It might have been the sense of relief, but there was an emotion-packed pause before Prince Harry answered one of his final questions in the witness box.

"You have had to go through these articles and answer questions knowing this is a very public courtroom and the world's media are watching. How has that made you feel?" Prince Harry was asked by his barrister at the end of his court appearance in the case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).

After a day and a half of giving evidence at London's High Court, he looked exhausted and the pause got longer.

"It's a lot," was all he said in the end, sounding distinctly choked up.

In the witness box over the course of two days he had spoken quietly, often in terse, quickfire answers, interspersed with some nervous quips - "if you say so", he said a few times ironically to some details being presented to him.

He has accused the Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People of hacking and illegal information-gathering.

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The great majority of his time in court has been facing questions from the Mirror Group's barrister, Andrew Green, an interrogator with a reputation fearsome enough for him to be known as a "beast in court".

But in the end, it was quite possibly Prince Harry who will have left the court feeling better about the last couple of days. He'd finished his high-wire act without falling off.

He hadn't crumbled or got wound up or tetchy, he hadn't been dragged into too many awkward questions, he'd stuck to his own lines. You couldn't exactly say he'd been an eloquent witness, but he'd not walked into any traps.

"For my whole life the press has misled me and covered up the wrongdoing," he claimed.

He talked of how paranoid it had made him. In evidence he said he'd never walk down a London street. But he wouldn't even walk around this court building with its airport-style scanning checks, going everywhere within a bubble of security guards. A guard had stood across the doorway as he went into the toilet.

But when the hearing was over, Prince Harry looked relieved and relaxed, chatting to his lawyers and those backing him in his battle against the tabloids, before heading downstairs to his waiting car.