Prince Harry will take Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet to visit the grave of their grandmother, Diana, Princess of Wales, for the first time during a trip to the UK next month.
The visit to Althorp House in Northamptonshire is expected to take place just days after what would have been Diana’s 65th birthday.
To celebrate the one-year countdown to Harry’s Invictus Games in Birmingham, the Sussexes are scheduled to fly from their California residence.
The duke is also expected to attend engagements with the charities WellChild and Scotty’s Little Soldiers.
Last week, the Daily Mail announced that Althorp, the stately home where Diana grew up and is buried, will be closed to the public for two days while Harry and Meghan are in Britain, fuelling speculation they planned to visit her grave.
‘This is highly unusual,’ a source familiar with the Althorp estate said. ‘Once the house is open to visitors, it’s not usually closed.’
Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, manages the Northamptonshire estate, which is only accessible to the public in July and August.
The trip will allow Diana’s grandchildren to visit her grave for the first time.
Diana is buried on an island in an ornamental lake in the grounds of Althorp.
A long-running row over UK security for the California-based duke has meant his children, aged seven and five, have never previously visited Diana’s final resting place.
The visit will now proceed, according to The Sun.
Diana lived at Althorp House from the time of her parents’ divorce until she married Charles.
Diana died aged 36 as a result of injuries sustained in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, while Harry was just 12.
Harry rowed Meghan in a boat to the island when they visited Althorp in 2022 on the 25th anniversary of his mother’s death.
‘At long last I was bringing the girl of my dreams home to meet Mum,’ Harry wrote in his memoir, Spare, published the following year. After Harry placed flowers on her grave, he left his wife alone. ‘When I came back, Meg was kneeling, eyes shut, palms against the stone.’
Harry has long claimed that security concerns have stopped him from bringing his family to Britain after his taxpayer-funded protection changed when he stepped back as a working royal in 2020.
Reports have claimed the Sussexes were given assurances ahead of the visit, although sources have highlighted security arrangements are a matter for the Home Office and that the King plays no part in the process.
The trip comes after Harry met his father, King Charles, who is undergoing cancer treatment, for the first time in 19 months last September.
It will also be the first time Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, have visited the UK since the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022.
Harry and Meghan no longer have a permanent UK base after they were asked to leave Frogmore Cottage in 2023, soon after the publication of the duke’s memoir Spare.
One person said they were ‘milking the situation’. I personally don’t believe that they are. Harry’s children are entitled to know who their grandmother was, and I’m sure that Diana would have been thrilled that her grandchildren came to visit. The children might not know who their grandmother was, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not entitled to.
They would have seen photos of her, so showing them where she is buried is a normal part of life, and being introduced to death as a child takes the scare factor out of it. They might not understand the significance at the moment, but in a few years, they will.
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