DIANA COMES HOME; BODY OF THE `PEOPLE'S PRINCESS' FLOWN BACK AS BRITAIN GRIEVES.

Byline: Warren Hoge The New York Times

Prince Charles brought the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, home Sunday night to a nation convulsed with grief over her death in a high-speed car crash in Paris early Sunday.

The 36-year-old princess was fatally injured and her millionaire admirer, Dodi Fayed, 41, was killed when their chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz tried to speed away from photographers pursuing on motorcycles. The car crashed into the wall of an underpass by the side of the Seine.

She was declared dead at 4 a.m. Paris time, a moment noted somberly on the BBC with the playing of the national anthem and the installation of a visual backdrop with a black-framed picture of Diana beaming her beguiling smile and the stark dates 1961-1997 beneath.

``She was the people's princess,'' said Prime Minister Tony Blair, ``and that's how she will stay, how she will remain, in our hearts and in our memories forever.'' He choked back tears as he spoke with reporters outside the 12th-century stone church he attends in his parliamentary district in Sedgefield.

``I feel, like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated,'' he said. ``We are today a nation in a state of shock.''

The princess's two sons, William, 15, the second in line to the throne, and his brother, Harry, 12, attended church services near the royal holiday estate in Balmoral, Scotland, with their father, the queen and the queen mother. They appeared subdued but controlled only hours after Prince Charles had awoken them to tell them of their mother's death.

In a conversation with her best friend in the British press, Richard Kay, the royal correspondent of The Daily Mail, just hours before she dined with Fayed on Saturday evening at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Diana said she was scheduled to see her sons in London on Sunday night.

``I'm coming home tomorrow and the boys will be back from Scotland in the evening,'' she told Kay, according to early editions of the paper available Sunday night. ``I will have a few days with them before they're back at school.''

Planned to withdraw

Kay also reported that she had planned to withdraw from public life in November.

``She would then, she said, be able to live as she always wanted to live,'' Kay wrote, ``not as an icon - how she hated to be called one - but as a private person.''

After the service, Prince Charles boarded the queen's jet in Aberdeen and, taking with him Diana's two sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale, flew to Paris on the sad mission of bringing home Diana's simple wooden coffin wrapped in the royal standard.

Long before the aircraft with its distinctive red tail and Union Jack motif touched down on its return trip at a Royal Air Force base outside London on Sunday evening, sorrow had engulfed the country. Diana's coffin was taken from the plane by an air force honor guard and carried in funereal lockstep to a hearse headed for a private mortuary.

The ceremony was conducted in total silence as the prince, the prime minister and others stood watching. The only sound was the flutter of flags in the stiff wind.

People sobbed in the streets of the capital. Mourners thronged the grounds outside Kensington Palace, virtually carpeting the field with flowers and pushing bouquets through the wrought iron and gold filigree gates.

Service at St. Paul's

Two thousand people jammed St. Paul's Cathedral for a memorial service at the site of the July 29, 1981, marriage that began her legendary transformation.

Diana, 20, passed from an undemanding life as a private kindergarten schoolteacher to a trying role on the world stage as a fantasy princess and fashion icon who struggled to overcome the isolation of a loveless marriage. She ended up the member of the royal family with the greatest following among people growing increasingly impatient with the institution.

It was remarkable how many people recounted having met her or having been influenced by her - an indication of how frequently she had traveled to hospitals and hospices and child-care centers and AIDS clinics in recent years and how her admissions of personal failure and affliction had touched

Sorrow and anger

For some, the sorrow was mixed with anger. When photographers appeared at Kensington Palace and outside Buckingham Palace, the scene of a candlelight vigil Sunday night, some people shouted accusations at them, part of a broad expression of revulsion at the tactics of the paparazzi who had dogged her path. Many are blaming them for forcing her driver to lose control.

From his home in Cape Town, South Africa, Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, said, ``I always believed that the press would kill her in the end.'' But, he added, ``not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in the death, as seems to be the case.''

Buckingham Palace said it would announce the funeral arrangements today. The move was being watched closely by Britons anxious that she be accorded a ceremony recognizing her close bond with the public.

Blair's identification of her as the ``people's princess'' underscored the widely held view that she had succeeded in establishing a rapport with ordinary people, a skill that has proved elusive to other members of the royal family.

She is the most prominent Briton to die since Winston Churchill, whose state funeral in 1965 in St. Paul's was given royal dimensions and attracted representatives of 110 nations.

Diana lost her right to be called ``Her Royal Highness'' as part of the divorce settlement last year, so she is theoretically no longer part of the inner family entitled to a royal funeral. But as the mother of a future king, her place in the Windsor dynastic line is secure, and the Prince of Wales' decision to bring the body back on a royal plane Sunday was seen as confirmation of that.

Sunday night her body was moved to the Chapel Royal at St. James' Palace in central London, just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace.

Types of royal funerals

Royal funerals fall into three categories. A full state funeral is for kings and queens but may by order of the monarch and a vote in Parliament be extended to exceptionally distinguished people like Churchill.

The second is a ceremonial funeral for those of the family who hold high military rank, for the consort of the sovereign and for the heir to the throne. The third is a private funeral, which is just for members of the extended royal family, their children and their spouses.

The private funeral would seem to accommodate precedent, but it would leave the public feeling that the monarchy had not treated Diana properly in death. The future standing of the royal family turns on such decisions, and the family's conduct in the coming days provides an opportunity for a diminished institution to regain respect.

Sunday night, the hundreds of lights that usually illuminate Harrods were switched off.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) The coffin carrying the body of Diana, Princess of Wales, is carried from the queen's jet by members of the Royal Air Force.

(2--color) Prince Charles is accompanied to Pitie Salpetriere Hospital by Diana's sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale.

Associated Press