Charles, 9th Earl Spencer, the younger brother of Princess Diana, has opened up about his late sister in an interview featured in the two-part ABC television event, The Story of Diana.
In the revealing special, which is also produced by People, the 53-year-old intimately discusses his state of mind following his sister’s untimely passing — particularly, the troubling thought that he may have been able to prevent her tragic fate.
“I was furious, I wasn’t just angry,” he said. “[I thought] what could I have done. But you always think, God, I wish I could’ve protected her. It was just…it was devastating.”
He adds: “I always felt…intensely protective towards her.”
Charles goes on to speak of his two nephews, Princes William and Harry, who he believes inherited their mother’s incredible ability to put people at ease.
“I love seeing the sort of uncomplicated way that they deal with people, and put them at their ease. It’s so easy to connect the dots between them and their mother.”
The princes were just 15 and 12 respectively when their mother died in a car crash.
Both Wills and Harry have since opened up about the pain of losing their mother at a young age.
He also mentions Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and the way in which the ‘golden royal trio,’ as Kate, Wills and Harry have become known, continue to uphold his late sister’s incredible legacy.
“What’s amazing to me is the passing of time,” he says. “Now William and Catherine are nearly the same age as Diana when she died.”
“I love the fact that there’s still such veneration inside her immediate family for what she was, and what she meant,” he continues. “I think that’s fantastic.”
The Story of Diana will air in two parts on August 9 and 10.
The golden royal trio continue to uphold Princess Diana’s incredible legacy.
Charles recently spoke about the gut wrenching reality of delivering the eulogy at his beloved sister’s funeral.
The speech, which has gone down in history as one of the world’s most memorable (and most poignant), described the ‘People’s Princess’ as “the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty” and “a symbol of selfless humanity.”
It also famously described Diana as “the most hunted person of the modern age.”
Speaking to the iconic line, he told People: “it summed up so much of the anger I felt towards those who had done that to her.”
At the funeral, Earl Spencer walked alongside his nephews, Princes William and Harry, Prince Charles, and Prince Philip.
Over two million people lined the streets to Westminster Abbey in a bid to say their final goodbye to the People’s Princess.
Charles also explained the physical difficulty he experienced in delivering the speech.
“She’d left me as guardian,” he explained. “I was looking directly at William and Harry across her coffin. In the final paragraph I had run out of energy, almost out of oxygen. I had to punch each syllable out of the base of my stomach.”
Prince William was just 15 and his brother Prince Harry only 12, when their beloved mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was tragically killed in a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997.
She was just 36.
WATCH: Earl Spencer delivers his history-making eulogy.
