What Nobody Said At Princess Diana’s Funeral — Until Now -ht
September 6th, 1997. The tenor bell of Westminster Abbey began tolling at 9:08 in the morning and within an hour more than a million people had lined the streets of London. By the time the service ended an estimated two to two and a half billion people worldwide had watched some portion of the broadcast delivered by more than 100 cameras and 300 reporters transmitted live to more than 180 countries.
In the United Kingdom alone 32 million people were watching. That’s 59% of the entire British population staring at a screen on a Saturday morning before most of them had finished their tea. A billion people watched. But the most important moment happened away from every camera in the building. Every element the world watched that day was the result of a fight.
The prayers, the route, the flag, the boys walking. What the world saw was the managed product of five days of argument between two families, a monarchy in freefall, and a government trying to hold public fury from turning into a constitutional crisis. What nobody saw was how close the whole thing came to being something else entirely.
Start with a fact that tells you everything about the institution’s relationship with Diana even in death. When she died in the early hours of August 31st, 1997 in a Paris tunnel, the palace had no funeral plan for her. Not because they were caught off guard by the timing, because she wasn’t a royal anymore.
Her divorce from Prince Charles had been finalized in August 1996. With it came the immediate stripping of her HRH title, Her Royal Highness, gone the same day by palace directive. From that point forward she was styled simply Diana, Princess of Wales, a title without the royal designation. A woman who was, in the language of protocol, no longer entitled to the full machinery of a royal send-off.
State funerals in Britain are reserved for monarchs or require specific parliamentary sanction for non-royals. Diana qualified for neither. So when the calls started arriving at Balmoral on the morning of August 31st, the royal family was in Scotland, the Lord Chamberlain’s office faced a genuine procedural void. There was no contingency plan for this.
No Diana file. The institution that had defined and then erased her status had made no provision for the possibility that the most famous woman in the world might die while still legally estranged from it. What they had instead was a different file entirely. Operation Tay Bridge was the code name for the long prepared funeral plan for Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, named for a bridge near Dundee, Scotland.
The plan had been rehearsed and refined for 22 years, updated and amended, waiting patiently for a woman who didn’t die until 2002 at the age of 101. That plan became the foundation for Diana’s funeral, which means the Queen Mother, who attended the September 6th service and would have recognized the structure of almost every element of it, was, in effect, watching a full dress rehearsal for her own ceremony.
The service they built from that template required a new designation, a royal ceremonial funeral. Not a state funeral, a category invented, essentially, to accommodate a woman the institution had spent the previous year legally erasing. The coffin was draped with the Prince of Wales standard with a white ermine border.
Diana retained precedence through her former marriage, so she was technically entitled to it. And it was lined with lead in the tradition of British royalty as all senior members are. That coffin weighed a quarter of a ton, 250 kg. The Welsh Guards who carried it were bearing 550 lb. The Los Angeles Times, reporting on September 5th as the week was still unfolding, captured the problem cleanly.
“It’s easier,” one analyst told the paper, “to bury a queen than a maverick princess.” They were about to find out exactly how much harder it was. The royal family was still at Balmoral on September 1st, still at Balmoral on September 2nd. The Queen had made a decision that seemed reasonable in private and became ruinous in public.
She would stay in Scotland to be with her grandsons. William was 15, Harry was 12. Their grandparents had taken them to church on the morning their mother’s death was announced trying to give them the ritual of normalcy while their world was disintegrating underneath them. Outside Buckingham Palace flowers were already arriving and the flag over the palace was flying at full mast.
There was a protocol reason for this. Buckingham Palace only flies a flag when the sovereign is in residence and no standing convention existed for lowering it at half mast for a divorced non-royal. The palace could cite chapter and verse for why they weren’t doing it. But to a public already raw with grief, the full mast flag didn’t read as protocol.
It read as indifference made architectural, permanent, visible, towering indifference. The newspapers didn’t wait. The Daily Express ran its headline on September 4th, “Show us you care.” The Daily Mirror went further. The Sun matched them. Multiple tabloids in those same days pointing the same accusation at a family still sitting in Scotland.
“Where is our queen?” The phrase hung over every broadcast, every edition, every radio phone-in from London to Edinburgh. Meanwhile, the planning machinery was grinding forward in multiple directions at once. Documents were being drafted by the Lord Chamberlain’s office and faxed north to Balmoral, hundreds of miles by fax in 1997, between men in formal offices and a family in a Scottish castle trying simultaneously to govern an institution and grieve two children.
Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s Deputy Private Secretary, who had traveled to Balmoral with the royal family, became the key liaison between the palace and the Spencer family. Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press secretary, documented a conference call with Janvrin and the Lord Chamberlain in his diaries.
A call in which the logistics, the optics, and the raw politics of the week were all being managed in the same breath by people who had never faced anything remotely like this. The two families were fighting simultaneously on several fronts. The Spencer family objected to references to the royal family in the service. The palace pushed back insisting on its own terms.
The nickname Tony Blair had introduced in his statement on August 31st, delivered outside his Sedgefield constituency church, visibly emotional, standing in the rain alongside his wife and children, had become politically loaded. Blair had told the country that Diana was the people’s princess and that’s how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.
It was a phrase his press secretary, Alistair Campbell, later claimed involvement in coining. The Spencers considered it Diana’s. The palace considered it an intrusion of New Labour sentiment into a royal ceremony. The argument over those two words, people’s princess, took up hours of negotiation time that the week didn’t have to spare.
By Wednesday, September 3rd, with public pressure mounting by the hour, Buckingham Palace bowed. The word used in a Los Angeles Times report from that day is bowing and agreed to double the route of the funeral procession. What had been planned as a more contained route was extended to 3 and 1/2 miles from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey giving the crowds who had come from across Britain and the world the chance to see the coffin pass.
Prince Charles and Tony Blair had jointly argued the case to the Queen. The public needed this procession, needed to be part of it, needed the street as their church. The Queen agreed. The route doubled. Then came a security fear that almost no one has discussed publicly. Campbell’s diaries record that St. James’s Palace was genuinely frightened for Prince Charles’s safety during the procession.
Officials believed there was a real possibility he would be physically attacked by members of the crowd. The depth of public anger toward Charles in the days after Diana’s death wasn’t a media construction. It was documented in security assessments. The decision to ensure he would be closely flanked by his sons, by Philip, was made partly with that threat in mind.
The father walking behind his ex-wife’s coffin in front of a million people needed to be kept safe from the million people. On the morning of September 4th, documents were sent to the Lord Chamberlain from the planning committee and then faxed to Balmoral where the Queen and Janvrin were working through the remaining decisions.
Robert Lacey in his biography Monarch, The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II, pinpoints that Thursday morning as a key moment, the day when the broad structure of the ceremony finally came together, shaped from thousands of miles of fax lines and conference calls between people managing a grief that none of them had been trained for.
September 5th was the day the public story broke open. The Queen returned to London from Balmoral. A child offered her a bouquet of flowers at the gates of Buckingham Palace. The Queen accepted it. That same day, The Times of London carried the line that summed up everything. The Queen bowed to public pressure over her response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, yesterday by announcing that she would broadcast to the nation.
She gave a live television address that evening. It was the first time she had addressed the nation from Buckingham Palace on the evening before a funeral. And the Union Flag went to half-mast. The Independent described it as two protocol breaks occurring simultaneously. It was the first time the Union Flag had ever been flown over Buckingham Palace at all.
That flag had not flown there before in all the decades of the Queen’s reign. And then it was immediately lowered to half-mast. Dickie Arbiter, the palace’s press secretary, who had served since 1988 and would serve until 2000, later wrote about walking toward the Abbey the next morning and watching it. A man who had spent more than a decade managing royal presentation, witnessing the institution break two of its own protocols at once, on the same morning, at the same flagpole, because it had run out of options.
Witnesses described the Queen arriving back in London looking, in one account, with something close to an uptight scowl. A woman who understood, as Tony Blair later observed, the enormity of what was happening, but wasn’t going to be seen to be pushed by it. The bow she made as the coffin passed in front of Buckingham Palace on September 6th, a brief, visible dip of the head, breaking the convention of sovereign composure, was captured in photographs.
Millions of people have seen it without knowing what it cost. By September 4th and 5th, underneath all of this, the argument over the boys had become the most explosive fight of the entire week. Someone, the record doesn’t establish precisely who first proposed it formally, suggested that William and Harry walk behind their mother’s coffin through the streets of London, behind the gun carriage, past the million people lining the route, through the full 3 and 1/2 mile procession to Westminster Abbey, with every camera in
the world on them. William was 15. Harry was 12. Earl Spencer, Diana’s younger brother, was violently opposed. In the years since, he has been consistent and specific about this. He told the BBC he called the decision bizarre and cruel. He said he was told by a palace courtier that his nephews wanted to walk, that they had asked for it, and that he later concluded he had been lied to.
He said he still had nightmares about it years later. It was far worse than having to deliver a speech at the end of it. In his 2023 memoir Spare, Prince Harry recalled that his uncle had been furious, that Spencer had apparently screamed at those who were pushing for it, calling the whole proposal barbaric. Spencer’s language in retrospect, in multiple interviews, was always some version of cruel, bizarre, horrifying.
The word he used in the heat of the argument, and the word he used publicly years later, may not be identical, but the position wasn’t. The royal family’s counter-argument, as Tina Brown documents in The Palace Papers, was partly dynastic and partly practical. The sight of three generations of royal males walking behind the coffin would make a statement about continuity, about the monarchy’s ability to absorb this and endure.
From the Crown’s point of view, the image was necessary. It was also, as multiple accounts make clear, partly motivated by the security concern around Charles. Courtiers worried that if Spencer walked alone and Charles rode in a car, the opportunity for something to go wrong with the crowds was greater. The boys weren’t enthusiastic.
Prince Charles, according to Tina Brown’s account, had such a poisoned relationship with Spencer by this point that Spencer had refused to ride in the same car as him. They would need to walk. And Spencer’s presence beside his nephews, rather than beside his ex-brother-in-law, made the question of who exactly would walk and where a matter of family politics as much as public ceremonial.
An alternative plan was discussed. William would walk alone. Harry would ride in a car with his grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd. When that proposal reached Harry, as he recounts in Spare, he rejected it outright. “I didn’t want Willie to undergo an ordeal like that without me,” he wrote. “Had the roles been reversed, he’d never have wanted me, indeed allowed me, to go it alone.
” A 12-year-old making a protective decision for his older brother, generating one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. The question wasn’t settled until the evening of September 5th. Sir Malcolm Ross, the courtier who was responsible for planning the entire ceremony, confirms the timing in the ITV documentary Diana: The Day Britain Cried, which aired on the 20th anniversary in 2017 with the knowledge of William and Harry.
“I understand it was at a family supper on the Friday night at Buckingham Palace that the decision was made,” Sir Malcolm said. “The senior members of both families gathered for a meal the evening before the funeral. And it was there, around that table, that the last undecided question of the week was resolved.
” Philip had been vocal during the planning process in a way that surprised some of those involved. Angie Hunter, Blair’s government relations director, later recalled a moment during the week in which Philip’s voice came through with unexpected anguish. His words, as she remembered them, “It’s about the boys. They’ve lost their mother.
” Not a procedural argument, not a dynastic calculation, the voice of a grandfather whose own mother had effectively disappeared from his life when he was 10 years old, when Princess Alice was committed to a psychiatric institution and he was packed off to schools across Europe. At the supper on September 5th, after the discussion had gone around the table and the positions had been restated and the arguments had been made again, Philip turned to his grandsons.
The version of what he said that has been most consistently corroborated by Sir Malcolm Ross, by Angie Hunter, and by Princess Anne herself in an ITV interview given after Philip’s death in 2021, is this: “I’ll walk if you walk.” Princess Anne put it this way when asked about it. “I seem to remember him saying that in fact it was a question of if you’ll do it, I’ll do it.
That was him as a grandfather. If that’s what you want to do, and if you want me to be there, I will be there.” A 75-year-old man, a duke, a former naval officer, offering to walk 3 and 1/2 miles through the streets of London behind his former daughter-in-law’s coffin, so that two bereaved boys wouldn’t have to do it without someone beside them who loved them.
The gesture didn’t erase what had gone before, the complexity of Philip’s relationship with Diana, the coldness, the distance, the documented friction. It didn’t undo any of it, but in that room, on that evening, it was the thing that ended the argument. The following morning, September 6th, five of them took their places at St.
James’s Palace and waited for the gun carriage to move. Prince Charles, Earl Spencer, Prince Philip, Prince William, Prince Harry. Behind them, 500 representatives of charities Diana had supported. In front of them, the back of a lead-lined coffin weighing 250 kg, draped in the Prince of Wales Standard, carrying a letter from Harry in an envelope addressed to Mummy.
Harry later wrote about what he heard as they walked, not what he saw, what he heard. “Most of all, I remember the sounds,” he wrote in Spare, >> [snorts] >> “the clicking bridles and clipping hooves of the six sweaty brown horses, the squeaking wheels of the gun carriage they were hauling. I believe I’ll remember those few sounds for the rest of my life, because they were such a sharp contrast to the otherwise all-encompassing silence.
” He also remembered the moments that punctured that silence. Every so often, certain people in the crowd just unable to contain their emotion. William called it a long and lonely walk, “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” He let his fringe hang forward, covering his eyes. He called it his safety blanket.
He kept his gaze level, kept moving, and tried to process the thing he later admitted he couldn’t understand at the time. The millions of people weeping for someone they’d never met. “I couldn’t understand why everyone wanted to cry as loud as they did.” he said in 2017. “You didn’t even know her. Why and how are you so upset?” Only later did he come to understand what Diana had given people.
What it meant to be that kind of presence in the world. And what it cost. Spencer walked, too, and in interviews has described the sensation of that tunnel of grief pressing in from both sides, the wave of it. The instruction that they had to look straight ahead. The discipline of not reacting while something that felt like a crashing tide of emotion rolled toward him from the crowds.
“I still have nightmares about it now.” he said. As the cortege passed in front of Buckingham Palace, the Queen was standing outside, waiting. She bowed her head as the coffin went by. She had never done that for a coffin in her life. At 11:00, the ceremony inside Westminster Abbey began. 2,000 invited guests occupied the nave.
British political leaders, former Prime Ministers, including Margaret Thatcher, John Major, James Callaghan, and Edward Heath. Celebrities, representatives from Diana’s charities, international heads of state and their families. Hillary Clinton was there. Nelson Mandela was there. Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Elton John, who would shortly perform a rewritten version of Candle in the Wind with new lyrics Bernie Taupin had turned around from California in a matter of hours after Elton had first been told by the
Abbey’s musical director that the original lyrics, written as a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, were completely out of the question for a royal funeral. Tony Blair read from 1 Corinthians. “And now abideth faith, hope, love. These three. But the greatest of these is love.” Diana’s sisters gave readings.
The choir sang. And then, Earl Spencer stood at the pulpit. He had originally planned a completely different eulogy. The overnight flight back from South Africa, where he’d been living, was brutal. He described a flight attendant being kind to him because he was barely holding himself together. He went through his address book from A to Z, looking for someone else to give the speech.
He got to Z without finding anyone. He called his mother from Heathrow. Frances Shand Kidd told him it was going to be him. His sisters agreed. He drafted a traditional address. Stories from childhood, an account of Diana’s qualities, the kind of eulogy that would have been warm and appropriate and entirely forgettable. Then, the night before he was to deliver it, he discarded it.
“I realized that my job actually wasn’t to do that.” he later said on the Rosebud podcast hosted by Giles Brandreth. “But it was almost to speak for her.” He rewrote it in an hour and a half. He made one last edit before leaving for the Abbey. He removed what he called a rather unnecessary name-check to Rupert Murdoch.
He decided Murdoch didn’t deserve the publicity, even hostile publicity, from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. Everything else stayed in. Spencer had rehearsed the final version once. He read it aloud to Diana’s coffin in the chapel at St. James’s Palace the day before the funeral. He later wrote that at the conclusion, he heard what he described as a whisper that sounded like satisfaction in the sad, sad place.
The eulogy he delivered wasn’t the address anyone in the royal family expected to hear. He called Diana the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. He said she was someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.
He described her as the most hunted person of the modern age. He spoke of her vulnerability, her eating disorders, her instinct for the suffering of strangers. He praised her in ways that framed the institution around her by contrast as something cold and grinding. And then he reached the passage that Tina Brown, in The Palace Papers, described as a hand grenade aimed at every sitting member of the House of Windsor.
Speaking directly to Diana, to the coffin in front of him, Spencer pledged on behalf of her blood family, “I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls aren’t simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.
” Blood family. He drew the line himself in those words in front of 2 billion people. On one side, the Spencers. On the other, duty and tradition, the institution, the family that had, in Spencer’s framing, immersed Diana and would immerse her sons, too, if left unchecked. The New York Times editorial board, writing the following morning on September 7th, caught it immediately.
Their correspondent noted the distinction Spencer had made explicit. The Spencers, Diana’s blood family, against the family of her former in-laws. The Times said the speech would be chewed on by the British press and eventually the historians for a long time. That was September 7th, 1997. They were right. Spencer later said he had looked directly at William and Harry across the coffin while delivering the final paragraph.
He said he had run out of energy, almost out of oxygen by the end of it. He was punching each syllable out of the base of his stomach. Inside Westminster Abbey, the 2,000 guests sat in silence as he finished. Then from outside, from the crowds watching on screens in Hyde Park and in the streets, applause began. It swelled.
Because the doors of the Abbey had been left open during the service, the sound rolled through them. First, a ripple at the back of the nave, then a wave moving forward, and then the people in the pews were clapping, too. The sound traveling all the way down to the altar, reverberating off the stone, surrounding the coffin itself.
Westminster Abbey’s musical director, Martin Neary, was present throughout the service. He told the ITV documentary, “I felt great sympathy for what she had suffered. But at the same time, I was shocked by some of the things which were said. The princes actually applauded at the end, although the senior members of the royal family didn’t.
William clapped. Harry clapped. The Queen didn’t. Philip didn’t. Charles didn’t. Tina Brown wrote that nothing in the Queen and Philip’s lives of public service had shocked and outraged them more than Spencer’s address. They had sat in the front of Westminster Abbey, in front of 2 billion people, while a man at a microphone attacked their institution, promised to protect the heirs to their throne from their own values, and received a standing ovation from the crowd outside.
There was no response available. Protocol offered no mechanism for rebuttal inside a funeral. They sat. The applause continued. And then John Tavener’s Song for Athene began, echoing through the nave. And the coffin was carried out to half-muffled change ringing on the Abbey’s 10 bells. And the performance resumed.
After the service, Diana’s coffin was transferred to a hearse. The crowds who had been waiting for hours along the route threw flowers as it moved through London toward the M1 motorway. CNN reported the route north as nearly 80 miles, planned so that people along the way could see the car pass. People lined overpasses and road verges.
They threw flowers from bridges. Some drove alongside until the motorway police waved them back. The flowers landed on the roof and bonnet and windscreen, and the hearse drove through them slowly, carrying her north through the English Midlands, through Northamptonshire, toward the Spencer family’s ancestral home.
Althorp. Diana had grown up there, in that house, on those grounds, chasing butterflies across the gardens, feeding ducks, swimming in the ornamental lake. The place was part of her before she was anyone’s princess. When Earl Spencer made the burial decision, he had made it partly because of that.
Because it was hers before the world got hold of her. The original plan had been to bury her in the Spencer family vault at St. Mary’s Church in Great Brington, the village just down the road from the estate. It was where other Spencers were buried. It was the traditional choice. Spencer changed it because he was frightened.
Not of anything immediate, of the indefinite future, of the thousands and eventually millions of pilgrims who would come to a church in a small village and overwhelm it. Who would turn a grave into a destination? Who would make a private visit by two boys into a managed public event every single time? I wanted a place where William and Harry could come to their mother in private without cameras, without crowds, he later explained.
He chose the island. The ornamental lake at Althorp is called the Round Oval. It sits within the park’s pleasure gardens. A path lined with 36 oak trees, one for each year of Diana’s life, leads down to the water. Four black swans live on the lake. Water lilies grow there, which along with white roses had been Diana’s favorite flowers.
The lake is the same one she swam in as a girl. In the middle of the water is the island, small, private, tree-covered, a few yards across in every direction. The ground on the island was consecrated by the Bishop of Peterborough before the burial. On the afternoon of September 6th, 1997, a small group crossed to that island. Diana’s former husband was there.
Her sons were there, William and Harry, who had walked 3 and 1/2 miles through London that morning in front of the whole world and were now somewhere the whole world couldn’t see. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, was there. Her siblings, Earl Spencer and his sisters, were there. A close friend, a clergyman, that was the gathering.
Her body was clothed in a black long-sleeved three-quarter length woolen cocktail dress by Catherine Walker, a dress she had chosen herself some weeks before her death from among her wardrobe. A set of rosary beads had been placed in her hands. They were a gift she had received from Mother Teresa, who died 6 days after Diana on September 5th, while the palace was still negotiating flags and routes and prayers.
Also in her hands was a photograph of her sons. It had been in her handbag in Paris on the night of August 30th. It had been found in the wreckage. It had traveled with her through everything since, the hospital, the mortuary, the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace, the 5 days of lying in, the gun carriage, the Abbey, the hearse, the 80-mile journey north, and now here.
The burial party was provided by the 2nd Battalion of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, the Queens and Royal Hampshire’s. Diana had been the regiment’s colonel in chief from 1992 to 1996. It was they who carried her across the water to the island and laid her to rest. Paul Burrell, her former butler, later claimed that at some point during the ceremony, Earl Spencer removed the royal standard that had covered the coffin and replaced it with the Spencer family standard, saying, “She is a Spencer now.” Spencer denied this account,
calling it hurtful lies and stating the standard was removed as part of the ceremony by the Queen’s own officer in a pre-agreed manner. The dispute itself, two men in subsequent years arguing publicly over which flag covered a dead woman, says something about the depth of the war that the funeral had barely managed to contain.
No footage exists of any of this. The cameras had all gone dark before the hearse reached the motorway. No press was present at Althorp. No statement was issued about what was said, by whom, or in what order. The ceremony on the island has no public record in the sense that Westminster Abbey has one.
What we know is the outline. A handful of people on a small island in an ornamental lake in Northamptonshire in the late afternoon light of a September day, surrounded by 36 oak trees and four black swans and water lilies on water that a girl had once swum in, two boys who had walked through London that morning holding themselves together for a million strangers, now somewhere no camera could reach.
A man who had rewritten a speech the night before and delivered it in front of the world and was now standing at a graveside in silence. The silence was probably the loudest thing about it. Earl Spencer later removed the bridge across the Oval Lake. There is no longer a direct crossing from the path to the island for visitors. Anyone who comes to Althorp, and the estate has opened to the public seasonally in the years since, allowing people to view the lake and pay respects from the path, sees the water and the trees and the island at a distance.
The island itself remains unreachable. Spencer made it more unreachable after Diana was buried there, creating additional distance deliberately because that was the point. William and Harry have each spoken in separate interviews over the years of visiting Althorp privately. Neither has described the island burial in any detail.
What they have described, extensively, is the public walk, the managed walk, the negotiated walk. The walk that half the world watched. That they have given to the record. The burial they have kept. The Abbey service with its 2 and 1/2 billion viewers and its hundred cameras and its 2,000 carefully selected guests and its coded political eulogy, that was the product of the negotiations.
That was what 5 days of argument between two families and a government produced. Every moment the world remembers watching was the result of a fight that mostly happened on the phone, on fax lines, in rooms where the cameras weren’t. The route, the flag, the prayers, the boys walking, the speech that nobody pre-screened, or if they did, didn’t know what they were approving.
The world watched the product. Nobody saw the process. And when the process finally ended, when the last argument was settled, and the last camera went dark, and the last crowd thinned from the motorway bridges, Diana got something she had not had since she was a teenager on those grounds, privacy. Not managed, not negotiated, not contingent on anyone’s approval or institutional designation.
Actual privacy. The kind that doesn’t require a title or a category or a plan. The island sits in the middle of the water. The oaks mark the perimeter path. The swans move through the lilies. Nobody can reach it. Subscribe for more stories like this.