Prince William only agreed to walk behind Diana’s coffin if grandad Philip did it too
THE death of Diana in 1997 plunged the Royal Family into chaos.
It drew millions on to the streets, exposed the divisions within British society and unleashed an outpouring of public anger against the monarchy that threatened its stability.
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If in life Diana had been troublesome and difficult, in death she proved a force beyond control, which drove the Queen and Prince Philip to despair as they saw everything they had worked so hard for come close to being destroyed.
The Royal Family, holidaying at Balmoral that summer, had no inkling of the crisis about to overwhelm them when they received the news that Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris.
The Queen and Philip were stunned and shocked. They were aware of the problems Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed was causing but they never expected it to spiral out of control in such a dramatic way. Now they were about to find out just how potent a symbol Diana had become.
The Queen was bewildered and caught up by the mood of suspicion as to what had caused the accident.
Her first comment upon being told of Diana’s death was: “Someone must have greased the brakes.”
It was an extraordinary remark and astounded her staff when they came to hear of it. She was most probably referring to the possibility, long mooted, that one of Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed’s many enemies had contrived the killing of his eldest son and the princess he was urging Dodi to marry.
REMARKABLE RESILIENCE
The Queen neither repeated nor offered any explanation for her comment and in the absence of any clarification, her staff chose to see it as an indication of just how shaken she had been by the turbulence of Diana’s life and sudden death.
Despite, or maybe because of, her agitation, it had to be business as usual, the Queen decreed. She asked that everyone should go to church at nearby Crathie that morning.
The only people exempted were Princes William and Harry. Both boys said they would go.
It was a sorrow-torn period for Diana’s sons. Yet staff noted that William, 15, and Harry, 12, showed remarkable resilience in the face of the tragedy.
Both boys behaved very much as Diana might have predicted. Harry, always matter-of-fact, appeared to take the loss in his young stride while William, on the verge of manhood and very much aware of his royal destiny, made the demanding effort of keeping his emotions to himself.
By then the Queen had dealt with ten Prime Ministers, starting with Sir Winston Churchill. She had got on well with some, less well with others, and the current occupant of 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair, fell firmly into the latter category.
On the Sunday, Blair issued a statement which declared Diana “the People’s Princess”.
The Queen was not amused, to put it mildly. She disliked the title and the implicit challenge it posed to her position as the Queen of all her people.
In London, the Blair admin-istration could see what the Royal Family, out of touch in rural Scotland, could not: The mass hysteria her demise had caused.
By contrast, the Royal Family demanded the right to grieve for one of their own in privacy.
The funeral, the Queen decided, should be a small, family affair at Windsor, followed by a burial in the graveyard at Frogmore, where successive generations of the Royal Family, with the exception of the reigning monarch and their consorts, are laid to rest. (Since Queen Victoria’s time, kings and queens have been buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.)
The situation, however, was being torn from their grasp. In London, the crowds of mourners were perilously close to turning into a mob.
Reflecting the changing mood, the Queen realised there would have to be a full-blown funeral at Westminster Abbey, so plans were made for a meeting between the Spencer family, Charles’s staff and the Queen’s men.
There was a disagreement about what role the boys would play at the funeral, if any. The Queen and Philip were opposed to them being involved, as they were in shock.
Philip’s voice boomed over the phone: “Stop telling us what to do with those boys! They’ve lost their mother! You’re talking about them as if they are commodities. Have you any idea what they are going through?!”
Prince Philip had virtually lost his own mother at the age of ten when she was committed to an asylum in Switzerland. He also lost his favourite sister and her family in an air crash in 1937 when he was 16.
So to some extent he understood what William and Harry were suffering. They both loved their grandpa. They took no notice of his gruffness and acerbic comments. They just liked being around him and during that strange, surreal week they were glad of his reassuring presence.
Over the Queen’s objections, Diana’s brother Lord Charles Spencer insisted she be buried not at Frogmore but at the family home of Althorp, Northants. He said he should be the only one to walk behind the princess’s cortege.
COMFORTING ARM
In a mark of respect to an ex-wife and a departed mother, Prince Charles wanted to walk behind the cortege with William and Harry beside him.
Another row ensued, which Spencer ended by hanging up on the Prince.
This was one point on which the Royal Family were not prepared to give way, however. It was made clear to Spencer the Prince and his sons would walk behind the gun carriage bearing the coffin.
The next difficulty was persuading William to join his father, uncle and brother in the slow walk from St James’s Palace to West-minster Abbey. At first, William flatly refused.
Charles pleaded with him and said it would be utterly wrong of him not to accompany them. The Prince — never comfortable in the eye of a crowd, and certainly not one so charged with emotion, looking at his every gesture — replied he simply didn’t want to.
Philip weighed into the argument and eventually William agreed to take part, but only on the condition his grandfather walked beside him.
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Diana had grown to dislike Prince Philip intensely — and he her. But William was devoted to the old man. Philip, in turn, was immensely fond of his grandson.
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William wanted his grandfather at his side in what was certain to prove the most harrowing public engagement he would ever endure.
Philip readily agreed and as the cortege trundled under Admiralty Arch, it was Philip who put a comforting arm around William’s shoulder.
