Seeking harmony, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office had drawn up variable plans envisaging two, three or even four mourners walking in the first rank behind Diana’s coffin – on the assumption that Prince Charles and Earl Spencer would definitely walk, accompanied by neither brother (two), either brother (three) or both William and Harry (four).
In the event there were five. As William shied away that evening from the ill-feeling between his uncle and his father, and while Harry remained fearful and undecided, Prince Philip – who had never been scheduled to walk – intervened.
‘If I walk,’ he asked his grandson, ‘will you walk with me?’
‘No child should have to do that in any circumstances,’ the adult Harry would say in an interview two decades later – then changed his mind when challenged by a subsequent interviewer. Thinking further, the prince agreed that he was happy to have taken up his grandfather’s unexpected invitation. What was the alternative – to have been driven in the limos with the ladies?
‘It wasn’t an easy decision,’ remembered William in 2017. ‘It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But we were overwhelmed by how many people turned out, I mean it was just incredible. It was that balance between duty and family – and that was what we had to do.
‘I think the hardest thing was that walk. It was a very long, lonely walk. But then again, the balance …’
There were two big speeches to be made in saying adieu to Diana, and Elizabeth II had to deliver the first of them – into the TV news live from Buckingham Palace at six that Friday evening. William and Harry watched it with the family on the TV set in a room nearby – and the thousands of people outside. The Queen was standing with her back to the Mall, so as she spoke the camera was also looking through the window behind her where people were coming and going, still laying their flowers.
‘Since last Sunday’s dreadful news,’ the Queen began, ‘we have all been trying in our different ways to cope … Disbelief, incomprehension, anger and concern for those who remain. We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your Queen, and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.’
The words ‘as a grandmother’ had come from Downing Street – from Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell.
‘Alastair was quite tentative about it,’ remembers the palace insider who took the call that morning after the draft had been sent to Downing Street. ‘He said, “the Prime Minister has only one comment, which is, would it be right for the Queen to say speaking as a grandmother?” We grabbed it and used it.’
‘I admired her and respected her,’ Elizabeth was saying, ‘for her energy and commitment to others and especially her devotion to her two boys. This week at Balmoral we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.’
Next morning at the funeral Charles Spencer made his own thoughts known – having delivered his first message by banning all tabloid journalists from Westminster Abbey. If Buckingham Palace had tried to do that, the outcry would have made it impossible – but there was no gainsaying an angry brother, uncle and indignant ninth earl.
‘Of all the ironies about Diana,’ Spencer began, ‘perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’
Cleverly, her brother claimed for Diana a title higher than saint. She had been ‘human’, he said, drawing attention to her ‘deep feeling of unworthiness’ which had helped her speak so directly to her vast ‘constituency of the rejected’. To judge how William and Harry have talked as adults about their mother, they were listening very attentively that morning to their Uncle Charles.
And what about the sting that lurked so wickedly in every Spencer tail? As the earl drew his address to a conclusion, he pledged on behalf of his two nephews’ ‘blood family’ – by which he meant the Spencers not the Windsors – that he would keep their souls singing so that they would not get ‘immersed by duty and tradition’. That they would not, in other words, end up as boring old stick-in-the-muds like their father Prince Charles, whose infidelity had betrayed Diana so cruelly from the start, and with whom the earl had been feuding all week.
Charles Spencer has always insisted that he meant no disrespect by what he said in Westminster Abbey that Saturday, 6 September 1997. A few days before the funeral, the earl had actually gone to try it out on his sister in the privacy of the chapel at St James’s Palace, reading his words aloud to her coffin.
‘I know people will think I’m some sort of fruitcake,’ he recalled twenty years later, ‘but I do remember hearing almost some sort of approval then – and then I realised actually I probably got the thoughts in order.’ Diana herself would surely have said much worse, and there was an anger in her younger brother’s tone that captured how millions were feeling that morning. The speech was greeted – astonishingly at a funeral – with a torrent of applause.
It started with the crowds watching on the big screens in the park. The clapping swept down
