29 Years On, the Image of William and Harry Walking Behind Princess Diana’s Coffin Still Breaks Hearts

Nearly three decades after Princess Diana’s funeral brought London to a standstill, one image from that extraordinary day remains almost impossible to forget: her two young sons walking silently behind their mother’s coffin.

On September 6, 1997, London witnessed a farewell unlike almost anything Britain had seen before.

Shortly after 9am, the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, left Kensington Palace on a gun carriage and began its solemn journey through streets packed with mourners.

There were flowers. There were tears. There were crowds stretching along the route.

But amid the enormous public spectacle, attention kept returning to two boys.

Prince William was just 15. Prince Harry was 12.

Walking behind the coffin of their mother, they were joined by their father, then-Prince Charles, their grandfather Prince Philip and Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer.

The five figures moving slowly through London would become one of the defining images of Diana’s funeral — and one of the most haunting photographs in modern royal history.

For William and Harry, however, it was not history.

It was their mother.

Diana had died at the age of 36 following the car crash in Paris on August 31, sending Britain into an extraordinary period of national mourning. Flowers piled up outside royal residences as members of the public struggled to comprehend the sudden loss of a woman who had become one of the most recognisable people in the world.

By the morning of her funeral, that private loss had become a global event.

An estimated one million people lined the route through London, while the television audience around the world ran into the billions.

Yet the scale of the occasion only made the sight of Diana’s sons seem more intimate.

They walked behind the gun carriage as the coffin passed through a city transformed by grief, surrounded by enormous crowds but appearing, in those images, strikingly alone.

The contrast was almost unbearable: a funeral being watched across the world, and two children experiencing something profoundly personal in full public view.

A city fell silent

The procession eventually reached Westminster Abbey, where royalty, politicians, celebrities and Diana’s friends gathered for the service.

Inside, one musical moment would become inseparable from memories of the funeral.

Elton John performed a rewritten version of “Candle in the Wind,” while Diana’s brother delivered a deeply personal address remembering his sister and reflecting on the intense attention that had surrounded her life.

But beyond the famous faces and ceremonial setting, the atmosphere outside told another story.

For many mourners, Diana had represented a different kind of royal figure.

Her highly publicised humanitarian work had included campaigning on HIV and AIDS, homelessness and the danger posed by landmines. Her willingness to touch patients at a time when fear and misinformation around HIV remained widespread became part of her public legacy.

Her death therefore felt, to many, less like the distant passing of a royal figure and more like the sudden loss of someone they believed they knew.

That connection could be seen in the extraordinary sea of flowers left outside Kensington Palace and elsewhere in the days following her death.

And then there were William and Harry.

Whatever debates surrounded the monarchy, the crowds or the response to Diana’s death, there was something almost universally understood about the sight of two sons saying goodbye to their mother.

The journey did not end at Westminster Abbey

After the service, Diana’s coffin left Westminster Abbey.

The enormous public farewell gradually gave way to something quieter.

Her body was driven away from London toward Northamptonshire and the Spencer family’s ancestral home, Althorp.

There, away from the vast crowds and television cameras that had followed so much of the day, Diana was laid to rest in a private ceremony.

Her grave is on a small island within a lake on the Althorp estate.

It was an unusually secluded ending to an extraordinarily public life.

For years, cameras had followed Diana almost everywhere.

On September 6, millions followed her final journey through London.

But the last goodbye belonged to her family.

Why the images still resonate 29 years later

Almost three decades have passed since that morning.

William and Harry are no longer the young boys seen walking through London behind their mother’s coffin. Both grew into adulthood under intense public attention, and both have spoken at different times about the lasting impact of losing Diana so young.

But the footage of September 6, 1997 freezes them forever at 15 and 12.

Perhaps that is why the images have retained such extraordinary emotional force.

They show all the ceremony associated with royalty — the gun carriage, the historic streets, Westminster Abbey, the crowds — while simultaneously stripping the moment down to something painfully ordinary.

Children had lost their mother.

No title could make that easier.

No palace could make that less final.

And no crowd, however enormous, could turn their grief into anything other than grief.

Diana’s funeral has since become part of modern British history. It is remembered for the unprecedented public mourning, for the immense television audience, for the music inside Westminster Abbey and for a nation confronting its relationship with both Diana and the monarchy.

But 29 years later, statistics are not what most people remember first.

They remember the coffin.

They remember the flowers.

And above all, they remember two young princes walking behind their mother on her final journey through London — an image that, even after nearly three decades, has lost remarkably little of its power.