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A clip of Prince William describing his reaction to Princess Diana's death has gone viral on social media after his younger brother Prince Harry's memoir was published on Tuesday.
A key theme of Harry's book, titled Spare, is his own reaction to Diana's death and how for many years he was not certain she had died in the 1997 Paris car crash that also killed her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, instead hoping that she had gone into hiding owing to the abusive media.
William's own reflections on his mother's death were shared as part of an anniversary documentary made in 2017, twenty years after the crash which happened when he was just 15, and Harry was 12.
In a clip from the documentary uploaded to TikTok by user royalbanterofficial, William said: "When you have something so traumatic as the death of your mother when you are just 15, as very sadly many people have experienced and no one wants to experience, it leaves you, you know, it'll either make or break you, and I wouldn't let it break me."
The prince continued to explain that through moving forward with his life in a positive way it was in part, to honor his mother's memory who would not have wanted to worry about how her death would have affected him and his younger brother.
"I wanted it to make me," he said. "I wanted her to be proud of the person I would become. I didn't want her worried or that her legacy would be that, you know, William and or Harry were completely and utterly devastated by it and that all the hard work and all the love and all the energy she put into us when we were younger would go to waste."
@royalbanterofficial ‼️sums up the different attitudes‼️Follow us @royalbanter.official with repost from #colunadocampellooficial #spare #princewilliam #princeharry #royalsatwar #royalty #britishroyalty #royalbanterofficial ♬ original sound - Royal Banter
The video has been viewed over a million times on TikTok in 48 hours and received in excess of 55,000 likes. A number of commenters have praised the prince for articulating his grief and for using the trauma of parental loss as a foundation to build on positively.
"Diana would be so proud of the man he has become ?," wrote one user.
"A son that any mom would be so proud of. William, you are so admired," said another, with a further commenter adding: "Acknowledges other people who have gone through the same thing. Trying to honour his mothers legacy by not playing victim and making her proud ?."
In his memoir Spare, Harry also discusses how his mother's death has shaped his life story, including his journey to coming to terms with her loss.
In one section he discusses requesting access to the classified police files concerning the car crash. He describes looking at photos of the incident, seeing the crumpled Mercedes, the bodies of Diana's boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul, who died at the scene.
He also describes seeing images of his mother, taken on the back seat of the car, not by police, but by the paparazzi who were pursuing her at the time of the accident.
Despite this, the prince writes that after viewing the images he was certain she was "hiding" because she looked so "alive" and unharmed.
It was not until some time later when he asked a chauffeur to drive him through the Ponte de l'Alma tunnel on a trip to Paris at 65 miles per hour, the same tunnel and at the same speed in which Diana was traveling when her fatal crash occurred, that he truly believed she was dead.
"It had been a very bad idea," he wrote. "I'd had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I'd told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn't really. Deep down, I'd hoped to feel in that tunnel what I'd felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away."
In 2022, both Harry and William individually paid tribute to their mother in what was the 25th anniversary year of her death. Though, the event was marked in no official way, both brothers referenced Diana and her legacy in speeches throughout the year.
James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.
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About the writer
James Crawford-Smith is a Newsweek Royal Reporter, based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on the British royal family ... Read more