Prince Harry reveals the emotional moment in his memoir ‘Spare’ on the anniversary of Diana’s funeral.
The Duke of Sussex made the stunning revelation in his 2023 memoir where he looked back on the emotional day Princess Diana was laid to rest.
Prince Harry was 12 and his brother Prince William was 15 when their beloved mother died, and they famously walked behind the casket during the funeral procession.
In ‘Spare,’ the 40-year-old Duke of Sussex notes that his tears ‘nearly’ began to fall when Elton John began his tear-inducing rendition of “Candle in the Wind” during Diana’s funeral at Westminster Abbey.
“I can’t be sure the notes in my head are from that moment or from clips l’ve seen since. Possibly they’re vestiges of recurring nightmares. But I do have one pure, indisputable memory of the song climaxing and my eyes starting to sting and tears nearly falling,” Prince Harry wrote.
However, the waterworks didn’t fully appear until he was at his mother’s burial site on the Althorp House grounds.
Prince Harry says, “When the hearse finally got to Althorp, the coffin was removed again and carried across the pond, over a green iron bridge hastily positioned by military engineers, to a little island, and there it was placed upon a platform. Willy and I walked across the same bridge to the island.”
“It was reported that Mummy’s hands were folded across her chest and between them was placed a photo of me and Willy, possibly the only two men who ever truly loved her. Certainly, the two who loved her most,” he wrote.
“For all eternity we’d be smiling at her in the darkness,” he said, reflecting that envisioning this as the flag on her coffin was removed and her coffin was lowered into the ground was what “finally broke me.”
“My body convulsed and my chin fell, and I began to sob uncontrollably into my hands,” Prince Harry wrote. “I felt ashamed of violating the family ethos, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer.”
Princess Diana died on Aug. 31, 1997, at age 36, from a car accident in Paris as photographers pursued the vehicle she was traveling in, and her funeral was held a week later on Sept. 6, 1997.