wales were among the guests, and Prince Harry acted as a pageboy. The Spencers had four children: Kitty, twins Eliza and Katya, and the Earl’s heir apparent, Louis, Viscount Althorp.
However, this seeming fairy tale quickly turned sour. At a birthday party in the early 1990s, the Earl allegedly said in a speech that his father had advised him to marry a woman who’d stick with him through thick and thin. He then uttered “the deathless phrase,” says Barber, “‘We all know Victoria is both those things.’” 
Lockwood said she then discovered that her husband was having an affair with journalist Sally Ann Lasson a mere six months after Kitty’s birth. “It turned me overnight from a deeply contented, first-time mother to a hurt, scared and devastated mother,” she said. 
Spencer allegedly confessed the affair to the Daily Mail, describing it as “a second one-night stand, four years after the first”, in a bid to pre-empt a tell-all piece by Lasson in his tabloid nemesis the News of the World.
It was reported that the Earl told Lockwood their marriage was over while he was sitting in the bath.
Lockwood also revealed that she had been dealing with an addiction to heroin and alcohol and with anorexia and bulimia – and that her sister-in-law had been a vital support. “I suppose Diana and I had quite a bit in common with our eating disorders and broken marriages,” Lockwood said.
Their marriage ended in 1995, and a bitter, multi-million-pound divorce battle ensued. Among her allegations of mistreatment in a 28-page document, reports Barber, was the claim that the Earl was “domineering”, and that he became “intolerant and angry and increasingly criticised, undermined, bullied and belittled” her until she became “very scared of him”.  While describing her as “immature, incapable of dealing with a husband with a strong character except by going on hunger strike, an alcohol binge, or resorting to drugs”, Spencer admitted that he had been “a dreadful bully to Victoria”. “I’ve been callous and vicious, trying to force her out of my life,” he said. The divorce was finally settled in 1997, the year of Diana’s tragic death. Both parties agreed to withdraw allegations made against each other during the separation.
Marriage number two soon followed in December 2001, to his long-time friend Caroline Freud (previously married to publicist Matthew Freud). Caroline and the Earl had studied together at Oxford, and she had worked as a nursery teacher, just like his late sister. They had two children, Edmund and Lara. 
But once again, the union was dogged by infidelity and rancour. The Earl had an affair with American TV presenter Coleen Sullivan, who came to interview him about Princess Diana, and walked out on Caroline four months after Lara was born. Shocked and furious, she reportedly emailed their mutual friends and family demanding that they choose sides; no one could stay in touch with them both after such an acrimonious split.
Could the third time be the charm? In June 2011, the Earl married Karen Gordon, founder of charity Whole Child International, in the grounds of Althorp. The pair had met the previous year on a blind date at a Los Angeles restaurant, and went on to have a daughter, Charlotte.
In 2020, the Earl enthused: “Neither of us has found happiness like this before.” He praised his wife for her support while he wrote his traumatic memoir, which detailed his alleged sexual abuse by an assistant matron while at boarding school Maidwell Hall in the 1970s. But this year saw the marriage collapse. In June, the Earl described it as “immensely sad”.
However, writing the book seems to have led to some soul-searching about how his childhood shaped his romantic relationships. The Earl reflected in his memoir that being sent away to boarding school meant he had “no understanding of intimacy”, and he told podcast Therapy Works in March that his abuse led to him being drawn to “good-looking people who weren’t really into love.”
His parents’ break-up was formative, too, believes Barber. “Charles was three when his mother, Frances, left [his father] Johnnie. Charles was told that she’d gone on holiday but she never returned. No mother was present during Charles’s formative years except, as he said in Diana’s funeral address, at the end of long train journeys.” Frances was “unfairly demonised as ‘The Bolter’”, continues Barber. “But God, wouldn’t you have bolted from Johnny Althorp: he was a bully.”
However, the young Earl was also his father’s longed-for son and heir, so he experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect, observes Barber. “He would have hero-worshipped his father, as head of the family, but absorbed that this bullying behaviour is how you treat women.”
Unsurprisingly, the Earl has a fractious relationship with several of his children. He did not attend the weddings of daughters Kitty or Amelia in 2021 and 2023 respectively.
Will this latest divorce, and court case, deepen those divides with his offspring, or will his union with the sensible-seeming Jarman – plus that therapeutic process of memoir-writing – give him a chance to rewrite history? With the latest instalment of this aristocratic soap opera being written before our eyes, surely it won’t be long until we find out.
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