Chapter Twenty-Seven ‘I Stand Before You Today…’ #4
This delay persuaded us to have lunch before the burial ceremony.
Prince Charles was located and came to join us.
We ate in the Marlborough Room, relieved that the most public part of the day was completed.
Diana was now, as we had originally intended, coming to us in private.
Nobody talked about it, but I am sure that we were all aware that the agony of the burial ceremony was still to come, the grim finale to a day of endless ordeals.
When Diana’s coffin finally reached Althorp’s park, the driver and protection officer in the hearse met up with Adey, my right-hand man on the estate, who was long used to liaising with royal policemen and members of Diana’s household.
Adey watched as the other two men carefully unpicked the pins holding the Royal Standard to the top of Diana’s coffin.
They then respectfully replaced it with a flag emblazoned with the Spencer crest – an emblem that Diana had always been so proud of.
She had incorporated it in her own royal coat of arms, after her marriage.
We in the house were now informed that everything was in order: the burial could take place.
We walked together towards the Round Oval. By the side of the lake, I met up with the officer from the Princess of Wales’s Regiment who had taken over responsibility for the coffin until interment.
A few days earlier, the commanding officer of the regiment that bore Diana’s title had asked for any of his men who might be interested in taking part in Diana’s burial party to assemble on the parade ground at an allotted hour.
When he arrived to see who had volunteered, he found every last man of the regiment standing to attention there, eager to be selected to serve Diana one last time.
The senior officer on duty that day was a wonderful fellow, clearly proud to be part of this immensely sad but important event: ‘I’ve just squared off the padre,’ he told me, pointing at a gently smiling clergyman in a flowing white gown, twenty yards away, ‘and we’re on the same page.
’ I thanked him on my sister’s behalf, and he saluted before heading off to complete his duties.
My sisters and I had chosen the Reverend Victor Malan to be the priest at the committal.
He was a long-standing family friend who had been vicar of All Saints, the main Protestant church in nearby Northampton.
Victor had conducted a packed service of thanksgiving there a year after my father survived his stroke.
Victor emanated kind calm empathy, alongside a sincere and humble Christianity.
His qualities were exactly what was required in this extraordinary setting of an island burial in the middle of Althorp’s wilderness, at that terrible time.
He had known Diana since her early teens, and was clearly very moved by her loss, while determined to do his best for her and our family on that darkest of days.
Knowing from what they had witnessed earlier on television that the coffin would be extraordinarily heavy, the Princess of Wales’s pall-bearers correctly took their time, locked together, determined to do their bit.
They crossed the pontoon bridge, which protested a little as they went, in a coordinated shuffle, rather than a march.
My sisters and I had decided not to bring any of our children under the age of ten to the funeral, fearing the occasion would be too much for them.
Some of my nieces, slightly older than this threshold, were openly crying now, and the rest of us were struggling to keep our emotions in check as we prepared to say goodbye to the woman who was either our mother, our child, our sister, our aunt, or our sister-in-law.
We were all related to Diana in the funeral party, apart from two members of her household staff and Josie, whom Diana had spent time with and liked.
I was surprised to spot a stranger on the island, in a dark suit.
I could not work out who he was, but he seemed to be part of Prince Charles’s retinue.
Trying to be unobtrusive, yet realizing he was anything but, he looked at me in a fluster before uttering the unforgettable line: ‘Please ignore me – I am a tree!’ He then pushed himself in behind a few straggly fronds hanging down from one of the island’s beeches.
He remained there, motionless, having failed quite spectacularly to achieve invisibility. He blinked more than a tree should.
Diana was lowered into the ground as the vicar offered his sentences of Christian comfort.
Several of us threw in our flowers on top of the coffin.
Prince Charles plucked a single stem from my bouquet for Diana and let it drop on his ex-wife’s coffin.
How very generous, I thought, angry now on Diana’s behalf, as she began to disappear under the soil.
But anger was very much a secondary emotion at such a moment of profound loss.
The burial was both incredibly painful and utterly exquisite.
It took place in somewhere of such outstanding beauty that it only emphasized the excruciating sadness of those of us present – heads bowed, hearts crushed – who truly loved Diana.