Princess Diana confided in her faith healer about her sons’ upset following her explosive interview with Martin Bashir in 1995, with William left ‘furious’ by her revelations

Princess Diana was left heartbroken by her young sons’ reactions to her explosive Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, according to a royal expert.

Diana sat down with Bashir in November 1995 for the bombshell talk, during which spoke about Charles’s relationship with Camilla, stating that there had been ‘three of us in this marriage’. But it wasn’t that which most upset her eldest son William. Then 13, the Prince watched the programme alone in his housemaster’s study at Eton. And he was particularly hurt by Diana’s confession that she’d fallen in love with James Hewitt.

Author and historian Robert Lacey wrote about the pivotal moment in his book, Battle of Brothers. “Diana spoke of ‘betrayal’, and that was exactly what William felt. Their mother had clearly seen how upset both her sons had been when Charles had confessed his intimacy with Camilla on TV the previous year. Yet here she was, doing the very same thing.” William’s housemaster returned to his study a short time later and reportedly found the prince slumped on the sofa, his eyes red with tears.

Two days later, the distraught princess told her faith-healer Simone Simmons what had happened. William had been “so angry with her,’ said Diana. According to Lacey, when mother and son spoke, “All hell broke loose. He was furious . . . that she had spoken badly of his father, that she had mentioned Hewitt . . . He started shouting and crying and, when she tried to put her arms around him, he shoved her away.’ The next day, William apologised to his mother for his bad temper, and presented her with a bunch of flowers. But Diana felt some irretrievable damage had been done.

“‘What have I done?’ Diana kept asking Simone, as though she finally realised the pain and long-term emotional damage her bitter public feuding had inflicted on her sons. ‘What have I done to my children?'” Indeed, Harry was said to be just as upset by the James Hewitt revelations. The two Princes reportedly spent a great deal of time with the man they’d called ‘Uncle James’, and had driven down with him and Diana quite regularly to stay in Devon with his mother Shirley.

Diana and James began a five-year affair in 1986. The former Household Cavalry officer’s red hair led to unfounded rumours that he was Prince Harry’s father – something Harry himself spoke about in his tell-all memoir Spare. “One cause of this rumour was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism,” Harry wrote. “Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles. They couldn’t get enough of this ‘joke’, for some reason. Maybe it made them feel better about their lives that a young prince’s life was laughable.” He concluded: “Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born, the story was simply too good to drop.”