On Saturday the 6th of September, 1997,
at twelve noon precisely,
Britain fell silent.
Together the country was remembering the life
of Diana, Princess of Wales,
following one of the most astonishing weeks
in modern British history.
The death of Diana was one of the greatest stories
of the second half of the 20th century.
It was a story that galvanized the world.
In just a few days, the nation was brought
to the edge of a collective nervous breakdown.
As grief turned into anger,
the royal family became the target.
They're the most cold people on this earth.
It's the first time I'd felt, ooh,
I wonder if this is what a civil war feels like.
I wonder if this is how it is before it kicks off.
Now, key players speak about that week for the very first time...
Diana's closest confidants who were with her after her death.
I noticed that the hair of the princess was moving.
And just for that... massive minuscule of a second,
was she alive?
And members of Tony Blair's inner circle.
I can remember Prince Philip's voice,
and he was talking about these boys,
you know, have lost their ma.
I mean, it was an extraordinary moment.
We reveal the story behind the biggest royal crisis in half a century.
I actually think that they've been totally unfair
to someone who, after all, has given her life to our country.
-Don't cry. -I'm not going to cry.
And how, faced with disaster,
the Queen fought back.
The Queen knew, if she lost the affection of the public,
then their days really were numbered.
Diana always had a mobile phone in her handbag.
So I rang her phone, and it rang and rang and rang.
And I thought, that's very strange because...
she always answers her phone.
I had a call from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.
Deep voice at the other end said,
"Can you tell me about the crash in Paris?"
And I said, "What crash?"
Just after midnight on Sunday, 31st of August, 1997,
Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed,
were involved in a catastrophic car accident in Paris.
Early reports confirmed that Dodi and the driver
had been killed instantly.
Diana was rushed to hospital
where she was taken into emergency surgery.
News of the accident began to reach Diana's staff
at her home in Kensington Palace.
I was in bed, the phone went, and I was gonna have a good night's sleep
because I was picking Her Royal Highness up that morning.
It was one of my colleagues.
He said, "Just sit on the edge of the bed and be prepared."
On holiday at her Scottish estate in Balmoral,
Queen Elizabeth was woken by her private secretary.
She came out of the bedroom, I remember somebody telling me,
and she was sort of clutching a hot-water bottle.
You know, it's cold there, even in the summer.
And the Queen's first reaction was, someone had greased the brakes.
At the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris,
Diana was given cardiac massage for two hours,
as doctors tried desperately to save her life.
But her injuries were too severe.
At 3 a.m. British Standard Time,
Diana, Princess of Wales, was pronounced dead.
She was 36 years old.
Tonight's accident is a terrible tragedy.
The death of the Princess of Wales fills us all
with deep shock and with deep grief.
Prince Charles was with his sons, William and Harry, at Balmoral.
The British ambassador in Paris informed him before anyone else
of Diana's death.
When Prince Charles learned of her death, he was absolutely distraught.
I mean, he fell apart, completely fell apart.
He knew instantly that
this was going to be a terrible thing.
That this was going to be-- he will be blamed,
that they would be blamed for the death of Diana.
At the same time, Diana's sisters broke the news
to their mother, Frances Shand Kydd.
Diana had been due to return home to London that day.
Everybody was just... horror-struck, really.
Just...
a minute before, I'd got a car to go and meet her.
You know, and that night she'd rung, and she's gone now.
I experienced a whole...
um...
extraordinary cocktail of emotions, and 20 years later, I still feel them.
It wasn't just those close to Diana who were left stunned.
News spread rapidly across Britain.
I have a news flash,
and I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.
But Diana, the Princess of Wales, has died.
There's very little I can say at the moment.
I ran downstairs and I put on the telly and I started watching it,
and my husband came in and my kids came in,
and I was... you know, you were mesmerized by it.
You... It was a totally shocking event.
On what would normally have been a quiet Sunday morning,
the National Grid registered a record power surge
as tens of thousands of kettles and televisions were switched on
at the same time.
You know, typical British reaction is, you make a cup of tea to console yourself
and then sit in front of the television.
Just the most awful news.
And that the shock for all of us,
every single person in this country, will be immense.
Diana's death was our JFK.
It was our moment of real shock
at a cataclysmic, unexpected tragedy.
In an attempt to calm people's emotions,
broadcasters played the national anthem every hour.
It's still dark here at Buckingham Palace.
A single light is burning in one of the upstairs windows.
When the royal family will return here, we don't know.
When we will get a statement from them, we're not able to say.
At the moment, Buckingham Palace remains dark and silent.
But the palace couldn't stay quiet for long.
The impact of Diana's death would be bigger than anyone could have predicted.
Faced with a tidal wave of national grief,
the Queen was about to encounter the biggest challenge of her lifetime.
Everything kicked off,
and it became a very, very strange week to be alive.
At their estate in the Scottish countryside,
the royal family was reeling from the shock of Princess Diana's death.
They released a brief statement saying,
"The Queen and the Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed
by this terrible news."
Right from the get-go, the Queen's view was,
the boys are the priority,
and the decision the Queen and Charles took was that
they wouldn't wake William and Harry to tell them that night.
They would wait until they woke up in the morning and tell them then.
But that was about all they agreed upon.
Soon it became clear that Charles and the Queen
had entirely different views about how to deal with Diana's death.
Charles took the decision
that he was going to go to Paris to bring back Diana's body,
and in many ways, that was a very surprising and brave move,
because he was a divorced husband, he was an ex-husband.
He had no legitimate right to be there, if you like,
beyond being the father of her sons.
Charles wanted to take the royal flight to Paris,
but the Queen wouldn't agree to it.
There was a lot of tension between Charles and the Queen
because the Queen's attitude was, this was his ex-wife who'd just died,
that she was the kind of warring ex-wife, actually, of their son.
Diana was no longer a Royal Highness.
Following her divorce the previous year,
the Queen had stripped her of her HRH title.
But Charles knew that his ex-wife was adored by the public.
From the very beginning, he understood
that if the royal family reacted in the wrong way,
people would blame them for her death.
Charles is said to have-- "What would you have,
that she came back in the back of a Harrods' van?"
Finally, Charles won the argument.
You know, there really was a moment
when it looked like he was going to have to fly commercial to Paris
and get a taxi at the airport, which would have been incredible.
The irony is, Charles fought for Diana
more than he'd ever fought for her in her lifetime, he really did.
The time had come to wake William and Harry
and tell them the tragic news.
Harry begged to come to Paris with his father,
but Charles decided not to put his son through the ordeal.
Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, was at his home in South Africa.
He was the first family member to make a televised statement.
This is not a time for recriminations, but for sadness.
However, I would say
that I always believed the press would kill her in the end.
It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication
that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her,
encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals
to risk everything in pursuit of Diana's image,
has blood on his hands today.
Here he is. Here he is.
Here he is.
Tony Blair was at his home constituency in County Durham.
He had only been prime minister for four months,
and this was his first major crisis.
I went on the phone to Tony. He was up in Sedgefield.
And he absolutely clocked it straightaway.
There was a phrase he used to use sometimes,
"My God, this is enormous doings."
You know, this is really big stuff here.
And we've got to just, you know, be absolutely wise
and sensible and focused.
I feel like...
everyone else in this country today... utterly devastated.
The people everywhere...
not just here in Britain, everywhere...
they kept faith with Princess Diana.
They liked her, they loved her.
They regarded her as one of the people.
She was the people's princess.
And that's how she will... stay, how she will remain...
in our hearts and in our memories, forever.
In describing her as "the people's princess,"
he was actually spot-on.
People watching that, you know, hastily delivered eulogy
would be going, "Yeah, she was, that's what she was."
Diana had a unique ability to relate to ordinary people,
to cut across dividing lines of race and class.
Of course you can.
She did have a radar for whoever was in the room
who seemed to be left out or lonely or in need.
And she would zero straight over to that person.
Particularly amongst women,
here was someone that they empathized with enormously,
that had her problems with bulimia,
that had her unresolved love life,
that had her difficult childhood,
and that somehow, she was coming on through it,
and really being strong.
Diana's modern human approach made her extraordinarily popular.
But it was in stark contrast to the formal way
that the Queen and Prince Charles did business,
and they found it difficult to compete.
Whatever she did was popular.
There was almost a sense of jealousy.
You know, "Why am I not like that?"
I saw it, I witnessed this thousands and thousands of times.
Following her messy divorce,
Diana was seen as a great danger to the royal family.
Charles and the Queen cut her adrift.
Now, they had little idea how to deal with the consequences of her death.
Faced with tragedy, the family decided to do as they had always done.
It was a Sunday morning, so they would go to church.
The Queen Mother and Duke of York in the leading car,
followed by Prince Charles,
Princes William and Harry sitting either side of him.
The Queen dressed in black, with the Duke of Edinburgh, followed.
The first thing we saw of the boys
was when they were going to the church for Sunday service,
and people saying, "Well, how could they? These boys have just lost their mother.
And they're going to church?"
At the royal family's request,
there was no mention of Diana at the day's service.
A lot of people found it extraordinary
that, at that time, no mention was made of her passing.
That, I think, did ring a bell all over the country.
Many people believed that the royal family was treating Diana
just as they had done when she was alive, with cold detachment.
But the Queen was convinced that any reference to Diana
would be heartbreaking for William and Harry.
So great was her desire to protect her grandchildren
that she ordered all TVs and radios in Balmoral
to be moved or hidden.
Prince Harry actually asked his father, "Is it true that Mummy's dead?"
Because none of them...
the children couldn't understand why everything was as normal
except that a couple of hours before, they'd been told their mother had died.
Five hundred miles away, in London,
there were signs that something extraordinary was beginning to happen.
I think the first bunch of flowers were laid against the railings
of Buckingham Palace round about five o'clock in the morning.
And people were surprised. I was surprised.
Diana!
Within hours, the trickle of mourners had become a steady stream.
In Paris, two of Diana's members of staff
arrived at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital,
where the princess had died just ten hours earlier.
In life, they had been among her closest confidants.
In death, it now fell to them to look after her.
I was a mess.
Colin guided me through the airport and onto the plane.
I don't even remember the airplane journey.
Paul was very, very upset. I was upset inside.
There was lots of things to do.
There's no way I was going to break down or anything there.
I was going to try and arrange things, see what was going on.
French police had cleared out the emergency wards
and were insisting that Diana's body be kept under their protection,
in a private room, on the first floor of the hospital.
I honestly thought, entering that room, looking at her,
"She's not really dead. This is just a joke.
It's just a very silly joke.
So now you can wake up."
I then was getting worried about the room,
which was very, very hot.
And we looked up, above the princess's bed,
and people were actually on roofs
trying to take photographs, not knowing where the room was,
so quickly we called in some blankets
and I was standing on a chair and we did put blankets up at the windows,
which, of course, made the room twice as hot.
Diana's body had to be looked after in the heat of the Paris summer,
so Colin Tebbutt placed fans around the room to keep her cool.
I noticed that the hair of the princess was moving.
Which was the fans that I'd put in the room,
and, having been on top of everything until that time,
I had to turn away and have just 30 seconds to myself,
um, on a personal, emotional moment.
Because, I don't know, I thought, good God,
you know, you look at somebody's hair move,
and just for that massive minuscule of a second,
was she alive? Which was a silly thing to think.
Having flown to Paris on the royal flight,
Prince Charles rushed to the hospital,
accompanied by Diana's two sisters, Jane and Sarah.
He was met by the president of France, Jacques Chirac.
The Prince of Wales arrived completely out of it.
He was devastated.
This was a woman whom he loved, in his way... many years ago.
We were standing outside the door, the prince came up to me
and thanked me for coming.
The prince asked if there are any members of the clergy there,
and Paul went and got the two vicars.
And then the prince, the two sisters,
and the vicars went into the room.
And the door was shut.
Prince Charles later said that it was the worst experience of his life.
Prayers were held over Diana's body
before the princess was taken from the hospital.
In a break with royal protocol,
Charles agreed that her coffin should be draped with the royal standard.
I was quite delighted to see
that the royal standard was placed over the coffin.
I thought that was very fitting and a very, very nice thing to happen.
This was a sign that, in death,
Charles wanted to treat his ex-wife as a princess.
Sixteen hours after Diana's death,
the royal flight touched down at RAF Northolt, West London.
The Princess of Wales was home.
In front of the world's media, Diana's body was taken from the plane.
The saddest duty that has ever been performed at RAF Northolt.
I had told the photographers
that there were to be no motorized cameras,
just single-shot, and you really could have heard a pin drop.
Not a word was said amongst us.
It's hard to put into words
how a bunch of really hard-nosed journalists,
photojournalists who had been with this lady
and covered some pretty hairy events around the world,
and there we were in total shock, if you like,
thinking that there she is.
It's something you don't forget. You can't forget it.
Diana's coffin had to be taken to central London.
On the 15-mile journey,
her escort was confronted by something astonishing.
The hearse left RAF Northolt,
and I got in my car and sort of followed it down,
and I was absolutely flabbergasted at how cars had stopped
on the westbound carriageway of the M40,
and people got out and stood alongside the central reservation barrier.
People, people, people.
Absolutely frighteningly amazing.
But this was only a hint of what was to come.
As the public came to terms with Diana's death,
Britain would find itself in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown.
Twenty-four hours after Princess Diana's death,
Britain was in turmoil.
In central London, 6,000 people an hour were now streaming
to the royal palaces to pay their respects.
We came out the back of Downing Street and we walked up the Mall,
and it was palpable immediately.
You know, you could smell it, you could see it, you could hear it.
I mean, there were hundreds of people carrying the flowers,
so we were completely gobsmacked.
Diana's body had been taken to lie in state
at St. James's Palace.
When books of condolence were set up at the palace,
it rapidly became a magnet
to the thousands who wanted to pay their respects.
Grief is often followed by anger,
and beneath the tears, a simmering resentment
was already building.
The public believed that Diana had been killed by the paparazzi,
so they were blaming the press.
-You helped to kill her. -I helped to kill her?
Not you, not you, but your profession.
My profession. You've never bought a newspaper?
I don't buy them when they're sordid.
Don't you think that what you're doing is wrong?
We've lost a lovely person for nothing. You're horrible.
Hope you really feel proud of yourselves.
I went down to see what was happening.
There had been reports of people being jostled
and journalists asking questions and people saying,
"It's all your bloody fault," and, you know,
"How dare you come down here? And what do you think you're doing?"
So there was quite a lot of that around, and I felt the mood was quite ugly.
-Shouldn't blame journalism... -If there was no money
in the photographs, they wouldn't have been after her in the tunnel.
I was on my own,
and somebody comes up, digs me in the back and she started swearing
and saying, you know, "You killed her," you know.
And I, I just...
I said, I... I couldn't speak.
So I kept walking and she kept walking, screaming, shouting.
And then this girl shouted out, "You're all to blame.
You're as bad," you know...
You felt, just get out of here as quick as you can.
In life, Diana had had a close relationship with the press.
She loved the camera and the camera loved her.
She was a very clever woman, and she used the press extremely well.
She would say, you know, "Come and photograph me here."
She would give information to certain journalists,
not give it to others.
She did what, you know, we now associate as fairly classic political spin.
Diana became the most photographed woman in the world.
But following years of extreme press attention,
she grew to hate certain sections of the media.
The real issue she had was with photographers.
She told me that one or two of them called her a whore.
Uh... a tart.
They would say things to deliberately provoke her,
because they knew if they got a crying picture,
or an angry picture, then they might have more success in selling it.
Now, the public believed that this aggressive press attention
had led directly to her death.
Meanwhile, behind a growing wall of flowers,
isolated from the grieving public,
the palace was in crisis.
Stunned by the levels of public grief, the Spencers and the royal family
had decided that Diana would have to have a royal funeral.
But there was no plan in place.
The royal household is ready for most deaths,
but not of young people.
They were ready for Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother to die.
But the royal household wasn't expecting Diana, Princess of Wales, to die.
There was no rule book to go to.
There was no precedent. There was no tradition.
There was nothing that...
fitted the royal game plan.
Diana's funeral would have to be organized from scratch
in just five days.
To tackle the mammoth task,
the palace assembled a team of experts.
That morning, they met for the first time in Buckingham Palace.
That was my first time ever in Buckingham Palace, actually.
And we went into this enormous room,
and there were all the Buckingham Palace officials,
and then there were the representatives
from each of the palaces, as well as other people,
and we were sort of the Downing Street contingent.
There was KP,
which was Kensington Palace, which sat on that side of the table.
Diana's private secretary was there.
KP was the Spencer family.
Her lady-in-waiting was there.
There was JP, which was St. James's Palace,
which was the headquarters of Prince Charles.
I was there with a colleague from the Press Office.
Sir Paul Condon, the head of the Met.
There was permanent secretary
from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Presided over by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Airlie.
So it was all sort of incredibly formal.
And right in the middle of this table was this enormous wooden box.
The box was a speakerphone,
a direct line to royal advisors in Balmoral.
The room was packed with important people,
and each faction had their own view about how the funeral should be run.
But for the time being, the funeral team were united by one aim,
to help heal a nation in deep shock.
It was clear to everyone that the grieving public
would have to be involved as much as possible.
My colleagues suggested
to have the charities walk behind the gun carriage,
rather than a military procession.
I suggested that we had speakers along the route
and a screen in Hyde Park,
that people could hear and watch the service.
"The people's princess,"
although I don't think the phrase was ever used in those meetings,
but there was definitely a sense of that, and everybody got that,
and there was a real sense that this was going to be
a slightly different funeral,
that this was going to be an inclusive affair.
Royal funerals usually took place at Windsor Castle.
This time, Prince Charles and Tony Blair
decided that it should be at Westminster Abbey,
allowing as many people as possible to pay their respects.
But this posed a problem.
With an abbey to fill,
organizers had to find 2,000 guests in five days,
and they had no idea who to invite.
The Controller rather surprised me by saying, "Who do we ask?
I mean, at the moment, I'm not sure we can fill the abbey."
Which, with hindsight, is quite funny.
Uh... and I can remember saying,
"Well, if you get hold of a guest list for the princess's Christmas drinks
in Christmas 1995, invite everybody on that guest list,
then you won't have missed out anybody important."
For the moment, the funeral team were united.
But with so many competing voices around the table,
it wouldn't be long before cracks began to appear.
Two days after Diana's death, London was now the epicenter
of the biggest outpouring of public grief in British history.
When she was alive,
Diana had had a unique ability to reach out to people.
Now these people, tens of thousands of them,
had come to pay their respects.
People began to pile on trains and come into London
just to be there, just to be standing there, in...
looking at these flowers and being part of this enormous national grieving event.
She was the queen of people's hearts.
Absolutely irreplaceable.
We all loved her.
We didn't realize how much we loved her till we lost her.
Just can't say any more.
I was overwhelmed with grief.
I decided I'm just going to go to central London
and just be part of that crowd.
And what was so comforting was, I was one of a million people.
And we were all united in this grief.
Diana's death touched a raw nerve across the country.
Church attendances increased dramatically, as people sought comfort,
and there were record numbers of calls to suicide help lines.
I've never seen anything like it in my life.
I thought, these are the Brits.
You know, these are the sort of tight-lipped Brits,
sort of, you know, weeping and wailing.
Like banshees.
I mean, it was quite an astonishing sight.
This unprecedented eruption of grief came as a huge shock.
For some, it was impossible to understand why there was so much public anguish.
As the response kicked in, I remember very quickly feeling disgust
for all the people who were going to Kensington Palace
with toys and with presents and with gifts and weeping.
Um, I wouldn't be so hard now. I was much, much younger then.
And I like to think I'd be more compassionate,
but at the time I just remembered, you're projecting all this love
onto somebody you didn't know.
There were people who felt...
after, you know, a decade of her being on the front, middle,
and all other pages of all newspapers and magazines,
that they did know her, and that they were intimately connected with her life.
I was looking at your bouquets there.
Would you read what you've said on the card?
What I've said on the card?
"It's not just what you've done for us that makes us love you so,
it's all the joy of who you are, the friend we've come to know."
Nice.
Sad?
I remember a phone-in where a man literally said
that he was so upset,
he'd never cried so much.
His wife had died from cancer, but he'd never been this upset.
And I think that was the moment I thought, you just have got to stop this.
Um, this is absolutely mad.
Police were now predicting that two million people
would descend on central London for Diana's funeral,
making it the biggest in British history.
And with just four days to go,
the planning meetings were becoming fraught.
The most tension in the room
at those meetings always came from the Charles Spencer people.
When I say "tensions," you know,
it was sort of a slightly raised voice type of tension.
Or, you know, a stiffening of the body.
Every detail of the funeral had to be agreed upon
by both the Spencers and the royal family.
But they couldn't see eye to eye.
There was more bitterness in the Spencers' side, and confusion,
and, uh, a sense that they had...
They didn't really know what to think or feel,
because Diana was a very problematic issue in their own family.
Towards the end of her life,
Diana's relationship with her brother Charles had broken down.
To escape media attention, Diana had asked to live
in a cottage on the family estate at Althorp,
but he had refused.
He felt the press would just decamp from London
and move up to Althorp, and he didn't want the press interfering
with the smooth running of Althorp.
So they fell out, and they weren't speaking at the time of her death.
This made the tragedy of Diana's death...
even harder for the Spencers to bear.
Earl Spencer wanted to make sure that after death,
Diana would again be part of the family.
It was almost like the tug-of-war.
You know, she's ours, she's ours.
Spencer saying, "You've thrown her out.
You took away her HRH and now you want her back?
She's ours."
So there was a lot of animosity.
Charles Spencer wanted to walk behind Diana's coffin
in the funeral procession.
But royal advisors weren't happy.
The royal family did not want the focus to be solely on Charles Spencer
walking behind the coffin.
They thought that that wouldn't be right,
that somehow it would set the Spencers apart from the royal family.
Although Charles had divorced Diana,
he was adamant that he, too, should walk behind the coffin,
and the funeral team wanted to go one step further.
They believed that William and Harry, aged just 15 and 12,
should join their father in the procession.
Diana was their mother,
and William is one day going to be king.
And therefore he needed to be seen to be taking a role
in mourning the loss of his mother.
And Harry, by default, as the spare, should be seen as well.
It was a lot to ask of them.
But Prince William was refusing to take part.
He just didn't want to be seen grieving in public.
He felt it was a private event.
He was mourning his beloved mummy, and, uh...
he didn't like the media attention.
He probably felt that the media had had a hand in his mother's death.
He didn't want to perform.
The funeral team set up a telephone conference with Balmoral
to try to persuade the reluctant prince.
I can remember...
it sort of sends a tingle up my back, actually, even thinking about it,
is, we were talking about this, and then from the box,
this huge big wooden box in the table, the voice of Balmoral,
came Prince Philip's voice.
And we hadn't really heard it before, I don't think.
And it was, it was anguished.
You know, he was saying, you know, "These are the boys here.
You know, you're talking about these boys, you know,
who've lost their ma."
I mean, it was an extraordinary moment.
And you did think, you know, that's what brought it back to me,
my God, you know, there's a bit of suffering going on up there.
The Queen and Prince Philip were doing everything they could
to protect the young princes.
But this wouldn't satisfy a nation in mourning.
Soon, a growing public anger
would focus on the royal family...
plunging them into their biggest crisis
since the abdication.
Three days after Princess Diana's death,
the carpet of flowers at Kensington Palace now stretched more than 50 feet.
And the queues for the books of condolence were 11 hours long.
But as the flower mountains got bigger
and the queues grew longer,
the mood in the crowd had shifted.
That's the thing I most recall, actually, is the speed
in which it turned from this sort of tears and this trauma
to anger, you know, against the royal family.
Bunkered down in Balmoral, the royal family had not appeared
or said a word in three days.
I think it's disgraceful that they're not here in residence.
She hasn't said anything, the Queen.
And, as for Prince Charles, well, I think there's not a lot he can say, is there?
Prince Charles had been unfaithful to Diana during their marriage,
and following their divorce,
she had been abandoned by the royal family.
I think they treated her terrible.
Absolutely shocking.
I don't think...
They're the most cold people on this earth.
The crowd began to focus their anger on one conspicuous issue.
Above every major building in London,
there was a Union Jack flying at half-mast.
But at Buckingham Palace, the flagpole was bare.
They must be very, very cold-hearted, not to have a flag up.
I think it's a disgrace on the whole royal family.
Throughout history,
the Union Jack had never been flown over the palace.
Royal protocol dictated that the only flag flown was the royal standard,
and that was only when the Queen was in residence.
It's actually an "in and out" sign,
that it goes up when the Queen is there and it comes down when she's away.
But this became a symbol of royal callousness.
Forty-two thousand people rang The Sun newspaper,
demanding that the royal family do away with protocol
and fly the Union Jack at half-mast over the palace.
But the Queen was sticking resolutely to tradition.
No flag would fly.
On hindsight, yes, we should have been more forceful.
The Lord Chamberlain should have been more forceful.
The Private Secretary should have been more forceful.
Or somebody should have just done it.
I really am upset.
I can't understand the Queen doing it, really,
Everything people like about the Queen,
which is she is careful and she is cautious,
and she is not emotional and she is not impulsive,
she is steadfast, that's what she is...
Everything they always liked about her, they realized that week,
they didn't like so much that particular week
because they wanted to run down to London and give everybody a cuddle.
Faced with a rising tide of public anger,
courtiers in London were now seriously concerned
that the Queen was losing touch with her people.
There were battles going on, there's no doubt about it.
Messages were being relayed to try and encourage the Queen to engage more.
They wanted the Queen to come down to London as soon as possible.
But the Queen and her immediate family were still resistant to that.
Unlike the Queen, Tony Blair was an expert judge of public mood.
He intervened to try to persuade her to act.
Tony was talking to the Queen and just saying, "Look,
you know, things are getting a little bit hot down here."
Blair later claimed
that he asked the Queen to show her vulnerable side.
Bye-bye.
But Her Majesty wasn't budging.
It's not stubbornness.
It's just that she's been around a lot longer
than everybody else that's working for her,
and she's not going to be pushed by an agenda, by a media agenda,
that, well, you know, somebody famous has died, so it's got to happen now.
The Queen was adamant that her rightful place was at Balmoral
with her grieving grandchildren.
Since Diana's death, the family had rallied round the young princes.
Every day, Prince Philip would take them walking, fishing, and horse riding,
anything to take their minds off the tragedy.
What the royal family pulled around
was the fact that here were two young boys
who had lost their mum.
And I don't think there's a human being alive
who doesn't respond to that as being an important thing to do.
It was actually the first time in her whole long reign
that the Queen was thinking of family before she was thinking of her people.
And for that we should really admire her,
because her whole attention and thoughts were for these children.
She wasn't thinking about how this was going to, quote, "be played" on the media.
The following morning,
the press took aim at the Queen.
Earlier in the week, the newspapers
were being blamed for Diana's death.
Now they attacked the royal family.
In this case, I think it was a conflation
of public desire and the press being very quick
to get the attention away from themselves and onto someone else.
It's the first time I'd felt, ooh,
I wonder if this is what a civil war feels like.
I wonder if this is how it is before it kicks off.
In the face of such sustained criticism,
Prince Charles was now deeply concerned.
As he had predicted,
the royal family were now being directly blamed for Diana's death.
He still believed it was his duty to walk in the funeral procession
behind Diana's coffin,
but he was increasingly worried for his own safety.
The Prince of Wales was convinced
that he was going to be the focus of the anger,
that he was the real target of the anger.
I mean, he thought that he might have been attacked, actually physically attacked.
In response, the Metropolitan Police drafted in a team
of mounted officers to guard the funeral procession.
One of the protection officers said, "There's just one area
where we can't cover the angle that Prince Charles will be walking at,"
and they asked me if I could move slightly to my right in Parliament Square
so that I was covering Prince Charles.
And, of course, at the time I went, "Yeah, that's fine, no problem."
But I remember thinking afterwards, so what you're asking me to do
is, if somebody wanted to try and assassinate Prince Charles,
they'd have to shoot me first.
So, you know, at the time, you just go, "Yeah, that's fine,"
but you think about it after, thinking, what did I just agree to?
Charles was anxious, not only for his own safety
but for the future of the monarchy.
He was now convinced that the Queen had to act,
so he joined forces with the prime minister.
Tony Blair spoke to Prince Charles
and implored Charles to talk to his mother to try and sort of break the logjam.
Under extreme pressure from the media, her people,
her government, and her own son,
the Queen responded.
It finally became clear to her,
out of self-preservation, for which, you know, she is known,
uh, that this was something bigger and more important
than her own personal feelings.
Firstly, she asked her press officer
to break with protocol and appear on television
to defend the royal family.
The Queen has asked me to say
that the royal family have been hurt by suggestions
that they are indifferent to the country's sorrow
at the tragic death of the Princess of Wales.
Prince William and Prince Harry themselves want to be with their father
and their grandparents at this time
in the quiet haven of Balmoral.
As their grandmother, the Queen is helping the princes
to come to terms with their loss
as they prepare themselves for the public ordeal
of mourning their mother with the nation on Saturday.
Following the statement, the palace announced
a series of astonishing steps.
For the first time in history,
the Union Jack would fly at half-mast over the palace.
The royal family would return to London on Friday,
a day earlier than planned, to meet the grieving public.
And most remarkably, the Queen would address the nation on television.
It would be her first live broadcast in 50 years.
This was a truly unprecedented climb-down
by an institution that had always resisted change.
It was very hard for the Queen to do what she had to do,
yielding, if you like, to public pressure.
She knew better than anyone
that if she lost, or the royal family lost, the affection of the public,
then their days really were numbered.
To gauge the public reaction, Princes Andrew and Edward
were asked to walk amongst the crowds on the Mall,
the first royal public appearance in four days.
No one knew which way it would go.
There was a real anger.
The moment they were seen,
this sort of relief started to go.
People just wanted to talk to these princes
about their former sister-in-law.
That evening, the Queen, Philip, Charles, William, and Harry
stepped outside the Balmoral gates for the first time since Sunday
to look at the tributes that had been laid to Diana.
Finally, the world saw them as they were, a family united in grief.
Faced with the biggest crisis in half a century,
the Queen and the royal family had fought back.
But tensions were still running high.
In less than 24 hours, the Queen would return to London
to face the vast crowds
and she had little idea how they would react.
Good afternoon. We're breaking into your regular ITV schedules
to bring you a special program
on the return of the royal family to London
for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Five days after Diana's death,
the royal family had finally bowed to intense public pressure
to share openly in the nation's grief.
It was a grim-faced Prince of Wales
who drove his two sons out of the grounds to begin the journey to London.
The Queen, with Princess Margaret, left a short time afterwards.
They were driven by the Duke of Edinburgh,
a family together, mourning a family loss.
Princes Charles, William and Harry boarded the royal plane
at Aberdeen Airport.
Normally, it is forbidden for two future kings to fly on the same plane,
but the boys were desperate to be with their father
and the Queen gave them special permission.
With less than 24 hours to go until Diana's funeral,
organizers were working around the clock to make sure London was prepared.
Two million people were now expected to line the streets for the funeral.
To accommodate the vast crowds,
funeral organizers had quadrupled the length of the procession route.
It would now stretch
from Kensington Palace
to Westminster Abbey,
four and a half miles through central London,
twice the length
of Churchill's funeral procession.
The police were horrified by this
'cause they just didn't think they'd have the manpower
to block off all the roads and ensure public safety, if you like.
In response, the Metropolitan Police
mounted the biggest security operation ever seen in Britain.
Thirty-five thousand officers were needed on the streets for the funeral,
so all police leave was cancelled
and extra manpower called in from surrounding forces.
It was one of those military exercises
where you keep having to change the map board,
because the amount of territory
is needed to be bigger and bigger and bigger.
And more territory, more police,
more security implications, more whatever is required.
Huge screens were set up in Hyde Park and Regent's Park,
with room for 100,000 people.
It was an incredible organizational feat.
The logistics and the security.
I mean, there were so many things to... to work out.
Meanwhile,
last-minute rehearsals were taking place at Westminster Abbey.
Diana's royal coffin was lined with lead and weighed 50 stone.
To get used to the weight,
her pallbearers had to practice with a dummy version.
We got told we're gonna try and simulate the weight
with a curbstone.
And we thought, gor blimey.
I'm not sure if it was one or two curbstones, but it was heavy.
So we finally managed to get the coffin on our shoulders and start walking round.
This was the first time we actually got a feel for the cathedral floor.
It's marble, and it was like an ice-skating rink
because you wear metal studs.
And we went up and down, up and down, up and down,
getting the feel of the actual marble itself.
Did put a bit of a reality check.
If something did happen, it's gonna happen there.
Three hours after leaving Balmoral,
Charles, William and Harry arrived in central London.
The young princes hadn't yet had a chance to experience
the staggering response to their mother's death.
So at their request, they made a detour to Kensington Palace
to look at the hundreds of thousands of tributes that had been left for her.
It was so juxtaposed with this "behind palace gates" approach
that we had seen earlier in the week with no visibility of the royals at all.
And suddenly here they are, like, in plain sight,
for everyone to see at this moment of untold grief and upset.
Charles.
Thank you so much, thank you.
Harry, I'm so sorry.
William, William.
Thank you so much, thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
William!
It was a very moving occasion.
Both boys behaved with fantastic dignity.
They were, by turns, interested and sad
and humbled, I think, by what they saw.
Um, and also they kept it together.
And because what everyone prayed for, above all,
was that the occasion didn't overwhelm them
and they didn't break down, and they didn't.
-Your mum was a wonderful woman. -I know she was.
She was greatly loved. God bless you, darling.
Thank you.
They all said, "Thank you very much for coming."
William said, "Thank you so much for the flowers.
And I'll lay them. Thank you ever so much."
I shook his hand, and I got all tearful. I couldn't say anything.
Two miles across London,
the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were heading for Buckingham Palace.
They had little idea how they would be received by the vast crowds.
So much bitterness had been written in newspapers,
so there was a certain amount of apprehension from the Queen
as to how she would be greeted.
There for the first time the Queen witnessing for herself...
-The car is going to stop. -...the flowers.
The car has stopped. And Her Majesty is going to get out.
She is going to look for herself at some of the thousands upon thousands
of floral tributes.
The Queen and Prince Philip left their car to a muted response.
The attitude of the crowd was unpleasant,
and it was something which I have never, ever seen before
in any royal occasion, ever.
You know...
Usually, when the Queen goes by, people clap, people cheer, people wave.
They don't just stand there.
I was waving my flowers,
and she came over and asked me
if she wanted me to go and put them down with all the rest of the flowers.
And I said, "No, they're for you, Ma'am."
Been drummed into me to call her "Ma'am," mustn't forget to call her "Ma'am."
She'd held my hand at this point. She was shaking.
And she sort of questioned me, "Are you sure?"
And I said, "I think you deserve them.
I think you've done the right thing staying with your grandsons."
I think I actually said,
"If my mum had just died, I'd want my grandma with me."
I actually think that perhaps what Kate said struck home,
and people realized that perhaps they'd been
totally unfair to someone who, after all,
has given her life to our country.
-Don't cry. -I'm not going to cry.
But, you know, that's what I-- that's what I believe.
Ma'am, take care of the boys. Take care of the boys, Ma'am.
-That's what we've been doing. -Sorry?
-That's what we've been doing. -I know you did.
Courtiers had had little idea how the crowds would react.
Now they and the Queen could breathe a sigh of relief.
When the Queen was leaving the enclosure to go back into the palace,
she walked towards me and she had a look on her face
as if to say, you know, "Was that okay?"
And I just nodded.
Three hours later,
every television channel interrupted their normal broadcasting
and cut to Buckingham Palace.
The Queen was about to deliver her first live address in half a century.
Since last Sunday's dreadful news,
we have seen throughout Britain and around the world
an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana's death.
We have all been trying in our different ways to cope.
So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother,
I say from my heart.
First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself.
She was an exceptional and gifted human being.
I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others
and especially for her devotion to her two boys.
I for one believe there are lessons to be drawn from her life
and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.
I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are,
join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss
and gratitude for her all-too-short life.
I thought it was amazing because it was delivered faultlessly
and with some degree of, I felt, um...
empathy.
Um, she wasn't a remote figure. She genuinely was saying what she felt.
I'm sure she found it excruciatingly difficult to give that address.
I thought that really showed the Queen as somebody who did listen
and was willing to adapt and change her behavior.
I thought she said everything she should have said.
Can't think of anything she left out at all.
She sounded very sincere and she looked as though she was very moved.
And I think that will satisfy everyone.
The Queen had bowed to public pressure as never before,
and she had helped heal the rift between crown and country.
Later that evening, Diana was taken home to Kensington Palace,
where she would spend one last night.
Behind a coffin shrouded in the royal standard
and adorned by a spray of her favorite white lilies
drove her two sons, Princes William and Harry,
bringing their mother back home.
Bye, Diana darling!
Bye, darling!
Bye, baby!
It was quite an extraordinary occasion, actually,
and there was a lot of people crying,
but it was also quite uplifting, too, in many ways,
because you could... you felt this woman really did reach out.
The boys said a final private farewell to their mother,
before Paul Burrell, Diana's butler for over a decade,
kept a solitary all-night vigil over her body.
I'd asked the policeman to bring in flowers from outside,
and I decorated the room and lit all the candles,
and I pulled a chair up, and I sat with her.
It may sound silly now, 20 years later, but...
I just wanted to have a last conversation
and tell her about all the people that had been ringing
and all the people that had left messages
and all the people that had expressed their love for her.
So that was important.
That night, Diana's mother, Frances Shand Kydd,
paid her own personal tribute to her daughter.
Diana's mother told me that she had found the whole experience
of the mourning extremely moving.
It really did touch her, and she told me
that she spent hours walking the streets among the people
who had come to mourn her daughter.
With the funeral now just 12 hours away,
30,000 people bedded down on the streets,
with a further 500 on a specially adapted train in Paddington Station.
After six days of intense public grief,
London was ready for the biggest funeral in British history.
The morning of Princess Diana's funeral.
The culmination of one of the most remarkable weeks
in modern British history.
Go!
The events of the past few days had shaken the monarchy
and the nation to its core.
Now the funeral would be a chance for both to grieve together.
The service was to take place at Westminster Abbey.
Two thousand guests had been invited,
and many started queuing from the early morning.
I remember rushing out into the garden
and picking roses and wrapping them in cooking foil
and taking them with me.
Uh, not the most elegant bouquet you ever saw,
but I just wanted some sort of tribute.
And arrived at Westminster Abbey and just put them there.
Across Britain, 33 million people tuned in to watch,
with a further two and half billion around the world,
the biggest global audience in television history.
That's Whitehall, cenotaph at the end.
People just waiting silently.
In London,
more than a million people had now crowded onto the procession route,
with tens of thousands in Hyde Park and Regent's Park.
As a sign of respect,
the police had imposed a "no fly" zone across London,
giving the city a sense of calm.
Then, with the time drawing close, a deeper hush descended.
The silence...
I mean you really could hear a bee buzzing.
There were no planes overhead.
There was no traffic.
There was nothing.
At Kensington Palace,
Diana's pallbearers were preparing for the funeral procession.
Princess Diana's coffin come out
and we put it onto the gun carriage then.
And to see that, that was...
it really put a lump in your throat.
And you're just thinking, whoa, I can't believe I'm doing this.
I can't believe I got chosen for this.
At 9:08 a.m.,
the great tenor bell at Westminster Abbey began to toll.
I still remember the bell, and then I had an earpiece in
and they just said, "Right, time to go."
When we went through the gates, as soon as we got onto the road,
there was this... the best way to describe it, really, is wailing.
You can hear the tears in the crowd, it was inevitable.
This woman screamed, "Diana, we love you!"
And it was like cutting through butter, it was, the scream was.
It was cutting through you something serious.
And to hear that and the emotion behind it...
I certainly got affected by it.
The Westminster bell tolled every minute,
signaling the procession's slow progress towards the abbey.
On the coffin was a wreath from William and Harry,
along with a hand-written card that read simply, "Mummy."
That brought it home to people that this wasn't this massive celebrity.
This wasn't this princess.
It was Mummy. It was a little boy's mother.
It was deeply, deeply moving,
and an unforgettable image of the day.
And the cortege now goes through Apsley Gate.
This is a historic moment
because only the monarch has ever ridden through Apsley Gate.
You could just hear the hobnail boots
hitting the surface of the road.
You could hear the wheels turning. You could hear the horses' hooves.
You couldn't hear any birds.
It's almost as if the birds knew what was happening and kept away.
It was quite eerie, but it was very moving.
With the cortege approaching,
the Queen and the royal family came out of Buckingham Palace
to stand at the west gate.
This is an extraordinary view we're seeing here.
We've never, as far as I'm aware, seen the royal family standing like this
at the gates of Buckingham Palace.
Anything is possible today.
Myself at the front and a colleague at the back had earpieces in,
We were told unexpectedly that the Queen walked out of Buckingham Palace,
which nobody had planned for, nobody knew she was going to do.
So there was a great deal of chatter in my ear, people panicking
all over the place because the Queen suddenly decided
that she was going to come out and pay her respects.
Then the world witnessed a small but hugely significant moment.
In another break with royal tradition, as Diana's coffin passed,
the Queen bowed.
It's respect.
And the Queen does respect.
Something like that would come naturally, nobody would have to tell her to do that.
It's something that would be inherent in her makeup.
As the cortege snaked through London,
Westminster Abbey was filling with guests.
Diana had been the most famous woman in the world,
and celebrities, royalty, and heads of state
were all on the guest list.
Then the family of Diana's boyfriend, Dodi, entered the abbey.
I remember sitting there and the Al-Fayeds came in.
And there was a kind of respectful gasp,
you know, in recognition that he'd also lost a son in this terrible accident.
As the procession drew close to St. James's Palace,
the world witnessed another totally unexpected moment.
Princes Charles, William and Harry emerged from their home
to walk behind Diana's coffin.
They were joined by the Duke of Edinburgh and Earl Spencer.
I don't think I knew, until that moment,
that both of the boys were going to do it.
I mean, again, it sort of puts a tingle in my spine, and I just...
you know, I just thought, my God, you know, how brave.
For days,
Prince William had refused outright to walk in the procession.
But on the morning of the funeral, he agreed.
It took Prince Philip to persuade William to do it in the end.
He put a grandfatherly arm around him and said,
"Look, if I come, too, will you do it?"
Whose heart cannot go out to those boys today?
Who can avoid a choke in the throat at the sight of them?
Prince Charles felt it was his duty to walk in the procession,
but he knew that he remained deeply unpopular
in the wake of Diana's death.
Both he and the police were concerned about the public reaction
when he appeared.
Alert to any potential threat,
the Metropolitan Police had placed plainclothes officers amongst the crowds,
with marksmen watching from nearby rooftops.
When we got to St. James's Palace,
I remember somebody shouting out, "You didn't deserve her!"
And I remember being slightly worried then that whoever said that,
are they walking towards him?
I can't turn around, I have to look straight ahead
and keep the horses moving in a straight line,
so there was a sense then at the time, is something happening behind me?
But, uh, I just kept going, really, hoping that it was a one-off.
As we moved away, luckily there was no other similar comment.
Almost intolerable moment
for the two boys, the two princes,
as they take their place behind their mother's coffin.
Pretty daunting, to be walking behind a gun carriage.
Their mother's on the gun carriage.
And they are being watched by tens of thousands of people along the route
and millions on television.
And it was quite a tough experience for them,
and they carried it off with such aplomb, it's unbelievable.
I was incredibly impressed.
I lost my father when I was 12, so I was their age.
So I remember, um...
what it felt like.
And to be able to have done that
in such a sort of, what I thought was such a dignified fashion,
I thought was sort of quite, quite amazing.
The princes were joined behind the coffin
by 533 workers from Diana's charities.
As the Queen made her way to the abbey,
for the first time in history,
the Union Jack was raised above Buckingham Palace
before being lowered to half-mast.
The will of the people had trumped centuries of tradition.
Then Diana's family entered Westminster Abbey,
and the congregation stood.
They were followed ten minutes later by the Queen and the Queen Mother.
One hour and 47 minutes after leaving Kensington Palace,
the cortege arrived precisely on time.
Now, Diana's pallbearers
had to undertake the most important job of their lives.
We'd just done four and half miles. We're trying to wake our arms up.
We knew what was going to happen now.
We had to pick up the coffin. Um...
Emotionally, I think we blocked a lot of that out.
I think, "We're here now.
Let's get it done now and do our best."
The coffin lined with lead, so heavy.
And the eyes of the world are on these men.
We waited and there was complete silence.
And then we saw the coffin beginning to come in.
And I think that was when it became real.
And I just think of it now, and the roses on the back
that had come from the children.
I... It was unbearable. It was unbearable.
Slowly, deliberately,
Diana's pallbearers walked her coffin
down the long nave of Westminster Abbey.
You could feel with the studs that you were slipping all the time.
Every step you'd take, you could go.
And you had to concentrate on what you were doing,
because it only takes a second, one lapse,
and something serious could have happened.
Out of respect,
the television cameras didn't film the royal family or the Spencers.
To make the funeral as inclusive as possible,
the hymns had been printed in the day's newspapers.
People were actually able to sing along in the hymns,
and we were able to really feel that everyone was involved,
even though millions were not present in the abbey.
Then Earl Spencer stood to deliver his sister's eulogy.
The congregation and the millions watching outside
had no idea what was to come.
Everything was fine until Earl Spencer stepped into the pulpit,
and I thought that that was going to be okay.
I thought it was going to be just the same as we've heard before.
Diana was the very essence of compassion,
of duty, of style, of beauty,
a standard-bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden
and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title
to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.
It sounded to me like a speech where nobody had advised him,
nobody had drafted it for him.
It was not, you know, the formal speech on the formal occasion.
It came straight from his heart.
She talked endlessly of getting away from England,
mainly because of the treatment that she received
at the hands of the newspapers.
She would want us today to pledge ourselves
to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry,
from a similar fate.
And I do this here, Diana, on your behalf.
And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters,
I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue
the imaginative and loving way
in which you were steering these two exceptional young men,
so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition
but can sing openly as you planned.
He basically looked over, you know, to a pew full of his in-laws,
uh, and had a go at them,
from the box, in the middle of a funeral of his sister.
Well, you know, questionable.
He was saying that they hadn't looked after her,
and they were inappropriate to bring up her children.
It was very strong stuff.
I think the emotional impact of his speech was so great
that we just sat and took it in.
And then the sound came.
I didn't realize it was people clapping outside.
It sounded like pebbles rattling on the roof of the abbey.
And it was coming closer and closer.
It quite put up the hairs on the back of your neck.
That wonderful sound like the sea,
rolling in through the doors of the abbey
and then rolling up the aisles of the abbey,
and we all joined.
We all joined. I don't know who didn't, but we did.
Hmm.
But many people felt the eulogy was totally inappropriate.
I thought, no, don't, don't applaud him.
Look at the Queen.
The Queen's horrified by what he's just said.
Nobody addresses the Queen of England in that way.
Nobody.
You would have been beheaded for that a couple of centuries before.
I was very angry that Diana's brother could stand up and say what he did say,
because in attacking the royal family, he was attacking his nephews,
William and Harry, and he talked about blood relative.
Well, he's had nothing to do with their upbringing,
and they very rarely see him,
so what was actually said on the day was sheer hypocrisy.
♪ Alleluia ♪
Was it strategically sensible?
Possibly not.
Did it make enemies for him? Probably.
But... for the general public, it lanced a boil.
It made us feel, heavens, somebody is saying...
she should have been protected.
Diana's funeral had been a bittersweet farewell
to the people's princess.
I was quite sure that she would have approved
of the turnout
and the solemnity,
and, uh, the beauty of this great ceremony.
In just six days,
the royal establishment had pulled off an astonishing feat of planning.
It was completely brilliant because it was done
so efficiently, so, um...
effectively and so, sort of, in such a dignified fashion
that it reminded people why they like the royal family,
because it's part of an establishment that does this
at moments of crisis.
I felt really moved at the end
when this huge chord suddenly was over.
We could see the brilliant blue sky out of the west door,
and it was then that we had a minute's silence
in memory of Princess Diana.
The drama was so telling, and it was almost unbearable.
Diana's funeral was over.
But she had one final journey to make.
Diana's funeral had been a fitting end to an extraordinary week.
By delivering such a spectacle,
the royal family had helped repair their damaged relationship
with the public.
But Diana had one final journey to make.
The princess was to be buried
at her family's estate in Northamptonshire,
77 miles from Westminster Abbey.
Charles, William and Harry left to take the royal train,
along with the Spencer family.
Diana's coffin would be driven all the way there,
giving the public a chance to say a final farewell.
For the entire journey,
the hearse would be escorted by eight police motorcyclists.
All the riders had known Diana.
They'd quite often go to Kensington Palace.
Then she'd be there in a track suit and her slippers or whatever,
with the two boys looking at the bikes.
And we'd just chat.
You could just talk to her as if you were talking to a member of your family.
She was just lovely. She was lovely.
And more applause.
Quite extraordinary.
I've never witnessed that in this country at a funeral.
It's as if the people want to say something,
and this is the best way to express their feelings.
As the cortege left central London,
it became clear the police had underestimated
how many people would want to pay their respects.
Look at the crowd. They're pressing around the cortege.
The police aren't there to hold them back, and it really doesn't matter.
Suddenly we found roads completely blocked with people
who generally wanted to wish her well and throw flowers on the car, et cetera,
but I was getting a little bit concerned about the amount of people.
Almost hemmed in by the crowds here.
It's almost as if they don't want her to go, isn't it?
They want to press forward and see her, but, you know, slow down, slow down.
Yes.
We were driving through a sea of flowers being thrown in the air.
It was like a mist in front of you.
When you're concentrating on the guy in front
and get hit on the head with flowers, from a motorcycling point of view
it was a complete pain.
You know, I think it's fantastic that people wanted to do that,
and one or two bunches of flowers wouldn't have been so bad,
but it was a continual barrage of flowers that were wrapped in cellophane.
And when they hit you on the head, you know it.
A lot of those stuck on the windscreen and started to build up,
reducing the vision from the driver's seat from the hearse,
so he couldn't see where he was going, so the message came back
saying that we needed to stop to clear the windscreen.
The hearse was forced to make an unscheduled stop
on the northbound carriageway of the M1.
The guy in the front of the hearse got out.
Took a great big arm full of flowers.
I was slightly concerned that he would just
walk to the side of the road and drop them,
but he didn't.
Uh, he took them and put them down and got back in the hearse
and off we went.
As the hearse made its way to Northamptonshire,
thousands of people lined the motorway.
Just cars abandoned all over the place,
and people standing by the central reservation
to see us go past.
Totally surreal.
Never seen anything like it.
Not something which is usually allowed by the police,
but still people on the motorway paying their final respects.
The hearse finally arrived at the Spencer Estate at Althorp,
an hour later than expected.
When the coffin arrived at the house,
the royal standard was replaced with the Spencer flag,
before Earl Spencer announced, "Diana is home."
I realized at that point
that they were truly claiming back their sister.
"She's a Spencer now," he said.
Diana was buried on a small island in the middle of a lake.
Her family chose the spot to allow her the seclusion and privacy
that she was denied during her life.
This is the private funeral bit.
This is what the family wanted.
We didn't want hordes of press or other people appearing
on the scene.
Colin Tebbutt and Paul Burrell were the only non-family members invited
to the intimate private ceremony.
We followed the coffin down to the lake
and across the pontoon which they'd built, onto the island.
The sunlight was coming through the trees
and the coffin was being lowered into the hole.
And a few prayers were said.
And I just stood there, rooted to the spot.
People threw earth onto the coffin.
And then we left.
It was as simple and as lovely as that.
Thousands of the flowers that had been left at the gates
were laid out for her.
To this day, Diana has no headstone.
If there was one lesson from that week, it is that
Diana's memory means an awful lot to a great many people.
Just as much today as it did then.
Today, Diana's legacy lives on,
especially through her two sons.
Do you want a kiss?
Ohh!
Oh, no! See?
They're their mother's sons.
People see her channeled through those two princes.
The events of that extraordinary week also left their mark on the Queen.
She proved that, when pushed, she was prepared to bow to the public
and act against centuries of tradition.
Out of tragedy, the royal family began to forge
a new relationship with the public, a relationship which still survives today.
It was an enormous scare for the royal family,
who, basically, I mean, in the subsequent decades,
has sharpened up its act no end.
The Queen and Charles have both learned from Diana,
to interact more with a public that so nearly turned on them.
They understood afterwards that they did have to be more inclusive,
they did have to open up, they did have to show they were part of the modern world.
But for Diana, that would have never happened.
Now the Queen is more popular than ever,
as her stoicism, her restraint, and her lifetime of service
have all come to be appreciated again.
The royal family endures. If anything, it's stronger than ever.
And today, when the Queen is not in Buckingham Palace,
the Union Jack always flies overhead,
a clear reminder of seven days that shook the world.