Chapter Twenty-Two

Remember Me

Is it true that Mummy is dead?

—Prince Harry, August 31, 1997

WHERE DID IT COME FROM, this immense reach of sorrow? In some mysterious transfusion of glamour, suffering, and exposure, Diana had exchanged her identity as a daughter of privilege for that of an idol of the masses. For sixteen years, millions of Britons had felt themselves to be not spectators of but participants in her evolution and her struggles: the shy teenager who became a fairy princess and a mother; the wronged wife who searched for love and was always betrayed; the compassionate crusader who seemed to become more beautiful the more she shared the miseries of others.

Now she was gone, and they streamed into London to mourn her at the rate of 6,000 an hour. The gates to Kensington Palace became a gigantic floral snowdrift bobbing with pictures of Diana. There were flowers strewn even on the trees and shrubs like the detritus of an exotic summer ball. The mountains of bouquets, clipped-out photographs, teddy bears, poems, messages, rosaries, queen of hearts playing cards, and children’s drawings; the sounds amid the crowd not simply of quiet crying but deep, gasping sobs; the lines to sign the condolence books at St. James’s Palace stretching away to vanishing point—it was amazing, and a little scary. The diversity of the crowd, as much as its numbers, was what made it a miracle: young, old, black, white, South Asian and East Asian, in shorts and saris and denim and pinstripes and baseball caps and hijabs. The death of an aristocratic girl who became a princess but refused to let palace walls enclose her had somehow triggered a historic celebration of inclusion. Dr. Trevor Phillips, later chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, spoke for them all when he hailed her as “a heroine who embraced the modern, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Britain without reservation.”

The then London bureau chief of the New York Times, Warren Hoge, was transfixed by the sight and sound of a country discovering itself. Britain, he says, “had no idea it was this racially mixed, this driven by women, this aspirational until it asked itself: Who were all these people in the green spaces of London coming out for Diana?”

Part of it, perhaps, was that she was the first great glamour icon to live and die in the age of round-the-world, round-the-clock multimedia. The loss of her dazzle happened all at once and everywhere on television and radio and the Internet, in newspapers and magazines, via cell phone and e-mail, creating the first great grief-a-thon. Her death came, too, at a moment of political transition. The British people in mid-1997 had had enough of stone-faced authority figures giving them castor oil and telling them to sit up straight. It’s why Tony Blair won the election for Labour in May with the biggest landslide of the twentieth century, after twelve years of Margaret Thatcher as Nurse Ratchet in Downing Street, seven years of John Major as a furled umbrella, sixteen years of the Royal Family failing to understand that the warm, golden, flesh-and-blood girl in their midst was the best thing to happen to them since the restoration of King Charles II. Now the British people’s pent-up desire to feel found its release in the death of a princess who always gave permission.

People were turning to each other in the crowd to share confessional stories about their own depressions, their own eating disorders, and their own grief when their father/mother/brother/sister/child had died. “Dear Diana, thank you for treating us like human beings, not criminals,” read one note pinned up on the Kensington Park Gardens notice board. “You were one in a million. From David Hayes and all the lads in HM Prison, Dartmoor.” NBC commentator John Hockenberry recalls the reaction to Diana’s death from a patient at an AIDS hospice outside London to which Diana had once brought William and Harry. “I was sitting at the table with a very gay gentleman in his early sixties. In the hospice cafeteria was a picture of him and Diana with another man and Diana was laughing hard in the picture. I said to him, ‘What the heck was going on that she was laughing at so hard?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was so nervous and my lover, who was very sick—he has since died—was sitting beside me, and it was all very strange, and I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her and I suddenly said, “You’re a princess and I—I’m a queen!” ’ And he started to cry as he said it, and it suddenly connected to me, that she was a symbol of letting it all go, letting all the bridges down. Even in the midst of being royal and being a celebrity royal, she was the symbol of saying fuck it, none of it matters.”

Some of it did matter, of course. Tony Blair understood that part of his role in the weeks ahead would be to analyze the national psyche and distinguish what mattered from what didn’t. He was in his Sedgefield constituency in County Durham when he was reached by Sir Michael Jay in the small hours of Sunday morning and apprised of Diana’s death. Blair, like Prince Charles, foresaw that the nation, as Charles had put it, would “go mad.” “This is going to be absolutely enormous,” the Prime Minister told his press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, “probably bigger than any of us can imagine.” He immediately set himself the task, says Campbell, of “helping to get the Queen through it.”

Blair solidified his reputation as master surfer of the zeitgeist by pausing to pay emotional tribute to Diana on his way to church with his family in the mining village of Trimdon in County Durham. In yoking Diana’s death to the New Labour ethos of people power, Blair had incidentally effected a political ten-strike. His voice cracking, Blair said: “With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity…She was the People’s Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.”

So what if the populist phrase had been swiped from Di biographer Anthony Holden by Alastair Campbell for Blair? So what if to some it had the rank odor of demagoguery? (“The people’s heroine, why did we need one?” asks the writer James Fox today, in exasperation: “It was celebrity culture meets the democratization of monarchy.”) The catchy phrase was everybody’s headline the next day and became the dominant slogan on the flurry of improvised posters tacked to the notice boards in Kensington Palace Gardens.

Not everyone was moved to tears. “The grieving over the Princess is beyond all belief,” groused Gloucestershire aesthete James Lees-Milne to his diary. Her death, he wrote, “would be recognized as a mercy in the long run.” Princess Margaret, who had cut short a holiday in Italy to return to her apartment in Kensington Palace, was more upset about the smell of rotting flowers outside her window. “She didn’t like any of the emotionalism one bit,” her lady-in-waiting, Lady Glenconner, explains. “She said the hysteria was rather like Diana herself. It was as if she got everyone to be as hysterical as she was when she died.” But Margaret and her ilk were in retreat, and they knew it. Wrong about a lot of things, Diana was right about this: that it was time the Monarchy showed a more compassionate, more contemporary face. The people of England were demanding it, too. Flower power, the New York Times called it. Floral fascism, Diana’s detractors called it. Defy her if you dared.

Every TV set in the country was tuned to the Royal Family’s appearance at the 11 A.M. service at Craithie Church, near Balmoral. There was first bafflement, then resentment that the royal response to the death of the most beloved member of their family was, in a word, nothing. The tableau before the cameras as The Firm disembarked en masse for Sunday-morning worship was devoid of any discernible emotion. When you look at the pictures today, with the scared faces of the boys in the back seat of the black Daimler, it is clear they are all numb, frozen in a tragedy so awful that the only thing standing between them and a howl of agony is habitual routine. But that’s not how it came across.

The young princes were heartbreaking in their grown-up jackets and black ties, but Charles and Philip were wearing, for God’s sake, kilts. Worse, as far as the public was concerned, Craithie Parish Church must have been the only house of worship in the country where there was no reference to Diana in the morning’s prayers. Nor had there been since the day she lost her HRH, an excision, said Diana’s friend Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo in 1998, that the Princess minded bitterly. “She thought it was so hurtful to William and Harry.” Even more discordantly, the sermon, by visiting preacher Adrian Varwell, a Church of Scotland minister, was about the unsettling experience of moving house, illustrated by jokes drawn from the ribald Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. (The regular minister at Craithie, Robert Sloan, later defended the sermon by saying, “Everybody in the world knew what had happened. Our business was to conduct a normal service of worship”—an explanation about as welcome to the British public, in Billy Connolly parlance, as a fart in a spacesuit.)

Perhaps it was the surreal public avoidance of the family’s loss that provoked Prince Harry to ask his father, “Is it true that Mummy is dead?” With so few tangible acknowledgments that Diana was gone, no wonder her younger son had his heart set on going to “bring Mummy home.”

The Queen’s detachment from her people was compounded by what her staff think of as “the Balmoral effect,” the unique sense of seclusion at their Scottish retreat. The castle exists in a Walter Scott novel, not in real time. When the Royal Family is there they are not just physically far away, they have retreated into a past they control. The feeling was intensified by a decision the Queen made to protect William and Harry. She ordered all the TV sets and radios in Balmoral to be moved or hidden so the boys could not see or hear any of the broadcasts about Diana’s death. The Sovereign and Prince Philip monitored the developments themselves through the only set available, sequestered in her private sitting room. Throughout the week, the Balmoral staff followed the news surreptitiously from rogue radios and TV sets concealed in closets or behind sofas.

It is one of the ironies of the antimonarchist feelings that swept the country in the face of the Queen’s “callousness” about Diana’s death that for the first time in fifty years the Monarch was, by her lights, putting family before duty, her grandchildren before her subjects. The whole family rallied to assist in supporting William and Harry. A member of staff at Balmoral noted that Prince Philip, who effectively lost his own mother at the age of ten when she was committed for three years to an asylum in Switzerland, was brilliantly effective with his grandsons, offering them gruff tenderness and outdoor activities like stalking and hiking to tire them out. Princess Anne was especially kind to Harry, whose fragility was manifest. She took him alone with her exploring the Balmoral wilds on foot and on horseback. She enlisted her children by Mark Phillips, Peter, age twenty, and Zara, age sixteen. More temperamentally suited than any of her brothers to be King, Anne had raised her children to be self-reliant and do without royal titles. Peter and Zara proved inspiring role models and friends for William and Harry. Prince Charles evoked the good times the family had together, turning through their old photo albums to dwell on pictures of them all together in happier moments. Tiggy Legge-Bourke was summoned to provide warmth and familiar outdoor distractions. Indeed, so concerted was the family effort to leave the boys no time alone with their feelings that they had little space to grieve at all. Such is the Windsor way.

None of this family pain, however, was the business of the public. In showing an impassive face, the Windsors were doing what Royals had always done—refusing “to wear private grief on a public sleeve,” as Princess Alice of Athlone once put it. But the British people were no longer willing to be excluded from the zone of privacy claimed by a family whose purpose, after all, was to symbolize the nation. Diana had schooled them to expect inclusion. The Queen did not grasp that in the media era communication is at least as much a core value as stoicism. Up to now, she had understood perfectly the importance of knowing when not to talk; indeed, much of the monarchical magic she had managed to preserve had stemmed from the dignity of her silence in a culture of babble. But there are also moments, just as important, when the instinct of silence fails and words are a necessary consolation. “All week we wanted the Queen to say she was suffering with us, but she didn’t do it,” said Sam Stark, forty-three, a mourner who, with his goddaughter in tow, had joined the milling crowd in front of Buckingham Palace. “When your parents don’t listen you rebel.” The fact that no words were forthcoming only served to reinforce the absence of empathy the Princess had experienced during her life. It conjured up the huge, sad blue eyes of the Princess on Panorama—You see.

Tony Blair smelled the potential danger early. He offered to lend the support of Alastair Campbell and another top aide, Anji Hunter, to the Palace team handling the funeral arrangements. They joined Lord Airlie, the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Robert Fellowes, Richard Aylard, and all the Queen’s men at Buckingham Palace. The Sovereign was still hoping that there could be a private ceremony at Windsor and then a burial at Frogmore—just like that other awkward anomaly, the Duchess of Windsor. From Sunday afternoon, however, it was clear to everyone except the Queen that there would have to be a full-blown memorial service at Westminster Abbey. Charles astutely co-opted Blair to help him get the idea past his mother. The planning meetings to rush through the arrangements took place in the Chinese room at Buckingham Palace, with representatives from the Spencer family, Charles’s staff, the Queen’s men, Downing Street, and the forces of law, order, and street traffic. Sir Robin Janvrin was on speakerphone from Balmoral. “There was an argument about the children’s role,” one of the attendees told me. “The Windsors opposed the children being involved much because they didn’t think they could handle it. There was an amazing moment when we were on speaker with what we thought was Janvrin alone and Prince Philip came booming over the squawk box. The Spencer side had been saying what the role of the children had to be and Philip suddenly blasted, ‘Stop telling us what to do with those boys! They’ve lost their mother! You’re talking about them as if they are commodities. Have you any idea what they are going through!’ It was rather wonderful. His voice was full of emotion, a real voice of the grandfather speaking.” Later in the week, the Duke butted in on the conference call again. “Our worry at the moment is William. He’s run away up the hill and we can’t find him. That’s the only thing we are concerned with at the moment.”

Ironically, it was a practical miscalculation that kicked the notorious flagpole controversy into high gear. The Palace had not allocated enough condolence books at St. James’s Palace. The endless standing in line to sign them focused the public eye on a glaring deficiency: the flagpole on top of Buckingham Palace was bare.

In protocol terms, there was no reason why it should not have been empty. The Buckingham Palace flagpole is strictly for the Royal Standard, with its lyres and lions rampant, and it is flown there only when the Monarch is in residence. It is not so much a flag as an office In/Out sign. It is never flown at half-staff, not even to mark the passing of a Monarch, because there will be a new Monarch on the throne. Nor does the Palace ever raise a Union Jack, not even to mark the passing of a national hero like Winston Churchill. But procedures that had been good for the Britain of 100 years earlier—or five days earlier—were suddenly archaic in the new Diana dawn.

The royal biographer Anthony Holden, who was based outside Buckingham Palace with American TV crews for most of the week, turned into the unlikely Robespierre for incipient Republican sentiment. At one point, he was engaged in the frustrating task of explaining the arcane traditions of the flag to an American audience. As the camera panned around, showing that every other building in Whitehall and Westminster had a flag at half-staff, voices from the crowd around the TV platform urged Holden to speak out on behalf of the people. Egged on by TV executives in New York saying, “This is great! Do it! Do it!” he became the electronic megaphone, expressing the rumbling of the crowd to an audience of millions. Picking up from Holden, TV reporters went up and down the line asking members of the public the disingenuous question “So what do you think of the fact there’s no flag up there, flying at half-staff?” On his way to the second day’s 10 A.M. meeting at the Palace, Alastair Campbell noticed that the mood on the streets was turning nasty. “It reminded me of coming out of a football match and not being sure someone was going to jump you,” he told me.

It was the perfect Day Three distraction for the tabloids. Retrieved from their uncomfortable infamy by Henri Paul’s exposé as a drunkard, the popular press had a new blood sport: going after the Queen. How dare she be “Out” from her Palace in London? The cry went up that she should be there in her capital with her grieving people. The front pages were a Greek chorus: “Show Us You Care” (the Daily Express), “Where Is Our Queen? Where Is Her Flag?” (The Sun), “Your People Are Suffering—Speak to Us Ma’am” (the Daily Mirror).” A Sun editorial: “That empty flagpole at the end of the Mall stands as a stark insult to Diana’s memory. Who gives a damn about the stuffy rules of protocol?” The paper opened a hotline on the issue, and 40,000 readers called to express their disgust.

It is fashionable to believe that without the persuasive bridge-building of Tony Blair, there would have been a convulsion in which Britain became a republic. In the end, I doubt it. There has never been a serious appetite among the British people for replacing the monarchy, however flawed, with a regime fronted by some official in a business suit. They tried a version of it after beheading Charles I and nobody much liked it then. For most Britons, the Crown is the golden thread that connects the people to the most glorious moments of their history, exercising a force for stability in an otherwise bewilderingly changing world. Not for nothing have the Elizabethan and Victorian ages been named after those two great queens. It is seen as reassuring that the Crown represents a constitutional force above politics, providing a bulwark against the egos of over-mighty politicians (who in other countries at other times have established dictatorships). There is something satisfying about Blair’s otherwise obstreperous aide Alastair Campbell having to trudge from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace for planning meetings when the rest of the world had to come to him.

Even in the middle of the Diana hysteria, two-thirds of the British people polled said the country was better off for having a monarchy. Its abolition was certainly not the wish of Diana, whose awe of the institution seemed only to increase the more she alienated the Family who embodied it. “I so want the monarchy to survive,” she wrote in one of her lonely nocturnal notes to Paul Burrell, “and realize the changes that [sic] will take to put ‘the show’ on a new and healthy track. I too understand the fear the family have about change but we must, in order to reassure the public, as their indifference concerns me and should not be.”

According to urban myth, the Queen’s authority is so deeply rooted in the national subconscious that the majority of her subjects are said to have dreamed about her at some stage in their lives.

If anything, Diana’s wedding and Diana’s death both made the same point about monarchy. The fascination they engendered in the rest of the world set Britain consciously apart from the Europeans, who seem to have presidents put in place by procedures no one can understand and whose names no one can remember for five minutes at a time, and Americans, who worship wealth and celebrity in ways Britons find unwholesome. In the words of the historian Andrew Roberts, “It is difficult to imagine two billion people worldwide bothering to watch the funeral service of an ex-daughter-in-law of an elected head of the Republic of Britain.”

Still, Diana’s passing was a nasty moment of truth for the monarchy, forcing it to confront how out of touch it had become. It required a shock to the system, not from Diana alone but from the public, whose disfavor could not be ignored. The Crown had pettily stripped Diana of her HRH, but with one concession at a time, the public now willed its dignity back to her. The rigidities of protocol the Princess had defied in her life tumbled before the outpouring of raw feeling from the people. The Queen was forced out of Balmoral to London for a public walkabout amid the grief and the flowers outside Buckingham Palace; she was obliged to make her first-ever live TV broadcast to the nation, expressing an empathy she almost certainly did not feel, and accept the flying of the Union Jack at half-staff over Buckingham Palace. And as the coffin passed Buckingham Palace, the Monarch, standing outside, did something she had only done before for a head of state. She bowed her head.

One of the many extraordinary things about the days after Diana’s death was the way the ritual of preserving the monarchy and the necessity of modernizing the monarchy simultaneously played out at Buckingham Palace. From the grave, Diana achieved something she could never quite manage in her lifetime: she made the Palace listen to her. “The death of Diana made the institution look hard at itself,” Sir Robin Janvrin admits. “It was an opportunity to lift stones that hadn’t been lifted. Who does come into Buckingham Palace on the guest list? What kind of engagements do we do? The death was an opportunity to shake the system.” “It was managing change through disaster,” another Palace official said.

And so, miraculously, in planning her funeral all present at the Palace meetings came to see that while ceremony mattered, what mattered more was that it be a ceremony reflecting an absence of awe and a presence of love. Diana would be carried not on a hearse shielded from the public by glass, but on an open gun carriage. The procession behind her coffin would be not of soldiers and military bands but of hundreds of the volunteers and workers from the charities and campaigns she had supported. The music in Westminster Abbey would be not only Verdi and the patriotic Victorian hymn she had chosen for her wedding—“I Vow to Thee My Country”—but also from her friend Elton John, a pop elegy, “Candle in the Wind,” written first to Marilyn Monroe, the unhappy star with whom Diana most empathized. Everything would be televised, and all along the route up to the Abbey would be video monitors allowing the crowd to participate in the service.

Diana’s coffin spent its last night before the funeral at Kensington Palace. There were candles flickering at each end. A courtier tells how before it left the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace the Queen Mother asked her page William Tallon to place flowers on her behalf. Tallon had already paid his respects in the morning, but in the early evening he went again to fulfill the Queen Mother’s request. He placed his flowers below the coffin and the Queen Mother’s on top. Then he noticed that the coffin was lower in its position than it had been earlier in the day and he asked the chaplain why. “Oh, that’s for the boys,” the chaplain said. “They’re waiting next door in the vestry till you’ve gone. They are going to view her then.” That, Tallon told friends, was when he felt the real force of it. He cried and cried.

At 8 P.M., the coffin made the twenty-minute journey to Kensington Palace in a four-car procession down the Mall, along Constitution Hill, to Hyde Park Corner, and from there to Kensington Palace. Fifty thousand mourners watched in silence as the hearse, filled with flowers, moved slowly past Hyde Park Corner in the hiss and splash of the summer rain. Once the Princess was on her own turf, the Spencer family alone was allowed to keep vigil. The candlelit inner hallway where the coffin lay all night glimmered with Diana’s favorite flowers—white lilies, white tulips, and white roses. For Frances Shand Kydd, these hours were her real good-bye to Diana. The choice of Westminster Abbey for the service the next day was, for her, an unhappy one. She associated the Abbey with her wedding there in June 1954 to Johnnie Spencer; the marriage had ultimately caused her much grief, and she had no wish to be a part of Windsor pomp and ceremony. To ease her pain, she wandered outside the Palace most of the night among the mourners.

The day of the funeral was bathed in bright sunshine. The coffin was draped in the Royal Standard and covered in lilies, a wreath of pink roses, and the single posy of cream roses that broke every mother’s heart: the handwritten card from Harry that read, simply, “Mummy.” As the coffin on its gun carriage, drawn by six black horses, emerged at 9:08 A.M. through the gates of Kensington Palace, a shrill wail, a spine-chilling, haunting cry, rose from the crowd. When it reached St. James’s Palace, the royal men—Prince Charles, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the pale, determined figures of Princes William and Harry—stepped forward, along with Earl Spencer, to take their places behind the gun carriage. It was Prince Philip who got the boys ready for the trial of walking behind. “I’m not going to march in any bloody parade,” William had wept. Philip had gently cajoled him: “If I walk, will you walk with me?” Earl Spencer vehemently objected, saying that Diana would not have wished them to go through such an ordeal. I think he was wrong. Diana’s ethos, even at her most distressed, was to rise to every occasion. She never let the public down. To keep the boys from breaking down along the route, Philip talked to them quietly about each of the historic landmarks of London they passed. How gravely dynastic the three generations of Windsors looked as they strode in formation up the Mall. Their collective masculinity was a reminder of continuity and strength in adversity.

The somber procession, with the boys keeping their heads lowered, moved through the Horse Guards arch and down Whitehall toward Westminster Abbey. The scene was rich in extraordinary images, but it is the sounds that linger: the grinding of the gun carriage wheels; the clatter of hooves; the sibilant slap of thousands of bouquets thrown onto the tarmac; the Shakespearean voices from the crowd calling out “God bless you, William,” “God bless you, Harry” the thin snuffle of sobbing. The funeral cortege arrived at 11 A.M. by the Great West Door of the Abbey. “You felt you were in the heart of the body of the world that was grieving,” says Geordie Greig, one of the guests.

Inside the Abbey were more unforgettable sounds: the solemn chimes of the tenor bell; the squeak of the guardsmen’s boots as the eight pallbearers from the 1st Battalion of the Welsh Guards, all of equal height, carried the 700-pound coffin to a catafalque before the High Altar; and the long seconds of stunned silence that followed the thrilling impertinence of Earl Spencer’s eulogy—a silence so deep, Meredith Etherington-Smith remembers, that “it was like being wrapped in black velvet, an almost physical feeling.”

In a clear rebuke to the Queen who had personally taken back Diana’s right to be styled Her Royal Highness, Earl Spencer said of his sister: “She proved she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic…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.”

Blood family! It was the second time in twenty-two months the Queen had been publicly kicked in the teeth by this spawn of off-the-wall Whigs. (The first was Diana’s salvo on Panorama.) Thrown as it was in the frozen faces not just of the Monarch but of the entire House of Windsor, Earl Spencer’s address—written in fluid longhand on his way back from South Africa on the plane—was the nearest thing you could get in the late twentieth century to an Act of Sedition. The silence in the Abbey was broken by a sound that everyone, at first, thought was the patter of rain. It was actually a burst of applause from the crowd outside. It washed through the Great West Door and down the nave until, for the first time in the great church’s history, everyone—except the Royal Family—was clapping, too. A few centuries earlier, Earl Spencer might have been dispatched to the Tower. As it was, the Queen, who is the Earl’s godmother, just stared stonily ahead. Prince Charles was so angry he had to be restrained from issuing a statement afterward. “Very bold,” the Queen Mother said archly when asked about it later in Scotland. Prince Philip considered the eulogy a matter of sufficient gravity that he later consulted his close friend Lord Brabourne, the film producer, about what he thought the royal response should be. Brabourne, sophisticate in the ways of the media, told him to do absolutely nothing, and urged him to restrain the instinct of impulsivity in Charles. What the Queen herself thought is evinced by her comment to Earl Spencer at the opening of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park in the summer of 2004. “I hope you are satisfied now,” she was overheard to tell her godson before she drove away.

Would Diana have approved of her brother’s reckless eulogy? More to the point: Would she have given it herself? The answer to that, of course, is yes (though later she would have sacked all the people who’d helped her write it). It had all the hallmarks of a dazzling Spencer mistake: perfectly of the moment, brilliantly conceived and executed, and freighted with disaster for the future. Frances Shand Kydd, repudiated by the Windsors from the day she left Johnnie Spencer, had no doubts herself about its rightness: “Strange though it may seem, Diana’s funeral was probably the proudest day of my life as a mother. Proud of her; my daughters, who were rock steady in their readings, and my son, who gave the ultimate tribute of brotherly love for her.” Frances and Earl Spencer had together chosen the site for the burial, not with her father and ancestors in the family vault in the thirteenth-century church at Great Brington but at Althorp itself on a small island, known as The Oval, in the middle of an ornamental lake two hundred and fifty yards north of the house. The grave’s seclusion, reached only by rowboat, protected Diana from the invasions of privacy that had marked her life. A temporary wooden bridge had been erected for the coffin to pass, borne on the shoulders of eight soldiers from the Princess of Wales regiment.

The gates of Althorp opened at 3:30 P.M. to admit the hearse, still scattered with flower petals from the crowds who had lined the seventy-seven-mile route from London to Northampton. Once inside the drive of the Spencer ancestral home, the royal officials escorting the coffin carefully unstitched the Royal Standard and replaced it with the white, red, and gold flag of the Spencer family. Only intimate relatives, along with Paul Burrell and Colin Tebbutt, would attend the burial. The Spencers with Prince Charles and his sons had arrived an hour earlier on the Royal Train—a strained ninety-minute journey, given Earl Spencer’s performance at the Abbey. The exhausted party of family mourners were served coffee at the rosewood table in the drawing room, the young Princes sitting with the silently brooding Prince Charles. A butler entered and Earl Spencer left the room. He returned to declare simply, “Diana is home.”

And so Diana the hunted was laid to rest in the beauty and tranquility of the Round Oval with Mother Teresa’s rosary and cards from nieces, nephews, and her two boys as eternal keepsakes.

I asked Tony Blair a decade after he became Prime Minister and was no longer the eager young modernizer he was in 1997, but a man tempered by the vicissitudes and loneliness of power, what if anything Diana’s life had signified. A new way to be royal? “No,” he replied without hesitation. “Diana taught us a new way to be British.”

And so she did; but she taught, and learned, much more. When she came into the world, at the beginning of the 1960s, to be British meant, in almost all cases, to live a life without surprises, to follow a path laid out by the circumstances of birth and the folkways of class. The pattern was especially circumscribed for women, and perhaps most of all for women of Diana’s background, as straitened as it was privileged. “Diana is home,” her brother said. But in many ways he could hardly have been more wrong. Althorp had not been home to Diana for a long time, if it ever had been. It was what—without really intending to—she had escaped from.

Like the heroine of a fairy tale, she became a princess. But her instinctive refusal to play her assigned role in the expected way, her insistence on living (as opposed to just living happily ever after), and her unplanned, unfinished search for happiness on her own terms enabled her to break free to become a citizen of the world, finding her place far from the moist-lipped charmers and grim periwigged operators of the Spencers’ ancestral past or the encrusted traditions of the Windsors’ stagnating present. The political power of the monarchy has been hemorrhaging for nearly 400 years, and by a century ago it was effectively gone. Diana stumbled on a new kind of royal power. She showed what could be done with the old concept of royal bounty when the drama of humanitarian concern is connected with the new electronic nervous system of worldwide media.

You can see the Diana Effect today on the Queen herself. During the London terror bombings of July 7, 2005, the Sovereign did something spontaneous for the first time in her own reign but reminiscent of the Queen Mother in the Blitz. She did not wait, as she would have done in the past, for her diary to open up for a planned visit to the injured. The very next day, she traveled by helicopter from Windsor Castle to tour the wards of The Royal London Hospital in White-chapel in London’s East End. Another first: the Queen made a speech in the informal setting of the hospital’s canteen. “Yesterday’s bombings have deeply affected us all,” she told the hospital staff to cheers and applause. “I know I speak for everyone in expressing my sympathy to those who have been caught up in these events and, above all, to the relatives and friends who have lost their lives.” And when Britain observed two minutes of silence on the week’s anniversary of the tragedy, the Queen again broke with royal custom. As Big Ben chimed its solemn midday across the silent city, she appeared in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, flanked by staff ranging from junior footmen to senior aides.

The understanding of the power of the inclusive gesture was Diana’s gift to the monarchy and so much more. She played her innovative role while also fulfilling to perfection the most important, if most atavistic, family duty to which she was assigned: the production of male offspring. She gave the Windsors and England, and all the world’s photographers, two tall, handsome Princes of the Blood. But then she raised them with a commoner’s hands-on warmth and informality. When Prince Harry, now second Lieutenant Wales of the Blues and Royals, a Household Cavalry regiment, insisted on serving in Iraq, you could hear his mother’s voice: “There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst,” he said in a BBC interview to mark his twenty-first birthday, “and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.” As for Prince William, the heir to the throne, he was happy to attend, before Sandhurst, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, rather than pull strings for the expected Oxford or Cambridge, and his first solo foray with the press was not conducted at St. James’s Palace but propping up the bar at the Hare and Hounds pub in Tetbury. He was wearing baggy jeans, a red sweatshirt, and a charming smile. He was relaxed and confident, but in ninety minutes’ friendly chat the tabloid reporters invited to join him, while smitten, learned precisely—nothing. He is a Prince who has learned from Diana’s experience, a Prince after Diana’s heart. Her legacy is in good hands.