The late Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Charles Spencer, is looking back at how her two sons’ grieved her tragic death at age 36.
“I do sometimes wonder with the situation, if I can call it that, … how much it is connected to this very sad time,” Charles, 62, told CBS Sunday Mornings when discussing nephew Prince Harry’s “feelings” in a preview of his Sunday, September 20, sit-down interview with the outlet. “He was so young, he was also so tiny. I remember walking beside him and thinking, ‘This little boy shouldn’t have to walk behind his mother’s coffin.’”
Diana was tragically killed in a fatal Paris car crash in 1997. In addition to Charles and her sisters, Diana was survived by sons Harry, 42, and Prince William, 45.
The late People’s Princess was ultimately laid to rest in a state funeral, in which William and Harry, who were 15 and 12 at the time, walked in the procession behind her casket with Spencer and their father, King Charles III.
“I just wonder if a gentler, more understanding treatment then might have helped him,” Spencer speculated of Harry and the royal family’s ongoing strife. “Then, everyone might have found a happier course ahead.”
Harry stepped down from his duties as a senior working royal in 2020 alongside his wife, Meghan Markle. The couple and their son, Prince Archie, now 7, subsequently left England to settle across the pond — a move that exacerbated an already complicated and strained relationship with the king, 77, and William. (Harry has since reconciled with Charles amid the monarch’s ongoing battle with an undisclosed form of cancer.)
Harry and Meghan, 45, returned to the U.K. last month in time for Archie and sister Princess Lilibet, 5, to attend a local British school in the fall. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have yet to make amends with William and his wife, Princess Kate Middleton, as the former remain private citizens in the wake of their relocation.
“The charitable work of the Duke and Duchess is a personal matter for them both and undertaken in their private capacity,” Charles wrote in a letter sent to Harry and Meghan’s team earlier this month. “In short, their position is akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests. It is well known that, in January 2020, the Duke and Duchess stepped down from undertaking representative duties on behalf of The Sovereign, and are no longer working Members of The Royal Family. This position … will continue to be fully respected.”
As for Spencer, he noted on CBS that he no longer keeps up with the inner-workings of the monarchy.
“I have so many interests, but I’m not being rude about them. I’m not interested in the royal family,” Spencer claimed. “I’m absolutely not bitter. … No, I don’t [have a relationship with Charles now] actually. He came into my life as a brother-in-law and that relationship ended. You know, he’s still my king. I respect the Crown and that’s it.”
