Farewell, Princess

By WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO

Sept. 7, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LONDON — Britain buried its beloved Diana, Princess of Wales, on Saturday with the same splendor and controversy in which she lived.

More than a million people jammed the streets of central London to bid a hushed farewell to the 36-year-old beauty who became a rebel with 100 causes, raising royal hackles while reaching resolutely out to the needy at home and abroad.

A gigantic global television audience shared Britain’s grief as Diana’s two young sons followed her--15-year-old Prince William with his head bowed--for the last time through sun-bathed London streets. Later, after a somber funeral service that echoed through gothic Westminster Abbey, hundreds of thousands more lined highways and country lanes to wave farewell as Diana went home to her family’s country estate.

“Goodbye, England’s rose,” Elton John sang, his words ringing through the abbey in one of the day’s most memorable moments--one that brought tears to the eyes of William and his 12-year-old brother, Prince Harry, witnesses said. “Now you belong to heaven, and the stars spell out your name.”

In an astonishing remembrance of his sister, Charles Spencer sounded a sharp note of anger in a flinty funeral oration, criticizing the media directly and the royal family by implication for the unhappiness that was such an integral part of Diana’s life. Spencer won powerful applause inside and outside the church.

Diana was carried to the cathedral past weeping, ashen-faced mourners in a simple cortege. Mounted on a ceremonial gun carriage, her casket was topped with white lilies from the Spencer family, white tulips from William and a cushion of white roses from Harry that bore a crisp white card with a single, handwritten word: “Mummy.”

The coffin was followed to church by Diana’s sons, her brother, ex-husband Prince Charles and Charles’ father, Prince Philip. It was also followed by people she had helped, a dozen of them in wheelchairs.

The procession took an aching one hour and 52 minutes. Once every minute, the abbey’s tenor bell pealed a single note of mourning, piercing the silence that lay on the city. The note was a D, for Diana.

Inside the abbey during the service, George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury, prayed for the princess, giving thanks “for her sense of joy and for the way she gave so much to so many people . . . , for her vulnerability, for her radiant and vibrant personality, for her ability to communicate warmth and compassion, for her ringing laugh and, above all, for her readiness to identify with those less fortunate in our nation and the world.”

Organizers of a “unique” funeral that broke decades of rigid protocol had said the chief mourners Saturday would be her brother, her sons and Diana’s former husband, Prince Charles. But that’s not the way it was.

Diana’s chief mourners were the 60 million people of Britain, who had mounted an unprecedented weeklong guard of honor for a princess they adopted as their own. Before it was over, a stuffy royal family had bowed deferentially to the power of the people--and to a million bouquets of flowers.

The 2,000 mourners in Westminster Abbey on a crystal Saturday included acquaintances and friends from every corner of Diana’s life.

“I found myself sitting among an extraordinary amalgam of people. Creed, race, religion, they all seemed to be there. There were women designer-dressed for a funeral, and women who obviously didn’t have the same resources,” said Peter Hubble, a Knightsbridge jeweler who, over more than a decade, struck up an acquaintance with a famous customer.

“It was a service for the wonderful miscellany of people. Tears ran, but, strangely, I was never unhappy. It was a beautiful send-off for a beautiful woman,” said Hubble.

Television cameras in the abbey, which beamed the funeral to about 2.5 billion viewers worldwide, did not focus on the faces of the 43 members of the royal family, led by Queen Elizabeth II, during the service.

But afterward, witnesses would tell of Harry weeping as performer John sang new lyrics to his song “Candle in the Wind”: “Your candle burned out long before your legend ever will.” William wept at the words, “All our words cannot express the joy you brought us through the years.”

There was no mistaking the pain or the anger in the face of Diana’s younger brother, Charles, 33, the ninth Earl Spencer. He called the media evil, vowed to protect the young princes from it and to share with the royal family in the upbringing of Diana’s two boys.

“I don’t think she ever understood why her genuine good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. My own, and only, explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum,” he declared.

In an oration that one British commentator would describe as “astounding,” Spencer spoke in direct address to Diana, saying that while his family would always respect and encourage William and Harry in their royal role, “we, like you, recognize the need for them to experience as many different aspects of life as possible . . .”

Like their mother, their uncle said, the boys must be allowed “to sing openly.”

Thousands had waited all night to say farewell to the “people’s princess,” and mourners were ready with their anguish and their bouquets as Diana’s cortege left her Kensington Palace home precisely at the appointed hour, 9:08 Saturday morning.

Mourners stood 12 deep in some places. The small, lonely procession included a detail of mounted police. People wailed, flowers flew, and the eerie quiet seemed an electric national gasp of shock and remorse.

With the princess’ coffin, pulled by six black horses of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, marched a detachment of troopers from the prince of Wales’ company, 1st Battalion, the Welsh Guards with scarlet tunics and bearskin hats. They would be the pallbearers at the abbey.

“Bless you, bless you,” screamed one woman as the cortege turned onto Kensington Road. There were no bands, no music, no guns. In the keening silence of the crowd, just the clip-clop of the horses and the tread of the soldiers could be heard--and, once a minute, the abbey bell. D. D. D. D. D.

Passing from Kensington into the city’s Knightsbridge section, one of the princess’ favorite shopping and dining haunts, the cortege passed within a few hundred yards of the landmark department store Harrods, shuttered for only the second Saturday this century. The first closure was for the 1965 funeral of Winston Churchill. This time it closed in homage not only to Diana but also to Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian playboy son of the store’s owner and Diana’s companion in the Paris car crash that killed them and a driver last week.

Like Harrods, all of commercial London shut for at least a large part of the day. Along the normally bustling Edgar Road to the north of Hyde Park, signs announcing businesses’ salutes to Diana were written in English, Arabic and Hindi. Around the rest of the nation, it was the same: no traffic, no businesses open, all soccer matches postponed, few people in the streets except the giant throng in London.

By the time the cortege emerged from leafy Constitution Hill and pointed toward the front of Buckingham Palace, the royal family was there, waiting. For an instant, the queen, in a black suit and a twin strand of pearls, stood tiptoe to catch sight of a funeral train heralded by approaching hoof beats.

The distant lament of a lone bagpipe drifted over the palace. The queen--who normally bows to no one--dipped her head to the coffin as it rode solemnly past. Then she turned back into her home and past a sign on the flower-festooned black iron gates reading, “Diana of Love.”

It was during Diana’s passage down the historic Mall, perhaps the most famous processional route in the world, that the cortege grew. Her brother, sons, former husband and former father-in-law fell in behind the coffin.

Behind them came representatives of the more than 100 charities that Diana had supported. Then came Diana’s people, in stiff black suits and in wheelchairs, in sweat shirts and saris, the workers for the Institute for Drug Dependence, the New Zealand Foundation for the Blind, the American Foundation for Covent Garden, the English National Ballet, the National Aids Trust, the National Hospital for Neurology, the National Children’s Orchestra, the Great Ormonde Street Hospital, the Leprosy Mission, Help the Aged and dozens more in earnest and disorderly lines.

At 10:39 a.m., the queen left the palace for the cathedral, and her Royal Standard was lowered from the flagstaff on the roof. For the first time in history, the Union Jack flew above the palace and it flew at half-staff, for Diana.

By the time the procession turned on to Horse Guards Road, it was one nobody in Britain would ever forget: 500 people who devote their lives to helping others, an angry brother and four princes ranging in age from 12 to 76, two of them potential heirs to the throne. At one point, Philip offered a grandfatherly pat to William, and Spencer leaned down to encourage Harry.

As the procession marched down Whitehall and past the Cenotaph, the empty tomb that remembers the dead of two world wars, Elizabeth and her 97-year-old mother walked unassisted into the abbey, where the organ played music that Diana had liked by Mendelsohn, Albinoni, Vaughn Williams and Bach.

Four former British prime ministers were in the church: John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan and Edward Heath.

And there was a sprinkling of foreign VIPs, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, representing the United States. “Today the shadows are longer because we have lost a light that shined brightly and gently, and we will miss her,” the president’s wife said.

Thatcher and Henry A. Kissinger came for the service. So did Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Sting, Wayne Sleep and Luciano Pavarotti. Jeweler Hubble, sitting near the Italian tenor, witnessed his discomfort at not knowing the words of the hymns sung lustily by the rest of the congregation. In the same row with Pavarotti, Hubble saw a young man in a wheelchair.

Mohammed Fayed, Dodi’s father, was there too.

Three generations of royals sat near the front of the cathedral, but, by prior agreement, the television cameras recording the ceremony only briefly showed their faces.

At 11 a.m., while two fellow soldiers held their bearskins hats, eight redcoats bearing the coffin followed their captain to a catafalque at the altar for the 66-minute service conducted by the Very Rev. Wesley Carr, the dean of Westminster.

“In her life Diana profoundly influenced this nation and the world,” Carr said. “She kept company with kings and queens, princes and presidents, but we especially remember her humane concerns and how she met individuals and made them feel significant.”

When the Westminster choir began a famous hymn, “I Vow to Thee My Country,” tears were as apparent among mourners in the abbey as they were in nearby Hyde Park, where a giant crowd followed the service on a huge television screen.

Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana’s sister, read a lesson: “If I should die and leave you here a while . . . , complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine and I perchance may therein comfort you.”

The service had been designed, like the overall ceremony, to be less formal than usual and to reflect the wishes and the personality of the deceased.

In Diana’s honor, soprano Lynne Dawson sang a segment of Verdi’s “Requiem,” one of the princess’ favorite pieces of music.

“I think we all cried, but it was not like some mausoleum. I’d say it was a typical Diana atmosphere. It was a ceremony of mourning, not of despair,” said Hubble.

Capturing Diana’s spirit, her other sister, Lady Jane Fellowes, read: “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternal.”

Love and compassion were the twin themes of the service. British Prime Minister Tony Blair read a lesson, 1 Corinthians 13: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not loved, I am become a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Then came the tribute in song from Elton John, who had been comforted by Diana earlier this summer as they both mourned slain Italian designer Gianni Versace. He was followed by Spencer’s tribute to his sister, which galvanized mourners to applause.

“I’ve never heard of anybody clapping at a funeral. We’re British; we don’t even clap at weddings,” said Hubble.

“The applause moved [from the streets] into the abbey, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said movie director Richard Attenborough.

Four on each side, the Welsh guardsmen shouldered the heavy casket after the service and carried it down the abbey steps. It was 12:06 p.m.

It was a national minute of silence, but it seemed longer. Nothing moved inside the abbey or out. People stood still in the parks, along the barriers, at train stations and airports. Then the abbey’s 10 bells, each half-muffled by a piece of leather wrapped around half of its clapper, again pealed the nation’s grief.

The ceremony was over, but Diana’s journey home had just begun. Even in death, the princess who defied convention rewrote ritual. She rode in a black hearse this time, inside a protective arrow of police motorcycles. And the people of London in their multitude clapped her out of town.

Another small cortege assembled began to travel, this time the hearse, its outriders and a limousine taking Frances Shand Kydd, Diana’s mother, to the burial ground at the Spencer estate about 80 miles north of London.

Before long, flowers tossed by mourners who lined streets for mile after mile lay heavily on the roof of the gleaming black hearse.

As the vehicle approached the M-1 motorway, its driver had to stop to remove the bouquets that were obstructing his view.

The procession formed the only northbound traffic on the motorway, and as it made its way toward Althorp, southbound vehicles were stopped as it passed. Drivers and passengers left their cars to watch, and many threw more flowers.

At one point, the driver resorted to his windshield wipers to clear the flowers away.

Nearly seven hours after leaving Kensington Palace, Diana’s body passed Sue Lyddiatt standing about a quarter of a mile from the 300-acre Spencer estate. Reality came at last to Lyddiatt, just as it came to millions of others in Britain.

“It just seemed real, didn’t it?” she said as the hearse headed for the estate gates and the privacy in burial that had eluded Diana in life. “The week has been a haze and you know it happened, but you had to see this.”

Clouds were gathering by then, and a wind had come up. By nightfall, though, thousands of candles still flickered amid the flowers in this stricken and sorrowful land.

Times staff writer Carla Hall in Lower Harlestone, England, and London Bureau researchers Janet Stobart and Chris Stotesbury contributed to this report.

Farewell, Princess

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