Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales
funeral of the British princess Diana
The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, started on 6 September 1997 at 9:08 am in London, when the tenor bell of Westminster Abbey started tolling to signal the departure of the cortège from Kensington Palace. Diana's coffin was carried from the palace on a gun carriage by riders of the King's Troop and escorted by mounted police along Hyde Park to St James's Palace, where her body had remained for five days before being taken to Kensington Palace. The Union Flag on top of the palace was lowered to half mast. The official ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey in London and finished at the resting place in Diana's family estate of Althorp, Northamptonshire.
Two thousand people attended the ceremony in Westminster Abbey while the British television audience was 32.10 million on average, one of the United Kingdom's highest viewing figures ever. An estimated 2 to 2.5 billion people watched the event worldwide, making it one of the most-watched televised events in history.
Funeral
Diana's coffin, draped with the royal standard with a differentiating ermine border (i.e. the Other Members' standard), had been brought to London from the Salpêtrière Hospital, via Vélizy – Villacoublay Air Base, Paris, to RAF Northolt by Diana's former husband Charles, Prince of Wales, and her two sisters on 31 August 1997. After being taken to a private mortuary, it was placed at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, and later taken to Kensington Palace the night before the funeral.
The funeral plan for the Queen Mother, codenamed "Operation Tay Bridge", had been rehearsed for 22 years and was used as the basis for Diana's funeral.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales” as funeral of the British princess Diana. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2918374. Authority coordinates are 52.283, -1.000. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.