Prince Harry painfully admitted he didn’t cry when he was told of his mother Princess Diana’s death.
The 36-year-old, who was given the unofficial title of the People’s Princess, passed away in August 1997 following a terrifying car crash in Paris.
The crash happened early in the morning on August 31, and Diana was pronounced dead at around 4am, with her passing confirmed by the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. Harry recalled the moment he and big brother Prince William were told about their mother’s unexpected death in his memoir Spare, and revealed their father Charles struggled to deliver the news while at the royal residence in Balmoral.
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However, the young prince confessed he didn’t cry when his father told him of Diana’s death, and was left feeling emotionless as Charles failed to hug him or William. “What I do remember with startling clarity is that I didn’t cry. Not one tear. Pa didn’t hug me. He wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances, how could he be expected to show them in such a crisis? But his hand did fall once more on my knee and he said: ‘Its going to be OK,’” Harry wrote.
Looking back on the moment, Harry revealed that his father’s words were “so very untrue”, and said that Charles had told William, who was just 15, about Diana’s death first, and then sought out Harry to deliver the tragic and heartbreaking news. He described the moment he found out in painful detail, as he admitted he didn’t move from his bed for what seemed like hours. After Charles told him Diana had died, he “didn’t get up, I didn’t bathe, didn’t pee,” Harry recalled, and said he didn’t even call for his big brother to come and console him.
In an interview last year, the Duke of Sussex revealed he and William were unable to show emotion as they met with the crowds outside Kensington Palace the the days after Diana’s death. He told ITV’s Tom Bradby he had cried when his mother was buried, but did not cry again. “I cried once, at the burial, and you know I go into detail (in Spare) about how strange it was and how actually there was some guilt that I felt, and I think William felt as well, by walking around the outside of Kensington Palace,” he explained.
“There were 50,000 bouquets of flowers to our mother and there we were shaking people's hands, smiling… And the wet hands that we were shaking, we couldn't understand why their hands were wet, but it was all the tears that they were wiping away,” Harry sadly recalled.
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