The mass expression of grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 looms large in the memory – but it’s far from the only moment of national mourning in history…

By Eugene Byrne

Published: Thursday, 23 November 2023 at 15:32 PM

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Some deaths can be the cause of great national mourning, but less so if the deceased has reached a decent old age. The sudden and unexpected passing of younger figures can sometimes leave everyone in a state of shock.

Probably the most traumatic within recent memory is that of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, which led to a huge outpouring of national grief. It also left many wondering at this unexpected turn in the British character, which foreigners and Brits alike had always been assumed to avoid open shows of emotion at all costs.

Yet reaction to Diana’s death was not, perhaps, as un-British as we might think. Look hard enough and you’ll find a few other deaths which shook the nation.

For example…

A huge cult grew up around Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by four knights who thought they were doing King Henry II a favour. The cult was actively curated by the church – he was made a saint within two years – as part of its ongoing power-struggle with the king, and because martyrs were good for business, attracting pilgrims and donations. So a story that Becket wore a hair shirt crawling with lice under his clothes might not necessarily be true.

But the killing of England’s most senior cleric in his own cathedral would have been shocking even without any church PR. After his death, Becket’s following grew through the Middle Ages, with pilgrimages to Canterbury rising in numbers, an order of English crusader knights and more. On the 50th anniversary of his death the movement of his remains to a new chapel was one of the biggest religious events in 13th-century England. The cult was also big in Europe (or the Norman part of it anyway).

Some aspects of it were bizarre; drinking the “water of St Thomas” – water mixed with some of the martyr’s blood – was supposed to miraculously cure illnesses.

Charles I lost a civil war (or wars, to be precise), was put on trial and executed for treason and replaced by a republic. From what we can tell, though, his actual execution was startling. Famously, one eyewitness (who may have been biased) wrote of the moment the axe fell and of how the crowd let out “such a groan … as I never heard before and I desire I may never hear again.”

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see that many, perhaps most, didn’t believe that a king supposedly anointed by God would actually be judicially killed by his own subjects until the moment it became reality.

In the process, Charles became a political and religious martyr for many. Some of those in the crowd were said to have dipped handkerchiefs into the king’s blood, or to have taken locks of his hair – were these souvenirs, or were they sacred relics?

The underground Royalist fightback continued with a pamphlet war in which the pro-Charles Eikon Basilikeeasily outsold the lot. Did the king’s execution start the process which led directly to the Restoration of monarchy in 1660? As they used to say on exam papers: Discuss.

It was a great victory, said The Times of the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, “but it has been dearly purchased”.

By the time he took on the combined Spanish and French fleet off the coast of Spain, Nelson was already a national hero, with a string of victories to his name and a dedicated following among his officers and men. Most Britons were prepared to overlook his scandalous liaison with Emma Hamilton and few were bothered by the atrocities committed in Naples on his watch.

His body was carried back to England, famously preserved in alcohol, where he had one of the most extravagant funerals the country had ever seen.

Some homicides might only be a cause for grief among relatives of the deceased, but can still cause widespread reaction – horror, revulsion or, as in the case of the infamous Ratcliff(e) Highway murders, sheer terror.

For all that we might think of Georgian London as a place of casual violence, the seemingly random and senseless murders of two families, 12 days apart, frightened everyone in the capital. Thomas Macaulay later wrote of how everyone now locked and barred their doors and bought firearms and watchmen’s rattles. “We know of a shopkeeper who … sold 300 rattles in about ten hours.”

On 8 December 1811, Timothy Marr (a draper), his wife Celia, their young son Timothy, and shop boy James Gowan were found battered to death at Marr’s shop and home at 29 Ratcliff Highway. A large quantity of money was undisturbed. The second killing spree, less than a fortnight later, was at the King’s Arms tavern, and saw New Gravel Lane publican John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth and servant Bridget Harrington found dead following a similarly frenzied attack.

A haphazard investigation settled on one John Williams, a sailor, as the likely culprit, but he was found hanged in his cell before the trial was due to begin. This was taken as evidence of his guilt, though some who have studied the murders claim he was likely innocent.

The investigation fizzled out, but the fear that the murders engendered lived on for years afterwards, taking on a folkloric character which has lasted to this day and which might yet overshadow some of the more horrifying killings from our own times.

Diana was not the first young princess of Wales whose death caused immense grief among the British public. The loss of the Prince Regent’s only legitimate child was widely seen as a national catastrophe.

Princess Charlotte Augusta was the daughter of the Prince Regent (later George IV) and his wife Caroline of Brunswick. The personal and political antagonism between her parents, in which she was something of a pawn, formed the backdrop to much of her childhood and adolescence, and she was the subject of a great deal of public attention. In drawing rooms and taverns alike she generated a great deal of gossip, all the more so because she was spirited – too spirited, some said – and unpretentious.

As the heir to the throne once her father died, everyone took a great deal of interest in who she would marry. In the end it was to be Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The marriage was very happy and the couple were hugely popular, representing hope of a brighter future at a time when King George III was suffering from mental illness and his son was extremely unpopular because of his extravagant self-indulgence and his treatment of Caroline.

• Read more | Charlotte and Diana: the parallel lives of two Princesses of Wales 

Alas, Charlotte died in childbirth in November 1817, plunging the country into an abyss of grief. It was said that even beggars on the streets wore black armbands and that the gambling hells of London closed on the day of her funeral. It was as though, said one writer, that every family in Britain had lost a favourite child. Some shopkeepers petitioned the government to shorten the mourning period, fearing they might otherwise go bankrupt.

Princess Charlotte is now almost forgotten, her name only known to aficionados of Georgian history, but her passing traumatised the nation every bit as much as Diana’s.

There were other consequences. The royal dukes, George III’s other sons, none of them with any legitimate offspring, were now pressured to do their duty. In the event it was Edward, Duke of Kent, who was first off the block, proposing to Leopold’s sister. Their daughter would become Queen Victoria.

On the whole, UK public opinion had not opposed the death penalty for the whole of its history (and beyond, if successive opinion polls are to be believed). By the 1950s, though, a strong tide of opposition was growing.

Campaigners against capital punishment argued not only over the rights and wrongs of the state taking life, but how the law was applied inconsistently. Some convicted killers were executed, while others, whose crimes had been equally bad (or worse), were reprieved on the say-so of a politician – the Home Secretary.

One of a number of post-war cases which moved opinion against hanging was that of Ruth Ellis, convicted of shooting a boyfriend. She was sentenced to death, but most expected her to be reprieved and get a life sentence instead. Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George refused a reprieve on the grounds that the killing was pre-meditated and that a bystander had been injured.

The case generated intense debate and publicity, and was even discussed in Cabinet. Daily Mirror columnist William Connor (‘Cassandra’) said that a piece he wrote condemning the planned execution of Ellis got him a mailbag with several letters critical of his views – but twice as many agreeing with him.

“I have been reviled as being ‘a sucker for a pretty face.’ Well, I am a sucker for all human faces – good or bad. But I prefer them not to be lolling because of a judicially broken neck.”

Ellis’s background and the abusive treatment she’d had at the hands of the man she killed would nowadays probably get a conviction for manslaughter rather than murder.

Those were different times, but they were changing. Ellis was the last woman to hang in Britain, and the news of her death spurred opponents of capital punishment to further action. Britain’s last hangings were in 1964.

The threadbare cliché goes that everyone around at the time remembers what they were doing when they heard the news.

The death of John F Kennedy, a glamorous young president who seemed to hold out so much hope of a brighter future, shocked the world, of course, but his loss was felt keenly in Britain at a time when many Britons looked enviously at the optimistic forward-looking American leader.

• Read more | What if JFK had lived?

It was early evening in the UK when the news came through and reports from the time talk of pub customers holding a minute’s silence and of dances and entertainments being cancelled out of respect. In the coming days, church services for the murdered president attracted huge congregations, many in them openly weeping.

The loss caused even greater mourning in Ireland. Kennedy was of Irish descent, the first Roman Catholic to be elected President, and he had made a hugely popular visit to the country a few months beforehand.

Some music stars die young; it’s an occupational hazard. Yet the death of John Lennon – one of the leading members of The Beatles, the biggest band in history – was startlingly unexpected. No car crash or drug overdose, but shot dead at the age of 40 outside his New York home by a deranged Beatles fan.

The world-wide outpouring of grief was huge. Thousands gathered at various locations in response to a request from Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono for a ten-minute silence. A number of his songs were re-released and topped UK and US charts, while reports of some fans taking their own lives led Ono to beg Lennon’s devotees to look after themselves.

As with JFK, everyone around at the time remembered what they were doing when they heard the news.

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