Prince Harry once spoke out about the only time he ever cried about the death of his mum, Princess Diana.
The youngest son of King Charles II and his first wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, the 39-year-old was just 12 years old when he lost his mum.
Princess Diana died in the early hours of 31 August 1997 from injuries sustained in a car crash at the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, France.
She died along with her partner, Dodi Fayed and their chauffeur Henri Paul.
With the Princess having captured much of the nation’s hearts, her death really rocked the country and screens were filled with tributes to her.
And among this, Brits saw a lot of the two young princes, Harry and William, in the press as they lost their mum.
During an interview with ITV in January 2023, the Duke of Sussex opened up about the grieving process and the crowds that gathered outside of Kensington Palace.
“Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing the night my mother died,” he said.
Harry was 12 when his mum died. (Jayne Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images)
“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.
“There were 50,000 bouquets of flowers to our mother, and there we were shaking people’s hands, smiling. 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.
“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.”
Princes Harry and William walked behind their mother’s coffin with their father, their grandfather Prince Philip, and their maternal uncle The Earl Spencer (Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
The highly anticipated interview came ahead of the release of Harry’s 2023 autobiography, Spare.
The book ended up becoming the ‘fastest-selling non-fiction book in history’ – selling 400,000 copies across hardback, e-book and audio format.
And the contents of that book is far from forgotten by many of us.
A few of the topics covered in the book was his admission to once using mushrooms, how he had Googled wife Meghan Markle’s sex scenes in Suits when they first started dating – which he described as a ‘mistake’ – and of course, how he lost his virginity to an ‘older woman’.
Elsewhere in the ITV interview, Prince Harry expressed how desperate he was to mend ties with his family, saying: “I would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back.”
Featured Image Credit: Victoria Jones – WPA Pool/Getty Images and Photo by Georges De Keerle/Getty Images
