Prince Harry says he felt 'guilt' following Princess Diana's death
Prince Harry says he felt ‘guilt’ walking outside Kensington Palace following Princess Diana’s death and reveals he and Prince William ‘were unable to show emotion’ when they met mourners
- Harry’s emotional recollection came in a trailer for an upcoming ITV interview
- The Duke said that he cried once in the wake of his mother’s death – at her burial
- ‘Harry: The Interview’ will be broadcast at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday
The Duke of Sussex has described the guilt he felt while walking outside Kensington Palace following his mother’s death.
In a clip from Harry: The Interview, which will be broadcast at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday, Harry speaks about his memories of meeting mourners following the death of his mother, the Princess of Wales, in 1997.
The Duke said he and William were unable to show any emotion as they met the mourners.
‘Everyone thought and felt like they knew our mum, and the two closest people to her, the two most loved people by her, were unable to show any emotion in that moment,’ he tells presenter Tom Bradby.
Undated handout screengrab issued by ITV of the Duke of Sussex (left) during an interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby in California, US, for the programme Harry: The Interview
Undated handout screengrab issued by ITV of Prince Harry and Prince William meeting mourners following the death of their mother Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997
He continues: ‘Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing the night my mother died.’
Harry also says that he cried once in the wake of his mother’s death – at her burial.
‘I cried once, at the burial, and you know I go into detail 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.’
Harry went on to describe feeling the mourners’ tears on their hands when he shook them outside Kensington Palace in 1997 following Diana’s death.
‘There were 50,000 bouquets of flowers to our mother and there we were shaking people’s hands, smiling,’ he says.
‘I’ve seen the videos, right, I looked back over it all. 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.’
‘I cried once, at the burial, and you know I go into detail about how strange it was and how actually there was some guilt that I felt,’ Harry says
Prince Harry (pictured with William and now-King Charles at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997) has recalled the moment he was told about his mother’s death by his father, whom he claims did not hug him while breaking the news
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In a separate teaser for an interview with Good Morning America, Harry added that the ‘rift’ in his relationship with his brother would make his mother ‘sad’
In his new autobiography ‘Spare’, Harry also revealed that his father did not hug him when he broke the news that Diana had been in a car accident.
The Duke, 38, writes about how the King sat him down on the bed to break the news of the car accident, calling him ‘my dear son’ as he told how Diana had sustained head injuries that didn’t look likely to improve.
He writes: ‘What I do remember with stunning clarity is that I did not cry. Not a tear. My father did not hug me.’
Harry recalls how the King ‘examined the folds of the old quilts, blankets, and sheets’ on the bed while breaking the terrible news.
As it dawned how grave his mother’s condition was, he recalls ‘silently begging my father, or God, or both’ that it wasn’t true.
Charles told him that there had been ‘complications’ with Diana’s condition after she had been ‘seriously wounded’ in the crash.
Harry recalls asking to go and visit his mother in the hospital, before Charles explained she ‘hasn’t recovered any more’.
After his father left, The Duke said he sat by himself while his brother William, whom he affectionately calls ‘Willy’, sat in a separate room.
Undated handout screengrab issued by ITV of the Duke of Sussex (left) during an interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby in California, US, for the programme Harry: The Interview
Undated handout screengrab issued by ITV of Prince Harry (left) and Prince William meeting mourners following the death of their mother Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997
Harry (pictured with Princess Diana and Prince William in 1995) recalls asking to go and visit his mother in the hospital, before Charles explained she ‘hasn’t recovered any more’
Prince Harry’s highly anticipated memoir is set to be released on January 10, but copies have already been leaked
Harry claims his memory has undergone ‘decades of effort to reconstruct that morning’, but after all this time he has come to an ‘inescapable conclusion’ – that he stayed alone in the room until 9am the following morning when the piper began to play outside.
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Harry’s heartbreaking recollection of his mother’s death comes as one of many explosive claims from Spare, his long-anticipated memoir which is set for release in the UK on Monday 10 January.
The emotive passage comes after Harry speaks about Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed after he and William had met him while on holiday with their mother in St Tropez.
Harry recalls seeing his mother light up in Dodi’s presence as he described the filmmaker as ‘cheeky’ and ‘nice’.
He reflects on a conversation he had with William about their mother’s new partner – and how they both agreed that, as long as she was happy, then they were happy for her.
Elsewhere in the book, Harry relives his memory of the days following his mother’s death and how he battled with himself to accept the truth of the situation.
He recalled how he and William were forbidden from watching the TV so they could be shielded from news reports about the car crash.
After Diana’s sisters had gone to France to identify her body, Harry recalls being reunited with his father and aunties in London, at which point Aunt Sarah (Lady Sarah McCorquodale) handing each brother a little blue box which contained a lock of Diana’s blonde hair.
Harry recalled not believing the hair belonged to his mother, and convincing himself it was someone else’s so he did not have to come to terms with the reality of her death.
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