The wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer took place on July 29, 1981 and marked a peak in the popularity of the British royal family. 45 years after that day, it remains the royal ‘I do’ with the largest audience of all time: the ceremony was followed by 750 million people in 74 countries. In Britain, where it had been declared a public holiday, 28.4 million people watched it on television, while 600,000 more lined the streets of London to cheer the newlyweds.
Four years and only thirteen engagements after Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, introduced them in 1977, Diana and Charles walked down the aisle at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The Queen’s son stated in 1981 to the Telegraph that he remembered thinking when he first saw her: “What a lively, funny and attractive girl.”
For her part, Diana told friends that she was meant to marry Charles after their first meeting, and added, with little prophetic talent, that he was the only man on the planet who is not allowed to divorce me. The prince proposed to Diana in the Windsor Castle games room and the engagement remained secret for three weeks, while details for the official announcement were prepared, which took place on February 24, 1981.
However, according to Penny Thornton, the astrologer of the late princess, the wedding almost did not take place. Thornton claimed that the future king of England told his fiancée the night before the ceremony that “he didn’t want her”. Despite everything, the ceremony went ahead, with a multitude of details and anecdotes that you may have forgotten…
Diana had two wedding bouquets, thanks to her mother-in-law
Florist David Longman told Express newspaper in 2018 that after Queen Elizabeth lost the bouquet during her own wedding, the tradition of ordering two identical bouquets was established to avoid a similar mishap. “We made two bouquets,” Longman explained about Diana and Charles’s wedding. “The first had to be delivered at exactly 8 o’clock at Buckingham Palace. We had a motorized police escort that took us through the entire city to the palace. Then we returned and by that time the second bouquet had already been finished, so we did the journey again.”
Diana and Charles, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London,
Diana’s wedding dress had to be altered…
Designer Elizabeth Emanuel has recalled in several interviews that the body of the young bride changed as the weeks preceding her wedding to the prince Charles progressed. Diana lost a lot of weight and her dress had to be altered at the last minute. Years later, the princess spoke publicly about her struggle with bulimia during the time of her engagement.
“Bulimia began the week after we got engaged and it took me almost a decade to overcome it,” she told in Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story. “My husband put his hand on my waist and said: ‘Well, here we are a bit plump, aren’t we?’, and that triggered something in me. And then there was all the matter of Camilla…“.
…and he also ended up perfumed
Diana walked down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral wearing one of her favorite perfumes: Quelques Fleurs. However, the fragrance was the cause of a small accident. The young princess, who was 20 at the time, accidentally spilled some perfume on her dress while trying to apply it to her wrists after donning the wedding dress. On the way to the altar, she can be seen trying to cover the stain caused by the perfume with her hand.
The wedding day nerves
When it came time to recite their vows, Diana was seized with a certain nervousness. Unintentionally, she referred to her fiancé as “Philip Charles” instead of “Charles Philip.” The groom also stumbled when saying “I will share with you all your goods,” instead of “I will share with you all my worldly possessions.” At that moment, in what was considered a very modern gesture, the couple agreed by mutual consent to omit the word “obedience” from Diana’s vows.
There were 2,500 guests at the ceremony…
Although royal weddings had long been held at Westminster Abbey, Diana and Charles held theirs at St Paul’s Cathedral, something the church itself described as “unusual”. Yet the cathedral’s large capacity proved more suitable for the couple and their 2,500 guests. Attendees included First Lady Nancy Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Grace of Monaco and her son, Prince Albert, the royal household staff, and Diana’s flatmates from before she met Charles.
…and Camilla also attended
Despite the romantic past between Charles and Camilla, the current wife of the King of England appeared on the guest list for the royal wedding. The reason lay in her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, who served as commander of the Household Cavalry Regiment. Charles and Camilla maintained a highly publicized romantic relationship during their respective marriages and made their romance public after Diana’s death in 1997.
The couple, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
Diana and Charles and the kiss on the Buckingham Palace balcony
Although Charles forgot to kiss Diana at the end of the ceremony in St Paul’s Cathedral, at the urging of the crowd, the newlyweds became the first to kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. That romantic gesture began a tradition that would be repeated at many royal weddings thereafter.
The wedding cake auctioned
The five-tier fruit cake from Charles and Diana’s wedding was prepared by the Royal Navy’s culinary school. It stood one and a half meters tall and was decorated with the Mountbatten-Windsor coat of arms, the couple’s initials, and flowers such as roses and lilies. In 2018, a well-preserved slice of the cake sold for $1,375 in Beverly Hills.
Diana did not have fond memories of her wedding
In the interviews she granted to journalist Andrew Morton in 1992 (the year of her separation from Charles), Princess Diana offered a new perspective on the day of her wedding after a tumultuous decade of marriage and a difficult integration into the British royal family. In fact, she described it as “the worst day of my life” and confessed: “If I could write my own script, I would have my husband leave with his lover and never come back.”
