In November 2002, Paul Burrell walked out of the Old Bailey a free man. Three weeks earlier, he had entered it facing three theft charges. Police had removed 342 items from his home near Chester that belonged to Diana, Princess of Wales, her former husband, and her eldest son. The prosecution spent most of a month building its case. Then the Queen recalled a conversation from five years earlier, and the trial stopped.
That conversation had taken place in December 1997, four months after Diana’s death. Burrell had come to see her. According to his account, the two spoke for roughly three hours, with him standing the entire time. At some point, he told her he was keeping some of Diana’s possessions safe. The Queen’s memory of that meeting reached the prosecution in the third week of the trial. The case against Burrell collapsed the next day.
The press focused that week on the timing. Why five years? Why the third week and not before the arrest, the charge, or the 17 months Burrell spent on bail waiting for a courtroom? There was a quieter question in the background. What was actually in the boxes police took from that attic?
Part of the answer is documented in records. Seven video tapes were among the seized materials. They were recorded at Kensington Palace in 1992 and 1993 by Peter Settelen, a former actor Diana had hired to work on her voice. In them, Diana speaks about her marriage in words that make the Panorama interview seem cautious. Before the trial began, the prosecution agreed not to show those tapes to a jury.
There was also a wooden box. Diana kept a mahogany box in her sitting room at Kensington Palace, locked. Six months after her death, her sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Paul Burrell found the key. It was hidden inside a tennis racket cover. Lady Sarah later stated under oath at the inquest into Diana’s death that they opened the box together, and that the material inside was highly sensitive.
That box is not in a museum. It is not in the Royal Collection. Its contents have never been publicly revealed, and the two people who opened it have given conflicting accounts of where those materials went. Burrell has said the papers went to Althorp, the Spencer family seat in Northamptonshire, and remain there. Lady Sarah told the inquest she handed the materials to Burrell for safekeeping, adding four words that every journalist in the room noted. She said she trusted him then.
There is a second closed secret in this story. Diana signed her will on June 1, 1993. The day after signing it, she signed a separate document called a letter of wishes, setting out what she wanted done with her jewelry and personal possessions. In December 1997, three and a half months after her burial on the island at Althorp, her executors went to court and asked to change that arrangement. They got what they asked for. The court order was never announced. Years passed before the people affected learned it existed.
Diana’s sons were children when that decision was made. William was 15. Harry was 12. Neither signed anything. Neither was consulted. The effects of that decision lasted into their thirties.
The will itself is a traditional document. Diana named two executors and guardians. One was her mother, Frances Shand Kydd. The other was her elder sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale. She left £50,000 to Paul Burrell. The rest of the estate was to go into a trust and be divided between her sons. Under the original terms, they would receive their shares at age 25.
Then comes the clause on which everything else depends. Diana instructed her executors to carry out, as soon as possible and no later than two years after her death, any written note or letter of wishes she had left regarding her personal possessions. Lawyers call these possessions chattels. They mean physical things. Furniture, china, paintings, letters, dresses, jewelry, the contents of a home.
She wrote that note the next day. She asked that all her jewelry and three-quarters of her other possessions go to William and Harry. The remaining quarter was to be divided among her 17 godchildren. That is all it says. Two sentences expressing intent, signed by her, directly referenced in a notarized will, sitting in a lawyer’s file for four years.
At her death, the estate was valued for probate at £21,711,485. Most came from her 1996 divorce settlement. After taxes, about £17 million remained. She died on August 31, 1997, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris at 4:00 a.m. local time. The following two weeks belonged to the crowds outside the palace gates, the flowers piled six feet deep on the pavement, and the funeral at Westminster Abbey with the card on the coffin that read “Mummy.”
Her apartments at Kensington Palace were numbered 8 and 9. Burrell photographed the rooms in the days after her death. The images show family photographs on the walls, her sons everywhere, stuffed toys on a sofa in the bedroom, a frog she made in childhood. The sitting room where she recorded the Panorama interview two years earlier. The hallway where her coffin rested the night before the funeral.
The apartments were emptied over the months that followed. Her mother and sister, as executors, were responsible for what left and for deciding the fate of those contents. In December 1997, they went to the High Court. What they requested is called a variation. They asked a judge for permission to distribute the estate differently from what the papers stated. The judge agreed.
Two things changed. The age at which William and Harry received their shares moved from 25 to 30. They could receive income from the trust at 25, but the capital itself was delayed another five years. The second change caused the problem. Instead of dividing a quarter of Diana’s personal possessions among her 17 godchildren, the executors were given freedom to choose one item for each.
The parents of those godchildren were not told the application was being made. Most of the children were minors. No one appeared in court to defend their interests because no one outside that room knew there were interests to defend. The legal reasoning was narrow and sound by its own standards. Diana used the words “wishes” and “discretion” in her note. Under English law, that language does not create a legal obligation. It expresses a preference, and executors may ignore that preference if they believe they have good reason. The court allowed them to ignore it.
Each godchild eventually received one item. Reports at the time estimated what they should have received, on a conservative reading of the estate, at about £100,000 each. What arrived instead was described in the press as a memento. Some families used blunter terms. They learned years later, not because anyone told them, but because the change surfaced through an unrelated legal case, the way buried documents usually appear, as an incidental detail in someone else’s litigation.
By then, the boxes from Cheshire had already been opened, the tapes seized, and the wooden box had gone wherever it went. Everything Diana wrote about her possessions was overridden by decisions made after her death by other people in rooms she had no part in choosing. The court order was one such decision. The police raid was another. The collapse of a criminal trial in its third week was a third. Her sons were teenagers through all of it and adults by the time any of it was settled. One of the two boxes at the heart of the case remains missing to this day.
The timing of the letter of wishes deserves attention. The will was signed on June 1. The letter about her possessions was signed the next day. The order matters. A will is a legal instrument drafted by lawyers and designed to withstand scrutiny. A letter of wishes is the human document that accompanies it, where a person says what they actually want according to their own priorities.
Diana’s arrangement was direct and simple. Jewelry to her sons, three-quarters of everything else to her sons, one quarter to the 17 children she had stood beside in churches. Godparenthood in that world is not merely a Christmas card relationship. It is a formal relationship with obligations, and Diana took her obligations seriously enough to include them in her estate plan the day after writing her will.
She had seen what money and property arrangements did to personal relationships in her own family. Her parents fought a custody battle over her at their 1969 divorce, which her mother lost, partly because Diana’s grandmother testified against her own daughter. Diana knew well what inheritance disputes looked like from inside a family. She wrote it down anyway, in the softer of the two available forms, a detail her lawyers must have thought about a great deal afterward.
In 1996, she amended the will with a codicil. Reports at the time indicated the amendment concerned the executors, removing her former husband from the arrangements and confirming her mother in the role alongside her sister. The divorce was finalized in August of that year. She had 12 months and 3 weeks left.
Diana owned a great deal of jewelry, some entirely her own, some borrowed from the Royal Collection and returned after the divorce. She had the sapphire engagement ring. She had letters from her childhood, letters from her sons, letters from her husband, letters from Prince Philip written as her marriage collapsed. She had photographs no one outside the palace had seen. She had the wedding dress, 25 feet of ivory silk taffeta with a train that required folding to fit inside the glass coach.
And she had the box. It was made of mahogany. It sat in her sitting room at Kensington Palace. It was locked, and the key was not kept in an obvious place, which is why a tennis racket cover ended up in a coroner’s court 15 years later.
Accounts of what was inside the box come mainly from two people, the two with the strongest reasons to remember differently. Both agree on the basics. It contained documents. It contained at least one audio recording. It contained material Lady Sarah, testifying under oath in 2008, described as highly sensitive.
The recording is what turned the box from a family matter into something else entirely. A former royal servant named George Smith, a Welsh Guardsman who served in the Falklands, had told Diana in the early 1990s that he had been sexually assaulted by a prominent member of her husband’s household. Diana recorded his testimony. The claim was denied. It was never considered before any court, and no charge was brought because of it. What matters here is that Diana kept the recording, kept it locked in a box inside a palace room, and when she died, the box was still locked and the key was elsewhere.
Six months after her death, according to Lady Sarah’s inquest testimony, they found the key together and opened it. After that, the accounts diverge. Burrell’s position, repeated over 20 years, is that the papers went to Althorp and are still there. Lady Sarah’s testimony was that she handed the materials to Burrell for safekeeping. The tape itself has never been found. The box has never been found. Nothing from it has been catalogued, displayed, or acknowledged by any institution.
In January 2001, police knocked on doors in Cheshire. The raid on Burrell’s home resulted from a broader Metropolitan Police investigation into missing royal property. Officers entered the house near Chester and climbed to the attic. What they found there was, by any measure, substantial. 342 items were logged, coming from three separate estates. Some belonged to Diana, some to the Prince of Wales, some to Prince William, who was 18 and at university.
The list, when read in court, seemed absurd in parts. An engraved silver tray, a white metal pepper mill, a book about the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, a whip described in the police report as an Indiana Jones whip, a detail that delighted the British press for weeks. The seven Settelen tapes were there too. So were the letters. So were materials from the mahogany box, or materials that had been in it, depending on which account you believe.
Burrell was arrested, released, and charged in August 2001 with three theft counts, one for each person whose property it was. He denied everything. His lawyer stood on the steps of West End Central police station and said his client was an honest man who had enjoyed the royal family’s trust and that the trust had been justified. Then came 17 months of bail.
Consider what that period looked like from the inside. Burrell joined royal service at 18 as a footman at Buckingham Palace and became the Queen’s personal footman within a year. He moved to Diana’s household in 1987 and stayed until her death. He helped prepare her body in Paris. He was the only person outside the immediate family to attend her burial at Althorp. The Queen awarded him the Royal Victorian Medal for his service. For four years after Diana’s death, he said nothing publicly at a time when his memoirs would have earned him more than most people make in a lifetime.
He spent those 17 months facing a criminal trial with a defense he could not use, because the defense involved a private conversation with the Queen and he had no way to prove it happened. The trial began at the Old Bailey in October 2002. The prosecution’s case was simple in outline. Property belonging to three members of the royal family was found in a private home in Cheshire. There was no justification for it being there. The defense case was equally simple. Burrell moved the items to preserve them amid the chaos of the months after Diana’s death. He had told the Queen he was doing so, and he never intended to keep or sell any of them. The gap between those two accounts was a conversation no one witnessed.
Inside the courtroom, the materials themselves created problems lawyers had to work around. The Settelen tapes were among the seized items, and the prosecution agreed before proceedings began not to enter them as evidence. Whatever their content, both sides concluded that reading them aloud in court was beyond the pale. That agreement itself is significant information. Seven tapes of a dead princess speaking about her marriage sat in police property storage, and the Crown Prosecution Service decided the safest place for them was where they were.
The trial entered its third week. The prosecution was nearing the point of handing over to the defense, which meant Burrell would stand in the witness box and explain, under oath and in public, why 342 items were in his attic. To explain that, he would have to describe the meeting in December 1997. To describe the meeting, he would have to repeat what the Queen said to him.
On October 22, according to the palace statement issued later, information came to the royal family’s attention. The Queen was traveling by car with the Prince of Wales when she recalled the December 1997 meeting and the fact that Burrell had told her he was taking things for safekeeping. Charles told his lawyers, the lawyers told the prosecution, and the prosecution told the judge. On November 1, 2002, the case collapsed. Burrell was formally acquitted. He walked out to the pavement outside the Old Bailey and told every camera in London that the Queen had saved him.
Press reaction split immediately. One strand of coverage treated the intervention as a stroke of luck approaching divine providence. Another asked the obvious question: why did a memory available for five years arrive on the exact day the defense case was about to begin? Buckingham Palace handled that question by ignoring it entirely. The statement noted the date the information reached the palace and stopped there.
Two things happened within 48 hours. First, Burrell sold his story to the Daily Mirror. The sum was reported to reach hundreds of thousands of pounds. In it, he described the private sitting room, the three hours, the Queen looking at him over her glasses, and the warning she gave him that there were powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge, and that he should be careful. He kept that secret for five years while facing prison. He sold it in two days.
Second, many began asking what else had come out of that attic, where it had gone, and who held it now. In October 2003, Burrell published a book called A Royal Duty. It sold enormously. In it, he printed a photograph of a letter Diana wrote in October 1996, ten months before her death, in which she said she believed someone was planning an accident involving her car. The name of the person she suspected was obscured in the published image. He also confirmed the existence of letters Prince Philip wrote to Diana, said they caused her real distress, and refused to disclose their contents. Buckingham Palace said letters between members of the royal family were a private matter and offered no further comment.
William and Harry were 21 and 19. They issued a statement through Clarence House. They said they did not believe that a man entrusted with so much could abuse his position in what they described as a cold and public betrayal, and that their mother would have been ashamed of it. That statement was the first time in this sequence that either of Diana’s sons spoke publicly about what happened to their mother’s possessions. They were children when the boxes were packed. They were children when the court order was made. By the time they had a voice anyone heard, the possessions had already been through an attic in Cheshire, police storage, a tabloid, and a printed book, and their inheritance under the trust was still years away.
In the summer before her death, Diana had already made clear to everyone how she wanted her possessions distributed, and she did so publicly. The divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996. The settlement was reported at about £17 million as a lump sum, with an additional annual amount to run her private office. She lost the style “Her Royal Highness” and became known as Diana, Princess of Wales. She kept apartments 8 and 9 at Kensington Palace and used the state apartments for public occasions. The money her sons ultimately inherited is, to a large extent, that settlement.
Ten months later, in June 1997, she sold 79 of her dresses at Christie’s in New York. The idea for the sale is credited to William, then 14. The auction raised more than $3 million for AIDS and cancer charities. Catalogue copies alone sold for tens of thousands. Among the lots were official visit gowns, the ink-blue velvet she wore dancing with John Travolta at the White House, and dresses that had fronted newspapers in 20 countries the morning after she wore them. She priced her own past and donated the proceeds on her own terms, her name on the catalogue, at her son’s suggestion.
That was ten weeks before the Paris crash. It tells you she knew the market value of her possessions precisely. She was able to decide, piece by piece, what should leave her possession and where the money should go. When she wrote a letter in June 1993 specifying what should happen to her jewelry and three-quarters of her other possessions, she was not being vague or sentimental. She was doing on paper what she later did on the Christie’s stage: controlling the distribution of her property.
Eighteen months after that auction, a court gave two other people the freedom to make those decisions instead, in a hearing no outsider knew about. The variation order from December 1997 was never announced. There was no press release, no statement, no letter to the families of the 17 godchildren explaining that the arrangement Diana had written 14 months before her death had been overturned in a hearing they knew nothing about.
The way the order surfaced was almost mundane. Details of the estate arrangement emerged through unrelated litigation, the usual way court files leak their contents once lawyers start pulling threads. Journalists picked it up. The parents read about it. Their reactions, as reported by several papers at the time, ranged from bewilderment to outright anger. It was not about the money so much as the sequence of events. Diana had written it down. The document existed. It was directly referenced in a notarized will. The first any of them heard about it was in the newspapers years after the fact.
There is a rationale for what the executors did, and it deserves to be stated fairly. Frances Shand Kydd and Lady Sarah McCorquodale were administering the estate of a woman who died at 36 in the most photographed death of the century. The estate’s largest asset was not property or shares. It was Diana herself. Her name, her image, her handwriting, her dresses, her hairbrushes. Every object she touched acquired market value unrelated to its purpose. Distributing a quarter of her personal possessions among 17 young people, most of them minors, with no restrictions on what they might later do with those items, would have put a substantial part of Diana’s private life on the open market within a decade.
The executors said nothing publicly about their reasons at the time, and neither has said much since. The Spencer family has noted that estate-related proceeds were directed to the memorial fund set up in her name. Against that stands a plain fact about the document. Diana had thought about this. She had dealt with courtiers, lawyers, and press officers for 16 years and understood better than almost anyone alive the value of her possessions and what people might do with them. Yet she wrote the letter. She specified a proportion. She chose 17 people by name. The court did not weigh these two positions because only one side was present.
The memorial fund itself then fell into a crisis of its own making, and it is worth pausing on because it changes how we view the estate decisions. In 1998, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund went to court in California to stop the Franklin Mint of Pennsylvania from selling Diana commemorative dolls, plates, and trinkets in the United States. The fund argued there was a right of publicity. California courts rejected that on the straightforward ground that Diana was resident in a country whose law did not recognize such a right. The fund appealed. It lost again. Legal costs exceeded £1 million.
Franklin Mint then sued the fund for malicious prosecution. That counterclaim dogged the charity for years. Grants were suspended for projects Diana had cared about, HIV and AIDS work, landmine clearance, hospice funding, while trustees held reserves against a judgment that could have destroyed the fund entirely. Chief executive Andrew Purkis told journalists that money intended for people with HIV, cancer, and landmine victims could no longer reach them. The matter was settled in late 2004 and grant-making resumed.
So the years when Diana’s godchildren were receiving one memento each are the same years the charity bearing her name froze its giving to fight an American novelty company over ceramic plates. None of this reached William and Harry in any form they could act on. They were at Eton, then Sandhurst, then St Andrews. Their share of the estate sat in trust, growing and frozen, until each turned 30.
In 2007, the coroner’s inquest opened. The inquiry into the deaths of Diana and Dodi Fayed ran from October 2007 to April 2008 at the Royal Courts of Justice under Lord Justice Scott Baker. Hearings lasted six months. 250 witnesses gave evidence. It was one of the longest and most expensive inquests in English legal history, and it was the first proceeding with the power to compel people from Diana’s household to testify, which is how a tennis racket cover entered the official record.
Lady Sarah McCorquodale was called to testify about her sister’s papers. She was asked about the mahogany box. She confirmed that about six months after Diana’s death, she and Paul Burrell found its key hidden inside a tennis racket cover and opened the box together. She confirmed the materials inside were highly sensitive. She strongly denied the suggestion that she had destroyed any of them. Her account was that she gave the materials to Burrell for safekeeping, at which point she said she trusted him then.
Burrell flew in from Los Angeles and testified over three days in January 2008. Michael Mansfield, representing Mohamed Fayed, walked through his previous accounts and set the contradictions side by side. At one point, Mansfield told him, politely, that he had been extremely contradictory. Burrell acknowledged there had been confusion. The court had by then assembled a decade of Burrell’s statements, in police interviews, a criminal trial, a newspaper, a bestselling book, and television interviews on two continents, and those accounts did not match.
He then returned to his home in America, and The Sun published secretly recorded footage in which he appeared to say he had hidden things from the inquest and planted what he called “red herrings” in his testimony. The coroner asked him to return or give further evidence by video link. Burrell refused. He was outside the court’s jurisdiction and the court had no power to compel him.
Another witness, Michael Fawcett, who had worked as Burrell’s bodyguard, told the inquest that Burrell described taking a ring from Diana’s finger after the crash. Burrell denied this in a written statement read to the court, denied ever possessing the ring, and denied describing it as an engagement ring. In his summing up, Scott Baker told the jury that Burrell’s evidence appeared to be motivated in part by exploiting his relationship with Diana, and said the jury should consider that he had behaved in a highly discreditable manner. He also told them, correctly, that none of this had any bearing on how the three people died in that tunnel.
Scotland Yard later concluded there was insufficient evidence to justify an investigation into perjury. The jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing. What the inquest did not do, because it was not its function, was produce the box. Six months of testimony, 250 witnesses, and the contents of a locked wooden box in a dead woman’s sitting room remained exactly where they had been in 1998, which is to say missing. The tape described by George Smith was not produced. The papers Lady Sarah described handing over were not produced. Burrell repeated that the materials had been sent to Althorp. Earl Spencer has never confirmed that any such materials exist at Althorp.
A criminal trial is the one forum that reliably produces an inventory. Items become exhibits, exhibits are numbered, numbers are read into the record, and the record is preserved. When the case against Burrell stopped in its third week, that process stopped with it. The 342 items were returned to their owners or to the estate without a public schedule. Nothing was published listing what was in that attic. The inquest six years later could ask questions, but it could not seize anything. It had no power over property and no power over a witness who returned to California and refused to come home. Whatever the coroner’s court achieved, it left the contents of the wooden box exactly as it found them, described by two people who disagree, held by someone who does not acknowledge it.
The Settelen tapes at least can be traced. Peter Settelen went to court in the United States to recover his recordings after the criminal case collapsed, claiming they were his property. He won. NBC broadcast excerpts in 2004. His lawyer stated bluntly that the tapes had lost any real claim to privacy once they passed through police evidence storage and a criminal investigation, with officers and the Spencer family having seen them. In August 2017, two weeks before the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, Channel 4 broadcast substantial portions for the first time in a program called Diana: In Her Own Words. Earl Spencer objected publicly. Many of Diana’s friends objected. The broadcast went ahead anyway.
So a set of recordings made in Diana’s sitting room with a voice coach ended up on national television. The other set, which Diana recorded herself and kept inside a locked box, has never appeared. Through all those years, the trust created by her will continued doing the one thing asked of it: waiting. William turned 30 in June 2012. Harry turned 30 in September 2014. Under the will’s original terms, they would have received their inheritance in 2007 and 2009. Under the amended terms, they received it five years later. Either way, 17 and then 18 years after their mother’s funeral.
The amounts were reported at about £10 million each, subject to 40% inheritance tax. Harry’s share was slightly larger because he spent two additional years accumulating interest. Both had received income from the trust since turning 25. The possessions followed the same path and took the same time. Diana’s clothing, including the wedding dress, was placed in a trust for her sons, their wives, and future children, plus a small group of charities. Her personal effects were held in trust by her brother, Charles Spencer, at Althorp. Ownership transferred to William and Harry in 2014, when Harry turned 30 and the trust arrangements completed.
Althorp exhibited some of them in the meantime. The exhibition opened in a converted stable block in the summer of 1998, ten months after the funeral, and ran for the next 15 years. The wedding dress was there, along with her school reports, her ballet equipment, and films of her as a child. Visitors paid admission, queued, walked the path around the lake, and looked at the island. The exhibition closed in 2013.
The jewelry was divided between the brothers years earlier, on the understanding that each would use his share for his future wife. William proposed to Catherine Middleton in 2010 with Diana’s sapphire engagement ring. Harry used Diana’s diamonds in the ring he gave Meghan Markle in 2017. Meghan wore Diana’s Cartier bracelet during her 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey. Each of these was a small public gesture of recovery, occurring between 13 and 24 years after Diana wrote down her wishes regarding her jewelry.
In the summer of 2017, for the 20th anniversary, Buckingham Palace held an exhibition of her possessions during its annual summer opening. The pieces were chosen by her sons. They selected her writing desk with her printed stationery still on it, her pens, a silver calendar, private photographs of friends and family, her ballet shoes hanging on the door of her sitting room at Kensington Palace, her typewriter, her wooden school box bearing her name, and a collection of her cassette tapes of Elton John, George Michael, and Pavarotti, some bearing notes in her handwriting. A box of Diana’s tapes behind glass at Buckingham Palace, chosen by her sons 20 years after her death. That is what the ordinary version of this story looks like when things go well. Someone dies, their family decides what the public should see of them, and they play the music she loved. The other box remains missing.
Harry has spoken about the money more directly than his brother. In the 2021 Oprah interview, after he and his wife had left official royal life and the family had stopped funding them, he said what his mother left him was what made the departure possible, and that without it they could not have done what they did. He also said he believed she would have expected something like this. That is worth setting alongside the 1993 document, because it is the only moment in the entire sequence where the arrangements Diana made did exactly what any parent would hope. She set aside money for her son. Twenty-four years later, that son used the money to leave an institution he could no longer live within. Whatever anyone thinks of that decision, the mechanism worked as intended.
Everything about her estate had by then passed through courts, police property storage, a collapsed criminal trial, tabloids, a bestselling memoir, an official inquest, an American lawsuit, and a suspended charity. The brothers were not passive during those years. They simply had no power over the estate, so they did the only thing available: they took control of the public memory instead.
On July 1, 2007, what would have been Diana’s 46th birthday, they filled Wembley Stadium. William was 25, Harry 22. The Concert for Diana was their production, from the running order to the choice of charities. 63,000 people attended. Harry walked out and opened the concert himself. Elton John, who had rewritten a song for her funeral ten years earlier and never performed that version again, opened and closed the show. Eight weeks later, on the tenth anniversary of her death, they held a memorial service at the Guards’ Chapel in Wellington Barracks. Harry gave the eulogy. He was 22, standing behind a lectern before the Queen, his father, his mother’s family, and hundreds of people who had known her. He spoke about a mother, not a princess.
The Duchess of Cornwall had been invited and accepted. After a week of public debate about whether she should be there, she withdrew. Even the memorial service could not happen without negotiations about who was allowed in the room. The fund created in Diana’s name closed at the end of 2012, 15 years after the flowers were removed from outside the palace gates. Over its life, it distributed more than £100 million in grants to hundreds of organizations working in the areas her name had become attached to, including care for the dying, refugee support, HIV and AIDS services, and landmine clearance. It closed because it was always designed to spend its money rather than continue forever, and because its founders judged that the organizations themselves were better placed to do the work.
The money it gave came from the public, not from her estate. It came from checks sent by people who stood in queues in the rain in September 1997, from the proceeds of Elton John’s single, and from the sale of commemorative merchandise, the very merchandise the fund spent years in an American court trying to control. William and Harry were both patrons of the fund. By the time either touched a penny of what their mother left them, they had already organized a stadium concert in her memory, spoken at a memorial service, served as patrons of a charity that gave away over £100 million in her name, and watched a criminal trial about her possessions collapse in its third week. They inherited a story written entirely in their absence.
Here is what was accounted for and what was not. Accounted for: the will, probated and public. The money, valued, taxed, and paid to her sons in 2012 and 2014. The jewelry, which went to the brothers and is worn by their wives at public events. The clothing and wedding dress, held in trust, then returned and exhibited at Kensington Palace in 2021 with the sons’ permission. The Settelen tapes, seized, litigated, returned to their maker, and eventually broadcast.
Missing: the mahogany box, the tape recording of George Smith’s testimony, and the papers Lady Sarah testified under oath she handed to Burrell for safekeeping. The full contents of what left Kensington Palace in the autumn and winter of 1997, compared with the 342 items found by chance in a Cheshire attic in January 2001. Also never publicly disclosed: the reasons behind the December 1997 variation. No judgment was published. No explanation was offered to the families whose children were affected. Frances Shand Kydd died in 2004 without ever explaining her reasons. Lady Sarah McCorquodale has never given a press interview on the subject.
There is one recording of Diana that belongs on that list, the only one her eldest son was able to recover. On November 20, 1995, 22.8 million people in Britain watched Diana speak to Martin Bashir on Panorama. She said there had been three people in her marriage. She questioned whether her husband would ever become king. The interview reshaped the next two years of her life and is generally regarded as hastening the divorce.
In 2020, Earl Spencer publicly revealed claims he had made privately years earlier. He said Bashir obtained his introduction to Diana after showing him fake bank statements purporting to prove that people close to her were being paid to spy on her. The BBC commissioned Lord Dyson, former Master of the Rolls, to investigate. His report was published in May 2021. It concluded that Bashir had acted deceitfully, that he had commissioned the fake documents, and that the BBC had fallen woefully short of the standards of integrity and transparency it was expected to uphold. Dyson also found that the corporation’s internal investigation in 1996 had been wholly ineffective. He noted, in fairness to the BBC, that Diana had written a note at the time saying she felt no regret about doing the interview, and he believed she would have agreed to it regardless.
William’s response was the strongest public statement he has ever made about anything concerning his mother. He said those failures contributed to her fear, paranoia, and isolation in her final years. He said his firm view was that the deceit used to obtain the interview had substantially affected what she said in it. He said the program should never be broadcast again. Harry issued a separate statement, shorter and angrier, about a culture of exploitation and its consequences. The BBC apologized, paid compensation, returned the awards the program had won, and pledged not to show the interview again.
That is the only case in this entire story where recordings of Diana were taken from other people’s hands and returned to her family’s control, and it took 26 years, a formal judicial inquiry, and the intervention of a future king. Compare that to the mahogany box, where there is no one to sue, no institution to apologize, no report to commission, and no known location. The Panorama tape had a broadcaster’s name and a paper trail leading back to a forged bank statement. The box has a tennis racket cover, a copy of a 2008 inquest transcript, and two accounts that contradict each other.
There is an additional fact beneath all of this. The December 1997 hearing changed shape significantly. According to several accounts, including Burrell’s, Diana and her mother were not speaking in the final months of her life. The rift was described as beginning with a phone call about Diana’s relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan. Burrell said the two women had not spoken for months before the crash. Frances Shand Kydd never publicly confirmed any of this, and she died in 2004, three years before the inquest that could have asked her under oath.
Whatever the truth of the estrangement, that is the situation it produced. The woman who went to the High Court in December 1997 to seek permission to set aside Diana’s written instructions about her possessions was, according to that account, someone Diana had stopped taking calls from. She was also the person Diana had appointed to do exactly that job in a document signed after the separation and confirmed by codicil after the divorce. Both things are true at once. Diana chose her mother as executor knowing the relationship was difficult, because the alternatives were worse and because there was no one else. The list of people she could trust with her estate did not include her former husband or anyone who worked for the palace, and it had been shrinking for years.
Burrell’s own explanation for the attic, when he finally gave it in full, ran along the same lines. He said he took Diana’s possessions because he feared what her mother and sister might do with them. He believed materials were being disposed of. He believed things were being cleared out too quickly. He never claimed a legal right to the property. His claim was always that he was preserving it from the people who legally controlled it. That is a serious accusation from a servant against the mother and sister of a dead woman, and it was never tested in any court because the trial that would have tested it stopped in its third week.
The rooms themselves were emptied by the end of the following year. Apartments 8 and 9 at Kensington Palace, where Diana lived for 15 years, were cleared, redecorated, and returned to palace use as offices and staff accommodation. The reception room where she told Martin Bashir there were three people in the marriage became a room with a desk. Her sitting room, where the mahogany box sat locked, became something else.
In 2013, William and Catherine moved into Apartment 1A in the same building, a few hundred feet from where his mother lived. They raised three children there. Harry lived at Nottingham Cottage in the same complex until he left the country. The brothers stood together in the Sunken Garden on July 1, 2021, what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, and unveiled a statue of her. It was one of the very few occasions in that period they appeared publicly together.
Both had by then received their inheritance, their share of her jewelry, placed it in the hands of the women they married, spoken publicly about what their mother’s possessions meant, and said the other had gotten something wrong concerning her. Both are the last two people with any direct claim to any of it. Every other principal party has either died or stopped speaking. Frances Shand Kydd died in 2004. Elizabeth II died in 2022, taking with her the truth of what the December 1997 meeting consisted of. Lady Sarah McCorquodale gave her testimony in 2008 and has said nothing since. Burrell has said a great deal, in several contradictory versions, and was described by a High Court judge as having behaved in a highly discreditable manner under oath.
The record closes where it began, on an object. A locked mahogany box in a sitting room at Kensington Palace, with the key hidden inside a tennis racket cover in the same apartment. That is not the behavior of someone careless with her papers. Diana hid the key in a specific place in a specific room, and she did so because she expected to return and because she assumed she would be the next person to open it. She was not. Two other people did, six months later, in a building the palace was already emptying. Everything that followed for Diana’s possessions was the result of decisions made in the four months between her death and the end of 1997. The estate’s guardians were appointed. The apartments were cleared. Items moved to an attic in Cheshire. The court approved the variation. A butler spent three hours standing in a private sitting room to tell the Queen he was keeping things safe.
All of that happened before her sons reached an age where they could be consulted about any of it. By the time they were adults with their own lawyers, the materials had been distributed among police property storage, a courtroom, a tabloid contract, an American television network, and a house in Northamptonshire. There was no longer any legal mechanism that could recover them. The estate had been wound up years earlier. The criminal case had lapsed. The inquest had delivered its report and closed. The two people who opened the box had given their accounts, and one of them was now beyond the reach of any British court. A box can remain missing indefinitely once every legal proceeding that might have inquired into it has ended.
What Diana wrote consisted of four sentences. Her jewelry and three-quarters of her possessions to her sons, the quarter to her godchildren. She signed it the day after signing her will in June 1993, with 4 years and 3 months remaining, with no reason to believe she was writing anything urgent. Seventeen godchildren received one item each. Her sons received their shares 17 and 18 years after her funeral. The box she locked, the one holding the recording and the papers said to a coroner’s court to be highly sensitive, has never been opened before anyone who could publicly say what was inside.