Over the Queen’s objections, Lord Spencer insisted that Diana be buried, not at Frogmore, but at the family home of Althorp in Northamptonshire. He also said he should be the only one to walk behind the princess’s cortege. Given that they had effectively excluded her, the royal family were in no position to deny Spencer his wishes as to her final resting place. The cortege was quite another matter. In a mark of respect to an ex-wife and a departed mother, Prince Charles wanted to walk behind the cortege with William and Harry beside him. Another of the by-now interminable rows ensued over the telephone, which Spencer ended by hanging up on the prince. This was one point on which the royal family were not prepared to give way, however. It was made clear to Spencer that, regardless of whatever private feelings he might harbour, the prince and his sons would walk behind the gun carriage bearing the princess’s coffin.

The next difficulty was persuading William to join his father, uncle and brother in the slow walk from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey. At first William flatly refused. Charles pleaded with him and said that it would be utterly wrong of him not to accompany them. The prince, never comfortable in the eye of a crowd – and certainly not one so charged with emotion and looking at his every gesture – replied that he simply didn’t want to. Prince Philip weighed into the argument and eventually William agreed to take part – but only on the condition that his grandfather walked beside him.

Diana had grown to dislike Prince Philip intensely – and he her – but Prince William was devoted to the old man. Philip, in turn, was immensely fond of his grandson. He had taught him to shoot, and William liked nothing better than spending his days with his grandfather out in the fields of Sandringham or wildfowling on the foreshore of the Wash. As football or cricket is in other families, field sports provided the common interest that crossed the generations and bound them together. Now William wanted his grandfather at his side in what was certain to prove the most harrowing public engagement the young man had had to endure. Philip readily agreed and as the cortege trundled under Admiralty Arch it was Philip who put a comforting arm around William’s shoulder.

‘Walking behind her coffin was one of the hardest things I have ever done,’ Prince William admitted in May 2017. ‘But if I had been in floods of tears the entire way round, how would that have looked? It was self-preservation. I didn’t feel comfortable anyway, having that massive outpouring of emotion around me. I am a very private person, so it wasn’t easy.’