On September 6, 1997, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was held at Westminster Abbey. She had died in the early hours of August 31, in a hospital in Paris, from injuries sustained when the car she was travelling in crashed in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel while being chased by photographers. She was 36. Dodi Fayed and the driver, Henri Paul, were killed at the scene; the bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived.
The week between the death and the funeral was the strange part, and it is what historians write about. The royal family stayed at Balmoral following its usual summer routine, and the refusal to return to London or to fly the flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace turned a private grief into a public argument about the institution. On September 5 the Queen made a live television broadcast, speaking as a grandmother and as head of state at once. The next morning the funeral went ahead.
The coffin was carried on a gun carriage from St James's Palace to the Abbey by soldiers of the Household Cavalry, drawn by six horses, with the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh and her brother Earl Spencer walking behind. About 2,000 people were inside. Earl Spencer's eulogy attacked the press. It attacked the family too, indirectly. The congregation applauded. Elton John sang a rewritten Candle in the Wind with lyrics by Bernie Taupin; the single went on to sell around 33 million copies and remains one of the best-selling records ever issued.
Estimates of the worldwide television audience have never been agreed on, and ran into the billions, which would make it one of the most-watched broadcasts in history. The crowd outside was measured in tonnes of flowers left at Kensington Palace and Hyde Park, cleared and replaced for days.
Diana was buried on an island in the ornamental lake at Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire. The visible consequence for the monarchy was a change in how it behaves: the fixed rules about when a flag flies and when the sovereign speaks in public were rewritten in the months after, and the idea that the institution could stay silent through a national reaction was quietly dropped.