The last few minutes of The Crown season six, episode four, fixates on a pair of young, grieving faces: Ed McVey’s Prince William and Fflyn Edwards’s Prince Harry. They march solemnly behind Princess Diana’s casket beside Dominic West’s Prince Charles and Jonathan Pryce’s Prince Philip, as millions of people in the crowd openly weep. “Why are they crying for someone they never knew?” William asks Philip. “They’re not crying for her,” he replies. “They’re crying for you.”
In an unusual creative decision, Peter Morgan then cuts from his critically acclaimed cast to archival footage of the real-life William and Harry trudging along The Mall outside Buckingham Palace, heads bowed in sadness. While The Crown often closely mirrors real-life events, Morgan makes a definitive point here: this scene was not exaggerated or sensationalised. It actually happened.
Prince Harry was 12 and Prince William was 15 when their mother, Princess Diana, died tragically in a car crash on 31 August 1997. The two boys, up at Balmoral in Scotland with their family, were told the next morning by their father.
The funeral took place on 6 September. The week before, the royal family found itself navigating an unprecedented situation: while Diana was no longer an official member of the monarchy, and therefore did not technically qualify for a state funeral, the public viewed her as such. “People everywhere, not just here in Britain, kept faith with Princess Diana,” Prime Minister Tony Blair remarked on 31 August. “They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the people’s princess, and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories forever.” A nation wanted to – perhaps needed to – mourn together. So, Buckingham Palace and Downing Street planned a royal ceremonial funeral.
A debate was quickly sparked around whether Prince Harry and Prince William should take part in the public procession to Westminster Abbey. The royal family, at first, was hesitant to thrust the two young boys into such a spotlight: “The events of that week in September 1997 were very sad, but as the spinners from Downing Street came to Buckingham Palace and started to kick around what roles Harry and William should play in the funeral, the Queen had relished the moment when Philip had bellowed over the speakerphone from Balmoral: ‘Fuck off,’” journalist Adam Boulton wrote in his book about the Blair premiership, Tony’s Ten Years.
Another plan suggested that the elder William walk without Harry. In his memoir, Spare, Harry recalls refusing to do so: “I didn’t want Willy to undergo an ordeal like that without me,” he wrote.
Eventually, Philip talked to the boys themselves. “I’ll walk if you walk,” he reportedly told them. So walk they did, flanked by Philip, Prince Charles, and Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer. Over 2.5 billion people watched them do so on television.
As adults, both men have spoken out about the deep pain this choice caused them – especially Harry. “My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television,” he told Newsweek in 2017. After he distanced himself from the royal family in 2020, he spoke more openly about the trauma: “The thing I remember the most was the sound of the horse’s hooves going along the Mall, the red brick road,” he said in the 2021 docuseries The Me You Can’t See. “By this point, both of us were in shock. It was like I was outside of my body. I’m just walking along and doing what was expected of me, showing one-tenth of the emotion that everybody else was showing.” Eventually, he admits, the pain caused by his mother’s death – and his subsequent suppression of it – led him to seek therapy.
In the 2017 documentary Diana, 7 Days, William told the BBC that the walk was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done”. He admitted that he kept his head down the entire time just to get through it. “I felt if I looked at the floor and my hair came down over my face, no one could see me.”
Do they regret doing it? The now Prince of Wales says it was a tough but necessary choice. “It wasn’t an easy decision, and it was a sort of collective family decision to do that. There is that balance between duty and family, and that’s what we had to do,” he told the BBC in 2017.
As for Harry? “I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances,” he said. “I don’t think it would happen today.” The Earl of Spencer, meanwhile, called the decision “bizarre and cruel”.
While The Crown is known for sensationalising real-life events, in this instance, it seems the truth was sad enough.
