Prince Harry Reveals How King Charles Broke The News To Him That His ‘Mummy’ Princess Diana Had Died
Prince Harry recalled ‘not shedding a tear’ as his father King Charles told him about the death of his mother in ‘Spare.’
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Prince Harry revealed how his father King Charles told him about the death of his mother Princess Diana in 1997. The Duke Of Sussex, 38, shared his father – now 74 — did not hug him as he shared the news in his bombshell memoir Spare. “What I do remember with stunning clarity is that I did not cry. Not a tear. My father did not hug me,” Harry recalled of the moment, which happened when he was just 12. Charles did, however, address his youngest child as “my dear son” during the conversation per NBC News.
At the time, Harry was visiting his grandparents, the late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, at Scotland’s Balmoral Castle with brother Prince William, 40 (then just 15). Harry also wrote that their father had told them Diana suffered from injuries to the head and was unlikely to survive the car cash, which took place in Paris on August 31, 1997. The Princess of Wales, just 36 at the time of her passing, was in the French capital with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, who was 42 at the time of his passing.
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It was believed that paparazzi had played a role in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel crash, however, it was later revealed that their driver Henri Paul had been driving the limousine under the influence. Notably, Diana’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was the sole survivor of the crash.
In another passage of the book, Harry revealed that as a child, believed that Diana had possibly faked her own death to escape the wrath of public attention and paparazzi. “With nothing to do but roam the castle and talk to myself, a suspicion took hold, which then became a firm belief. This was all a trick,” Harry said. “And for once the trick wasn’t being played by the people around me, or the press, but by Mummy. Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away,” he also wrote.
As adults, Harry and William themselves drove through the tunnel where their mother lost her life — wanting to experience the “bump” that supposedly threw the car off course. “We barely felt it,” Harry wrote in Spare. “I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”