THE NEXT MORNING, her wedding day, 29 July, Diana awoke at about five to a rush of noise. People were shouting, policemen’s whistles were blowing and there was the clop, clop, clop of horses’ hoofs. Her bedroom overlooked the Mall, which was already a solid mass of people with mounted police riding up and down on their splendid horses, trying to keep the main road clear. Many had camped for over twenty-four hours on the streets, and the scent of bacon frying and coffee being brewed on portable stoves pervaded the early-morning air. It was still too early to tell what the day was going to be like, but outside Clarence House an air of optimism prevailed.
Jane joined Diana in her room at about half past five. Neither of them had had much rest: at nine the previous evening, Prince Charles, to whooping cheers from the multitudes gathered in Hyde Park, had lit the first in a chain of 102 bonfires strung across London’s parks and squares. Moments later, the night sky had been ablaze with a huge firework display to celebrate the wedding. The strident sound of patriotic music played by five military bands and two choirs, the steady barrage of exploding rockets, timed to match the musical crescendos, had assaulted Diana’s bedroom windows.
Twelve hundred fireworks had been incorporated into a vast pyrotechnic palace: it was a reconstruction of a display created for George II 250 years earlier to celebrate the signing of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which recognized the Protestant succession in England. The crowds—an estimated 500,000 in Hyde Park alone and an equal number lining the streets—screamed and shouted as each new stream of light shot across the sky. As a climax, a sun in the form of gigantic Catherine wheel rose high above London.
Diana had tea and toast when breakfast was brought in to them. She was, however, suddenly “very, very calm, deathly calm,” feeling like “a lamb being led to slaughter.” But now it was the panoply of the day before her that she feared, for as the early-morning sunlight streamed through the windows of her room, it brought with it a reassurance of her love for Charles. Never, she believed, could she have come this far if her love was not solid and true; neither could he have put up with her jealousy and nerves if he did not love her.
At six thirty Kevin Shanley and his wife, Claire, arrived to do her hair. Diana had been emphatic that she wanted to keep the simple style that she normally wore and with which she felt comfortable. She was to wear the magnificent Spencer tiara with its crestlike waves of diamonds, worn by Grandmother Spencer and her mother at their weddings. It was heavy and would have to be tightly secured, her veil attached to it This had to be done early so that she could get used to the weight of it. While Shanley was drying her hair, the Emanuels and Nina Missetzes arrived with her gown.
When she was dressed she stood looking at herself in the full-length mirror with some disapproval. She felt now as if the dress overpowered her. She was trembling as she turned to Missetzes and asked, more to herself, “Do I really have to go out in front of all those people?” The fitter just smiled and patted her hand. It was ice cold.
The gown’s design was chosen by Diana to help her maintain her Spencer identity. She had asked the Emanuels to copy it from a 200-year-old John Downman watercolour of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire unaware that the Duchess had entered into a marriage crossed by infidelity, illness and emotional breakdown.
The gown did not flatter Diana’s figure although it did capture a romantic air. Made of rich ivory silk from the only silk farm in England, the pie-frill neckline framed Diana’s shapely décolletage as it had Georgiana’s. The balloon sleeves were decorated with lace, and the voluminous skirt glittered with pearls and sequins. Diana had lost several more pounds in the last few days, and the Emanuels had to adjust the waist once again as she waited to put it on.
The amount of fabric on the bodice, as she had feared, overwhelmed her. The gown seemed to be wearing Diana and not the other way around. The Emanuels had obviously given less thought to the wearer than to the setting in which their creation would be worn. Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece of English Baroque architecture, St. Paul’s Cathedral (completed in 1711 after his death), is one of England’s largest and finest buildings. A simpler dress might have been more flattering to Diana, but it would have been eclipsed, the bride dwarfed, by the awesome height of the domed canopy over the high altar and the majestic, long sweep of St. Paul’s centre aisle down which she would walk. The most spectacular feature of the Emanuels’ creation was its magnificent twenty-five-foot, lace-trimmed train, difficult for Diana to manoeuvre, but a striking image for high-positioned television cameras.
Diana had had a blue bow (something blue) and a gold horseshoe encrusted with diamonds (a gift from her father and something new), sewn inside the skirt. A piece of lace that had edged one of Georgiana’s underskirts now edged hers (something old), and to complement the Spencer tiara, the only other jewellery she wore were her mother’s diamond drop earrings (something borrowed).
By eight thirty, Barbara Daly, the makeup artist, arrived carrying “a little shiny black bag from Asprey’s,” which contained all the makeup she would be using to ensure that Diana looked natural yet had enough colour to survive under the hot lights and glare from the forty television cameras inside the cathedral. In the basement of Clarence House, florist Doris Wellham, who had helped create the bridal bouquet carried by the Queen thirty-four years earlier, was assembling Diana’s, using only British flowers—gardenias, freesias, orchids, lilies-of-the-valley, sprigs of yellow myrtle and veronica from the gardens at Osborne House, and yellow roses, named in memory of Lord Mountbatten.
Diana remained cool, her only complaint that the tiara hurt her head. Shanley rearranged some of the pins that held it in place. Wearing a heavily jewelled tiara with a sturdy platinum frame does not come naturally to any woman: the first time the young Princess Elizabeth wore one to a ball at Buckingham Palace she was found late in the evening sitting on the stairs leading to the ballroom, holding her head in pain, the tiara beside her.
When she was finally ready, Diana looked very young and defenceless and incandescently beautiful. Jane, who had been with her for most of the morning, was so overcome that she cried, “Oh, Duch, it’s really, really true!”
Before she departed for St. Paul’s the Queen Mother, dressed in seafoam green, with a hat of matching flowers and osprey feathers, seeming to be preened for flight, popped in. “My dear,” she said, “you look simply enchanting,” smiled encouragingly, then disappeared as quickly as she had come.
At nine fifteen Doris Wellham and her assistant brought up the fragrant white and yellow bouquet and showed Diana how to hold and carry it for the most graceful and comfortable effect. Diana walked with it several times across the room. “One hand, Lady Diana,” Doris instructed. “You will need the other to hold your father’s arm.” Moments later Diana was informed that Johnnie, who would escort her to the cathedral, was waiting downstairs.
When he greeted his daughter Earl Spencer was all smiles. This was, after all, his dream as well as hers that she had brought to fruition: his grandchildren would be royal and, God willing, one would ascend the throne. He looked at her with immense pride and approval. It was what she had craved for years and, at last, been given. “Diana had finally got something right.”
Johnnie was very frail and unsteady on his feet. Usually he used a cane but refused to do so to escort her down the aisle. This was his great moment almost as much as it was Diana’s, and he was determined to play his part well. He would be seated with Frances in the front row of the cathedral while Raine sat towards the back, not far from Peter Shand Kydd.
While her father watched, Diana’s train was attached to her gown and, with the help of the Emanuels, folded so that she and it could get into the Glass Coach, now waiting for her in the courtyard of Clarence House. As she was being helped inside it the sun shone brightly, creating an aura around Diana in her diamonds and shiny silks that was startlingly otherworldly.
Once the bride was safely seated, her father was assisted inside. At ten thirty-five, the Glass Coach pulled out of the cobbled courtyard and into the Mall. A great roar of delight went up from the crowds who had waited so long for this moment. Diana, her face hidden beneath her veil, waved to them.
“Father was so thrilled he waved himself stupid,” Diana recalled of that momentous ride up the Mall, the Strand, Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill to St. Paul’s. “We went past St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields and he thought we were at St. Paul’s. He was ready to get out. It was wonderful, that.”
Until she viewed the wedding later on their honeymoon, Diana was not aware of the full grandeur of the parade of horse-drawn open landaus carrying a galaxy of European royalty. There had not been such a gathering of crowned heads in London since the Queen’s coronation. It was an impressive sight: the Household Cavalry, in their burnished breastplates and helmets with red plumes, the Yeomen of the Guard resplendent in scarlet, the royal horses, caparisoned in silver, coaches polished and gleaming with a blinding sheen as they moved through the brilliant summer morning.
The female members of the Royal Family were dressed to look like an English summer garden—each wearing a different colour that, in archaic custom, other female guests had been informed they could not wear. They sat in their open-topped vehicles, raising a hand every minute or so along the route as their scarlet-uniformed coachmen controlled some of the finest horses in the royal mews. The Queen, in a turquoise ensemble, with Prince Philip in full naval regalia, led the parade of British royalty in an open semi-state postillion landau. Then came the Queen Mother and Prince Edward followed by Princess Margaret in “Princess Margaret Rose,” Princess Anne, in white and yellow, Captain Mark Phillips and Viscount Linley close behind.
By 10:46 A.M. the 2,650 guests were seated in the cathedral. A special chair had been built to accommodate the King of Tonga’s 350-pound bulk. Outside, Prince Charles, dressed impressively in his heavily bemedalled Admiral’s uniform with jaunty cap, arrived with Prince Andrew, also in naval uniform, who was his brother’s best man. The bridegroom acknowledged the crowd and then disappeared inside the grand front arches of the cathedral. Moments later, everything timed to the split second, the Glass Coach was seen approaching St. Paul’s from Ludgate Hill. People shouted, “Diana! Diana!”
The door of the coach was opened by a footman clad in scarlet and gold livery. Earl Spencer navigated the high steps with the help of his chauffeur, John Harmon. Then Diana was assisted from the coach. Attendants set her train straight and smoothed it as she followed her father, her train an ivory stream of silk behind her, as she went past a line of guardsmen at attention on either side of the steps. There was a nervous moment when her father faltered on a step. Diana paused while Harmon help him recover his balance, then the bride continued her ascent.
Once inside, the five bridesmaids and two pages* surrounded her excitedly. “Hush! … Hush!” they were told. As they formed a line behind her, Diana leaned down and touched the cheek of the youngest, little Clementine Hambro, the great-granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill. Then she asked her father if he had seen Charles. “Yes,” he answered. “He looks very handsome indeed.”
The doors to St Paul’s were closed as Big Ben struck the last count of eleven. A trumpet fanfare sounded and everyone stood as the Queen led the Royal Family to their seats on the right side of the altar. Then came the procession of foreign sovereigns who occupied a block of front seats. There followed a second trumpet fanfare and, as the stirring music for his march to the altar began, Charles, with Andrew and Edward on either side of him, took measured steps down the aisle. Three and a half minutes passed before another trumpet fanfare signalled Diana’s entrance. She held her father’s arm firmly, lest he slip and fall. Earl Spencer said later, “Diana … was so determined that she wanted me to do it, she was quite insistent. Most fathers support their daughters on their wedding day—but it was Diana who supported me … She believed in me and that gave me the strength to get through it all. It’s funny because everyone remembers me taking her up the aisle, when it really wasn’t that way at all, it was the other way round.”
Diana kept her gaze steady as she moved towards the altar. She was worrying about curtsying to the Queen, as protocol demanded, when she reached the altar—her gown and bouquet were so heavy that it would be difficult to keep her balance.
Half-way down the aisle she caught sight of Camilla in a pale grey, veiled pillbox hat Her small son Tom, Charles’s godson, was standing on his chair beside her so that he could see the bridal procession as it passed. That remained one of Diana’s most vivid memories of the day. When she arrived at the altar Charles said, “You look wonderful.” She glanced sideways at him, smiled and whispered back, “Wonderful for you.”
When they took their vows both bride and groom made nervous gaffes. Diana confused the order of Charles’s Christian names, calling him Philip Charles Arthur George in error (“She’s married my father,” Prince Andrew later quipped) and Charles said, “And all thy worldly goods with thee I share.” He slipped the simple wedding band, made from a gold nugget found sixty years before in a Welsh mine, on the third finger of her left hand and Dr. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced them man and wife. The new Princess of Wales lifted her veil as her Prince kissed her respectfully. The royal couple then walked over to sign the marriage register, and boldly, her lessons from Oliver Everett well practised, the bride signed only her Christian name—DIANA—as was the right of a British princess. “This is the stuff of fairytales,” Dr. Runcie had said during the service, and it certainly was.
“She looked so young, so terribly, terribly vulnerable,” a guest recalled. “She was barely twenty and seemed—well—like a teenager. It was exquisitely moving. And all those children as bridesmaids. And the Queen grim-faced through it all, the whole Royal Family wearing a unified, solemn façade. I wondered if she [Diana] realized what was before her. I had a curious attack of fear. I remember turning to my husband and saying, ‘Oh, God, they’ll eat her alive.’ ”
For Diana the splendour of her wedding was to be the beginning of the happiness she had always sought. For the British people it symbolized the continuity of the monarchy and thus of the nation itself. Sir Winston Churchill had described the marriage of the Queen when she was the young and very-much-in-love Princess Elizabeth as “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” Times were different. There were few signs of the war that had so devastated London just a short few years before Elizabeth’s wedding. Yet, the road was still hard and this joyous day afforded surcease from a year of steadily climbing joblessness, urban unrest, intractable problems in Ireland, and crippling strikes by civil employees and seamen and no one yet was entirely sure that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government could lift the country out of its present depression.
But no other nation could put together a show of glorious panoply like Great Britain, and the Queen with unerring instinct had known that the pomp and spectacle of a royal wedding would do much to lift the spirits of her subjects. The polls being taken only days before proved she was right. It had been a long while since the monarchy had enjoyed such popularity.
The parade back to Buckingham Palace, where the wedding breakfast was to be held, started at twelve twenty as a peal of twelve bells from the north-west tower of St. Paul’s was answered by bells ringing out from almost every church in London. People thronged the way, waving flags and banners. Diana and Charles led the carriage procession in an open state landau escorted by mounted police. Earl Spencer, in what must have been the second most glorious moment in his life (the first being walking with his daughter to the alter of St. Paul’s), rode with the Queen while Frances Shand Kydd was escorted by Prince Philip.
Before lunch could be served, the wedding photographs were taken by Patrick Lichfield. There were portraits of the wedding couple, Diana almost lost in ivory silk taffeta, Charles in theatrical pose, one hand on his hip, his other resting on his gold sword, and looking directly at the camera. “I was basically wandering around trying to find where I should be,” Diana recalled, “clutching my long train with my bridesmaids and pages.” Charles never came over to her during this time to take her hand, “nothing tactile, nothing,” she remembered. Then they went out on to the Buckingham Palace balcony and she was overwhelmed by the thousands of cheering people—“so humble-making.” Shouts of “Kiss her!” wafted up, and it was then that Charles put his arm loosely about her waist and they kissed. The cheers grew more intense.
“Neither of us spoke to each other,” Diana said, “we were so shattered.” The crowds, the shouting, the people’s enthusiasm had overwhelmed them. But it had been a long day, a difficult week, and Diana was exhausted. She mustered up her spirit when Charles cut the five-foot-tall, five-tiered, 255-pound wedding cake with his ceremonial sword, laughing as she fork-fed her groom a small taste from her own piece. She disappeared moments later to change into her coral pink going-away outfit with its bolero jacket, frilly white organdie collar and cuffs, and matching, Edwardian-style tricorn hat with plumes. At four o’clock, in a hail of rice (the Queen joining in as a “tossing” participant), the newlyweds got into an open landau for Waterloo station to take the royal train to Broadlands, where they were to spend the first two days of their honeymoon before joining Britannia in Gibraltar. On the back of the landau, Andrew had pasted a handwritten sign reading “Just Married,” and tied above it a big bunch of heart-shaped silver and blue balloons.
Once again the royal couple rode through throngs of cheering people until they reached Waterloo, Diana with her anticipation sky-high and Charles smiling wanly through his own exhaustion and troubled thoughts. When they arrived at Romsey station, they were met by a limousine with a canopy of flowers on its roof. Photographers raced alongside the car as it moved slowly through the narrow old streets lined with more cheering people. When the car pulled into the Broadlands driveway, Diana turned her head slightly as black iron gates closed behind them.
Diana’s dream was now reality. She was the Princess of Wales. However, the fantasy had been passed on to the millions who had watched her and Charles take their vows. For the multitudes it had been the stuff of fairytales. For Diana it had only been a prelude to the real life she now faced.
*The bridesmaids were seventeen-year-old Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones; India Hicks, thirteen, Lord Mountbatten’s granddaughter, Sarah-Jane Gaselee, eleven, daughter of Prince Charles’s racehorse trainer, Catherine Cameron, six, the daughter of another of Prince Charles’s Mends, Donald Cameron; and five-year-old Clementine Hambro. The two young pages were Nicholas Windsor, the Duke of Kent’s son, who was seven and Edward van Cutsem, eight, dressed in midshipman’s uniform of 1863.