King Charles was forced to tell his adolescent sons Prince William and Prince Harry that their mother Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in 1997.

Prince Harry recalled the moment King Charles informed him that his mother Princess Diana had been involved in a car crash in Paris, which tragically led to her death.

On August 31, 1997 Harry and his older brother William, who was just 15 at the time, learned that Diana, Dodi Al Fayed and their driver Henri Paul had been killed in an accident.

In his memoir Spare the Duke of Sussex opened up about Charles sitting on the edge of the bed, telling him the news with phrases that remain with him “like bullets in a dart board”.

He recalled that his father “looked at me in a funny way, a way he’d never looked at me before”, before explaining that he initially hoped Diana would recover.

Harry said of his thought process at the time: “She’s been taken to hospital, they’ll fix her head, and we’ll go and see her. Today. Tonight at the latest.”

Prince Harry was just 12 when Princess Diana died (Image: Getty)

However reality soon began to dawn on Prince Harry, as his father gently said to him: “They tried, darling boy. I’m afraid she didn’t make it”, reported The Mirror.

The Duke then recalled: “None of what I said to him then remains in my memory. It’s possible that I didn’t say anything. What I do remember with startling clarity is that I didn’t cry. Not one tear.”

His aunt Sarah, Diana’s sister, later gave Harry a lock of his mother’s hair in a little blue box after admitting she snipped some off when she went to see the late Princess in Paris.

Harry and his mother in the 1980s (Image: Getty)

Diana grew up on the Althorp Estate in Northamptonshire, where her younger brother Earl Charles Spencer, 60, still lives with his family.

The late Princess of Wales is also buried on the estate on a small island in the middle of the Oval Lake, with visitors able to look around the 13,000 acre property and grounds at certain times of the year.

However neither William nor Harry will inherit Althorp as it will instead go to their cousin Louis Spencer, Diana’s nephew and Charles Spencer’s son.

Harry and Charles are now no longer close (Image: Getty)

Louis, Viscount Althorp, has three older sisters but due to the system of primogeniture the estate will go to him, as his father’s eldest son.

The 30-year-old maintains a relatively low profile compared to his sisters, who have worked as models, studying at the University of Edinburgh before honing his craft as an actor.

The Royal Family used to operate under the primogeniture system, meaning Princess Anne was overtaken in the line of succession by her younger brothers Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.

However this was overturned in 2011, meaning that the line is now determined by birth order only regardless of gender.