On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana died in a car accident in Paris. At the time, she was arguably the most beloved woman in the world. Certainly, she was among the most influential. Diana’s social and cultural impact meant the news of her death crushed people all across the globe. “It was the only thing anybody was talking about. In many ways, it was the only story in Britain and it was almost the only story in the United States,” news journalist Roxanne Roberts, who reported the incident in 1997 for The Washington Post, later told Elle. “What struck me was this outsized expression of grief. The British, as a general rule, pride themselves on being in control of their emotions … This was just pure uncensored grief.”

This massive response to Diana’s death would not just impact her fans; it would also shake up the British royal family as a whole. Leading up to her passing, Diana was considered a persona non grata within royal circles. After that fateful car wreck in Paris, the palace was forced to confront the reality that the princess’ popularity far superseded what anyone could have imagined. Many of Diana’s approaches toward public life were adopted by the monarchy, and her conflicting feelings about the British royal family would leave several royal figures with a lot to consider.

Princess Diana may be remembered as one of the most popular royals in British history, but that doesn’t mean her in-laws were necessarily her biggest fans. High-ranking members of the British royal family did not always approve of Diana. While there were certainly times that Princess Diana broke strict royal rules, there were other instances — such as her outreach toward young cancer patients and those diagnosed with AIDs — when her compassion reflected well upon the monarchy.

Queen Elizabeth II, sadly, was not among those to initially understand this dynamic. Speaking to this in the documentary “Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors,” royal expert Richard Kay alleged that the queen had originally been against the idea of sending a royal flight to France to collect Diana’s remains. According to Kay, she didn’t even want the princess’ former husband to travel to Paris himself using a royal plane for this heartbreaking moment. “Charles wanted to take the royal flight to Paris but the queen wouldn’t allow it,” the expert said.

In the days following Diana’s death, however, Elizabeth began to understand the princess’ impact on the British people. Diana’s fans left over 60 million flowers in front of Kensington Palace. This display of grief helped motivate the queen to give a speech in honor of her late ex-daughter-in-law. But as royal historian Marlene Koenig put it to the Daily Express, “She was kind of forced into it.”

Over the years, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret held a rather old-fashioned view of the monarchy — one in which protocol and hierarchy reigned. By the time Princess Diana died, they weren’t particularly keen on the rule-breaking princess. In his book, “Do Let’s Have Another Drink! The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother,” royal expert Gareth Russell wrote, “Both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret thought there was no need for a permanent memorial to Diana inside the grounds of Kensington Palace.”

Apparently, the massive outpour of love and mourning for Diana did little to move them. Margaret even went so far as to mock the flowers left in honor of the People’s Princess. “She complained about the smell of the mountains of decomposing flowers left at the palaces across London, referring to them as ‘floral fascism,'” Russell reported in the book. These attitudes — and their failure to change even in the face of the public’s adoration of the late Diana — showed that Margaret and her mother’s view of the monarchy was losing popularity, while Diana and her more compassionate touch were the future of the crown.

Older members of the British royal family had mixed reactions to Princess Diana’s death, but that doesn’t mean King Charles III felt similarly. As Diana’s ex-husband, Charles was crushed by the devastating event. Writing in the book “The King: The Life of Charles III,” royal journalist Christopher Andersen described Charles’ initial reaction to the news of Diana’s death. “He let out a cry of pain that was so spontaneous and came from the heart. Palace staff rushed over to Charles’ room and found him collapsed in an armchair, weeping uncontrollably,” Andersen wrote.

Things only got worse for Charles when he went to see Diana’s remains at the hospital. “I don’t think people realize how really stricken he was by her death,” Andersen noted in the book. “I interviewed the nurses in the hospital who saw him when he came into the room and saw her body for the first time, and he looked like he’d been hit in the face.” The truth is that Charles and Diana’s marriage may not have been perfect, but Charles experienced a deep sense of grief after losing his ex-wife nevertheless.

During her lifetime, Princess Diana was known for her charismatic warmth. As she traveled throughout Great Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth, Diana left an indelible impact on the people she met. “Any kid wants to meet a princess and have that experience, but then she had this ability to make you feel like you were connected with her,” Renae Plant, founder of The Princess Diana Museum, told Forbes of her experience with meeting the People’s Princess in Australia in 1983. “Even shaking her hand, the look in her eyes, it was just this magnetic presence about her.” What was Diana’s secret? While other royals could be cold and stand-offish, Diana wasn’t afraid to really engage with people. She would address her fans individually, reply to their letters, and look them in the eye. This allowed her presence to really impact the public.

After Diana died, King Charles III made a point of keeping his ex-wife’s charisma alive. The royal began to incorporate some of her kindness into his royal rounds, transforming the way the monarchy operated. “If you look at the way Charles tries to engage with the public now, he has taken real cues from Diana, and I think he would acknowledge that, in terms of trying to connect with people, to be human and relatable,” Boston University historian Arianne Chernock told Smithsonian Magazine in 2023. Diana may have died, but her kindness lives on.

Princess Diana’s death forced King Charles III to learn some important lessons, but his public image still suffered in light of everything that had transpired in his failed marriage. He was aware that the public already judged him for his infidelity throughout his relationship with Diana. When the People’s Princess died, Charles understood the world would blame him for that as well. He also likely knew his affair partner, Camilla Parker-Bowles, would suffer even more public scrutiny.

What the then-prince probably could not have guessed, however, would be the extent of the hatred directed at Camilla. “Camilla was the sort of ugly — you know, considered the ugly sort of force that had driven, you know, Diana into such pain and sadness,” royal expert Tina Brown, author of “The Palace Papers,” told The Washington Post. Prior to her death, Diana had referred to Camilla as a “rottweiler,” cementing her position as the villain in Diana’s story. Because of this, Brown said, the future queen became known as “public enemy No. 1.”

Even before Princess Diana died, King Charles III and Queen Camilla knew that they needed a public relations makeover. In 1996, the couple had hired press master Mark Bolland to help them revamp their image as a couple. As royal expert Tom Bower wrote in the Daily Mail, Bolland’s job was “to reverse Camilla’s image as [Charles’] privileged, fox-hunting mistress, make her acceptable to the public and overcome the queen’s hostility to them being together.” Famous for his cut-throat tactics, Bolland seemed willing to stop at nothing to get his job done. After Diana’s death led to intense unpopularity for Charles and Camilla, the public relations expert likely upped his game.

In practice, this was a messy process. In his book, “Battle of Brothers,” royal journalist Robert Lacey described Bolland’s strategy for reinventing the couple’s image. At one point, the publicist allegedly leaked a story concerning Prince Harry’s misuse of drugs to the press with the goal of painting Charles as a more favorable father. Unfortunately, this strategy appeared to have backfired, as it damaged Harry’s public image at a moment when he was very fragile. First, the prince lost his mother, then he was painted by the media as a lost party boy. He was so injured by this betrayal, Harry wrote about it in his sensational tell-all “Spare” years later. It may have even contributed to his famous royal exit.

Prince Harry found it challenging to deal with the press following Princess Diana’s death. The prince was just 12 years-old when his mother died, and the experience of performing public duties while the rest of the world was permitted to mourn Diana was deeply confusing for him. “There were 50,000 bouquets of flowers to our mother and there we were shaking people’s hands, smiling … And the wet hands that we were shaking, we couldn’t understand why their hands were wet, but it was all the tears that they were wiping away,” Harry recalled in an interview with ITV.

For Harry, balancing his role as a public figure with his own personal grief was terrible. Reflecting on this dichotomy in “Spare,” Harry recalled the moment he burst into tears at his mother’s burial. “My body convulsed and my chin fell, and I began to sob uncontrollably into my hands,” he wrote. But, rather than feel relief at this catharsis, the prince felt something else. “I felt ashamed of violating the family ethos, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer,” he admitted. This sense of tension between his role as a royal and his inner world of emotions could come to impact Harry’s future within the monarchy.

Prince William had long been spending Sundays with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle, but after Princess Diana died, these meetings gained a new layer of importance. Writing in “Battle of Brothers,” royal expert, Robert Lacey, reported, “Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip performed more healing and effective parenting with their bereaved grandson in those Sunday sessions in the late 1990s than they ever achieved with any of their own children. After lunch, the Duke of Edinburgh would execute his discreet post-prandial vanishing act, leaving the sovereign to share her heart and secrets with her teenage protégé.”

During these meetings, William was able to find a sense of purpose. He understood he was to one day become indispensable to the nation. This gave him hope. As Lacey put it, “William regained his equilibrium pretty quickly thanks to his focus on his role as the future King William V. The prospect of future kingship … served as a source of strength in these days of sorrow.” In that sense, Diana’s death forced William to look ahead to the future and focus on the type of king he would like to become.

Prince William may have looked forward toward his future as king, but that doesn’t mean he never looked back on Princess Diana’s tragic life. Even before she died, Diana struggled immensely — and William suffered as a consequence. When he was just 12 years old, the prince read headlines surrounding the biography “The Prince of Wales” by Jonathan Dimbleby, which alleged that Prince Philip had “forced” a marriage between Diana and King Charles III. Per Robert Lacey’s book, “Battle of Brothers,” these reports were deeply upsetting to William. At one point, he reportedly asked his mom, “Is it true? Is it true that Papa never loved you?”

These distressing thoughts were likely only compounded by Diana’s death. After losing his mother, William grew very cautious about pursuing romantic relationships. He never wanted to potentially place another woman in that same position as Princess of Wales. In 2005, when he was in the early days of his relationship with Princess Catherine, reporters asked him about marriage. “Look, I’m only 22 for God’s sake. I’m too young to marry at my age” William replied, according to the Daily Mail. “I don’t want to get married until I’m at least 28 or maybe 30.” This desire to take things slow and think everything through was partially a result of the tragedy that had struck William’s mother in the 1990s.

As he got older and started his own family, Prince Harry became increasingly concerned with the dynamics leading to his mother’s car accident and subsequent death. In particular, he was losing sleep over security.

When Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, stepped down as working royals in 2020, the couple lost the right to automatic, publicly-funded security in the United Kingdom. Instead, it was decided their security needs would be determined depending on the circumstances of each visit. Harry challenged this decision in court and lost his appeal in 2025. Commenting this in a conversation with the BBC, Harry lamented the court’s decision. “I can’t see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point,” he said.

At least one expert claimed that Harry’s feelings partially stem from the experience of losing his mother. “The tragic death of Princess Diana and the way it traumatized Harry clearly influences his fears for his family,” royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams told Express. Making matters worse, an unhealthy public interest in the Sussex family has created stress for its members. Per Fitzwilliams, “Recent incidents involving a stalker [who focused on Harry and Meghan] will have exacerbated those fears.”

Princess Catherine is known for her unique parenting style, and her late mother-in-law is part of the reason why. Historically, the British royal family relied on the complicated role of royal nannies to perform the majority of child-rearing duties. Because of this, Queen Elizabeth II did not think twice about leaving the future King Charles III and his younger sister, Princess Anne, behind for months at a time. Even the more modern Sarah Ferguson embarked on a child-free tour of Australia when her daughter, Princess Beatrice, was less than two months old. Princess Diana, however, broke royal protocol by refusing to go on tour without the young Prince William. This move would change the royal approach to child-rearing forever.

A generation later, Diana’s sense of connection to her children was something William and Catherine would try to replicate with their own brood. The Wales family nanny only works during the day — in fact, William and Catherine don’t have any live-in staff and have been known to complete school drop-offs themselves. What’s more, they have embraced Diana’s belief that royal children need a break from elite circles. As royal expert Christopher Andersen told the New York Post of Diana, “She’d have been thrilled that William and Kate have chosen to raise her grandchildren, George and Charlotte, largely outside of royal circles, going to school and playing with middle-class children.”