The Truth About the Royal Family's Reaction to Princess Diana's Death

Did King Charles Say Princess Diana Would Be Forgotten After Her Death? Palace Reacts to Claim

Recollections may vary all these years later, but there's no denying the wave of intense emotion that swept over Britain when Princess Diana died.

And while Queen Elizabeth II's priority as a grandmother was to protect Prince William and Prince Harry, her initial lack of public response to the tragedy did not go over well with those who were anxiously waiting to hear from Diana's former mother-in-law.

As a headline on the cover of The Express screamed, "SHOW US YOU CARE."

While the queen has proved more understandable in hindsight—Helen Mirren won an Oscar for 2006's The Queen, a whole movie about the monarch's response to Diana's death—at the time her silence was viewed as a gross misreading of the public temperature.

King Charles III was also admittedly startled by the public outpouring of grief, saying a year later, according to Sally Bedell Smith's 2017 biography Prince Charles, "I felt an alien in my own country."

"Rest assured,’” Charles said, according to a Daily Mail excerpt of Spencer's Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, "we’ll forget her soon enough!’”

That would have at least made Charles preposterously wrong, but the palace issued the rarest of statements pushing back against his former brother-in-law's claim, saying, "His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss.” 

Spencer didn't flinch, telling the BBC Sept. 18, "I can tell you here and now, those are exactly the words he said."

Diana was pronounced dead at 4 a.m. in Paris, 3 a.m. in Britain. Also killed was her boyfriend of barely a month, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul. Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was the only survivor.

Charles, who was at Balmoral with William and Harry, was told at 4:30 a.m. by the queen's deputy private secretary (and Diana's brother-in-law) Robert Fellowes that the princess had succumbed to her injuries at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital.

"He was absolutely distraught. He fell apart," The Diana Chronicles author Tina Brown said in the 2017 TV documentary Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors. "He knew, instantly, that this was going to be a terrible thing, that...he will be blamed, that they will be blamed, for the death of Diana."

"They," meaning the royal family.  

Tony Blair, who had only been prime minister for four months, addressed reporters that morning from his home constituency in County Durham.

While he was "utterly devastated," Blair said, "We are today a nation, in Britain, in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us."

He called Diana "a wonderful, and a warm, human being" whose own life "was often sadly touched by tragedy."

"You know how difficult things were for her from time to time, I'm sure we could only guess at," Blair continued, "but the people everywhere—not just here in Britain, everywhere—they kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the People's Princess. And that's how she will stay, how she will remain, in our hearts and in our memories, forever."

And Charles was caught in a precarious predicament when it came to mourning the death of his ex-wife.

They officially separated in 1992 (the queen's "annus horribilis") and their divorce had just been finalized in 1996, leaving Diana with the title of Princess of Wales and a Kensington Palace address, but she was no longer Her Royal Highness.

Charles wanted to take the royal aircraft to Paris to claim Diana's body. The queen initially said no, according to Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors, but eventually relented at her son's behest. Harry wanted to go with him, but Charles considered the boy, two weeks shy of his 13th birthday, too young.

"One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is tell your children that your other parent has died. How you deal with that, I don't know," Harry said of his father in the 2017 BBC documentary Diana, 7 Days. "But he was there for us. He was the one out of two left. And he tried to do his best and to make sure that we were protected and looked after. But he was going through the same grieving process as well."

Harry and William accompanied the queen to church that Sunday morning, where, under her direction, there was no mention of Diana during the service.

Charles went to Paris with Diana's sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Baroness Jane Fellowes. On their way back to the airport, following the hearse carrying Diana's casket, Charles reportedly said in the car to Michael Jay, the British ambassador to France, "It all seems unreal."

In retrospect, William said he was thankful to have had "the privacy to mourn, to collect our thoughts, and to just have that space away from everybody."

When they eventually returned to England, father and sons made the unprecedented move of flying together, usually a no-no for two future kings, but the queen approved the unorthodox travel arrangements.

"She felt very torn between being the grandmother to William and Harry, and her queen role," William recalled. "And I think she—everyone—was surprised and taken aback by the scale of what happened and the nature of how quickly it all happened."

But the fissures that had been forming between the royals and the public since even before Charles and Diana's separation were about to bust wide open.

"However," he continued, "I would say I always believed the press would kill her in the end." No less than every editor and publisher who'd profited from ill-gotten photos of Diana "has blood on his hands today."

Before they fatefully ended up at the Hôtel Ritz Paris on the night of Aug. 30, Dodi took Diana to another of his family's properties—the former Windsor villa in the Bois de Boulogne. But Diana was in no mood to commune with the spirits of the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and her ex-husband's disgraced great-uncle, the erstwhile King Edward VIII.

Photographers gathered outside the Ritz to await the couple's exit and a handful were pursuing them by car and motorbike when their chauffeured Mercedes slammed into a pillar inside the Pont de l'Alma tunnel.

"I think one of the hardest things to come to terms with," Harry grimly observed in Diana, 7 Days, "is the fact that the people that chased her, into the tunnel, were the same people that were taking photographs of her while she was still dying in the backseat of the car."

Any ambivalence that the press or the people felt toward the princess in her post-divorce era vanished when she died, instantly replaced by antagonism toward the royal family over what was perceived as a chilly response to the tragedy.

On Sept. 4, the queen's press officer issued a televised statement saying the family was "hurt" by suggestions that they were "indifferent" to the nation's sorrow, that their priority was caring for William and Harry. 

The queen also relented on the flag, allowing the Union Jack to fly at Buckingham Palace without her for the first time. Charles' younger brothers, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, were tasked with greeting the increasingly impatient crowd milling outside.

That evening, William and Harry, with their father and grandparents, ventured outside the Balmoral gates for the first time all week to see the pile of flowers and messages.

"We have all been trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings—disbelief, incomprehension, anger and concern for those who remain," the queen, dressed in black, said from Buckingham Palace. "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 monarch called Diana "an exceptional and gifted human being," who "never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness."

"I admired and respected her—for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for 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. No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her."

Neither William nor Harry really wanted to walk behind Diana's casket in the Sept. 6 funeral procession to Westminster Abbey the next day, but Prince Philip encouraged it.

"If you don't walk, you may regret it later," he told William, according to Bedell Smith's Prince Charles. "I think you should do it. If I walk, will you walk with me?"

Harry told Newsweek in 2017, "I don't think any child should be asked to do that under any circumstances. I don't think it would happen today." But he also said in Diana, 7 Days that he was "glad" to have done it.

William called that walk "one of the hardest things" he'd ever done, saying in the doc, "It felt she was almost walking along beside us to get us through it."

Charles Spencer told BBC Radio 4 in 2017 that he had objected strongly to the boys being asked to do it, calling the request "very bizarre and cruel."

"It was truly horrifying, actually," he added. "We would walk a hundred yards and hear people sobbing and then walk round a corner and somebody wailing and shouting out messages of love to Diana or William and Harry, and it was a very, very tricky time." 

And Diana's brother memorably seized the opportunity to unload in no uncertain terms on the forces that, from his perspective, had unofficially collaborated to wring the life out of his sister.

In the eulogy he delivered at Westminster Abbey, the earl said, "It is a tribute to her level-headedness and strength that despite the most bizarre life imaginable after her childhood, she remained intact, true to herself...I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling.

"My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, 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. She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry, from a similar fate, and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair."

Diana's "blood family," he continued, would do what they could "to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men, so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned."