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‘I'll walk if you walk’: Here's why Prince Philip accompanied William and Harry at Diana’s funeral

The distressed grandfather of the young princes was worried about their emotional wellbeing following the death of their mother as preparations for her funeral were underway

The Iron Duke who passed away on Friday at age 99 was reportedly very concerned about the emotional wellbeing of his grandsons during the preparations of Lady Diana's funeral in 1997. Then 15-year-old William and his 12-year-old brother Harry walked in company with Prince Philip during the funeral procession that started at Kensington Palace, towards Westminster Abbey in London. 

“We were all talking about how William and Harry should be involved and suddenly came Prince Philip’s voice,” a former government relations director Anji Hunter told the Evening Standard, recalling a dramatic intervention by the Duke during the conference call in the lead-up to the funeral. “We hadn’t heard from him before, but he was really anguished. ‘It’s about the boys,’ he cried, ‘They’ve lost their mother.’” At supper, on the night before the funeral, Prince Philip turned to William and Harry and told them, "I'll walk if you walk."

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Prince Philip's along with his grandsons and Diana's youngest brother Earl Spencer took their places behind the gun carriage transporting Diana's coffin as it passed St. James Palace. The decision for the young princes to make the long journey to Westminster Abbey down the streets lined with more than a million mourners remained disputed. In 2017, Earl Spencer branded it "bizarre and cruel" and Harry had said that "no child should be asked to do that." 

However, in a later interview with BBC in 2017, he said he didn't "have an opinion whether that was right or wrong", but "looking back on it", he was glad to have been part of the day. Reports on who had suggested that the princes walk with the funeral remain unknown. Former Downing Street officials remember it as a suggestion from Tony Blair’s government, which was heavily involved in the planning, while William described it in an interview “as a sort of collective family decision... there is that balance between duty and family and that’s what we had to do."

"It wasn't an easy decision,” the Duke of Cambridge said in the 2017 documentary 'Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors', according to the BBC. The prince had also added that he had to strike the difficult balance "between me being Prince William and having to do my bit, versus the private William who just wanted to go into a room and cry, who'd lost his mother."

Looking back on the day, Prince Harry had also recalled how Prince Charles had been a rock for him and his brother at that time. “One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is to tell your children that your other parent has died," he had said. "How you deal with that I don't know but, you know, he was there for us."