It was a thunderclap that fell on Buckingham Palace on August 31, 1997 on learning of the death of Lady Diana. The Princess of Wales has just lost her life following a car accident in the middle of the night under the Alma bridge, in the heart of Paris. A heart massage was not enough to revive the one who recently shared Charles’ life. In the midst of a conspiratorial controversy, Prince Harry barely understands the event that upsets the crown. In his memoir, The Substitute, the Duke of Sussex recalls shocking paparazzi photos revealing “the back of [his mother’s] head, slumped in the back seat”. “I think at that time I was looking for evidence that it had really happened,” Lady Diana’s son told ITV today. Proof that she had been in the car, that she had been injured.”
Prince Harry confides: “I was also looking for pain because at that time, I was still quite insensitive to all that. It was, again, my body, my nervous system in a way, which has stopped.” A memory more than twenty years old still comes to mind, that of Charles breaking into his room at Balmoral to whisper in his ear: “My darling, mum had a car accident “. The young 12-year-old would then have waited for his father to reassure him about his mother’s state of health. But the Prince of Wales “did not”. Harry would only mourn his mother once, at her funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997.
This photo of Prince Harry that Lady Diana took away
The streets of London were “invaded by the most immense crowd that this immemorial city has ever seen”, recalls Prince Harry. He then walks headlong alongside his older brother William and his father. No overflow of emotion is allowed. The crown requires dignity and restraint. Harry is all the more difficult to contain his tears as “certain witnesses” have reported to him having a photo of him and his brother in the hands of his mother in the coffin which precedes him. “Perhaps the only two men she had really loved, comments the” Substitute “in his memoirs. Those she had loved the most in any case, without the slightest doubt.” Harry will go years later to the scene of the accident. “It was a very bad one, he writes. I had had many bad ideas in 23 years, but this one was particularly unhealthy.” The Alma bridge remains to this day a place of pilgrimage and meditation for admirers of Lady Diana.
Prince Harry © Backgrid USA / Bestimage
