When Lady Diana married Prince Charles on July 29, 1981, at the tender age of 20,
she was the first British citizen in three centuries to wed an heir to the British throne.
While the wedding may have seemed picture perfect, behind the scenes, it was anything but.
There have been reports that Charles nearly didn't make it to the altar at
St. Paul's Cathedral in London on his wedding day.
According to Catherine Mayer, author of the unauthorized biography "Charles:
Heart of a King," the Prince of Wales reportedly
told an aide that he didn't want to go through with the wedding at all.
One of the problems was that Charles and Diana didn't know each other very well.
They had a brief five-month engagement and had only dated for a short period of time,
so they hadn't really established a deep affection, or even much of
a relationship at all. That distance showed in public, even at the time.
"...and I suppose in love." "Of course" "...Whatever 'in love' means."
In another book, "Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an
Improbable Life," the author claimed that Charles cried on the eve of the
wedding because he still had feelings for his ex-girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles.
It doesn't seem unreasonable that Charles was nervous about marrying
a woman he didn't know very well when he was still hung up on a former girlfriend,
whom at the time would have been considered an unsuitable match for the future King of England.
Charles and Camilla wound up tying the knot in 2005, several years after Diana's death.
In 2017, previously unseen footage of Diana chatting with her friend and voice coach Peter
Settelen was unearthed that shed new light on Diana's mindset in the lead-up to her wedding.
In the footage, Diana talked openly about her relationship with Charles and said the
pair had only gotten together 13 times before they tied the knot.
She revealed,
"He'd ring me up every day for a week and then he wouldn't speak to me for three weeks.
Very odd. And the thrill when he used to ring up was so immense and intense."
"It was the fact that an older man who was in a prominent position liked me and
wanted to have me around."
She also revealed that Charles didn't prioritize intimacy in the relationship,
which Diana thought was due to his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
According to Diana, Charles used to see Camilla with some frequency before their wedding.
Diana even went on to describe the actual wedding day as the "worst day of my life."
She added that if she could have written her own script about her life at the time,
she would have had Charles leave with Camilla and quote, "never come back."
The footage was never intended to be released to the public and was
used as an exercise by Settleten to help Diana with her public speaking skills.
It's not uncommon for brides to lose weight before the big day, and Diana was no exception.
But Diana's quest to look her best led to an eating disorder for the young royal.
Only 19 years old when she got engaged, Diana started binging and purging just one week after
Charles asked for her hand in marriage, allegedly in response to some comments he had made.
Diana revealed to author Andrew Morton in 1991,
"My [future] husband put his hand on my waistline and said: 'Oh,
a bit chubby here, aren't we?' and that triggered off something in me."
She noted that when she was initially fitted for her wedding dress, she was 29 inches around the
waist. On the day of her wedding, she was 23-1/2 inches. As she later described it,
"I had shrunk into nothing from February to July."
It can take hours for a bride to get dressed and coiffed on the day of her wedding,
and Diana prepared for her big day like many women
do by dabbing on some perfume before walking down the aisle.
Diana chose the fragrance Quelques Fleurs, but she had a tiny mishap when applying the perfume,
her makeup artist Barbara Daly told People. The 20-year-old princess was wearing her gown
when she put some of the fragrance on her wrists and accidentally spilled some on the material.
Daly came to the rescue, telling Diana to hold the spot where she stained the
dress while she was walking, making it look like she was carrying the front of
her gown to prevent herself from stepping on it. No one appeared to notice the stain
on Diana's dress when she got out of the royal carriage on her way into the church.
Most people didn't know what Diana's dress would look like until the day of the wedding. The gown
cost approximately $115,000 to make and featured sequins, lace, and thousands of pearls. David and
Elizabeth Emmanuel designed the dress, which they stored in a locked safe in their studio.
The safe was huge because it had to fit the gown's 25-foot-long train,
and the safe initially couldn't fit through the studio door because it was so big.
They ended up using a crane to put it into the space.
"The longest royal train in the past has been
24. She goes, 'yes.' So I said 'well, we've got to make it bigger than that."
Diana traveled to St. Paul's Cathedral in a coach,
and had to share the small space with her giant dress. The fabric was folded in a very specific
way in order to keep it from wrinkling -- a difficult task. Two of Diana's bridesmaids,
India Hicks and Sarah Armstrong-Jones, were tasked with making sure the train was properly laid out
during the ceremony. The pair practiced using a long sheet to make sure they were prepared.
It can be nerve wracking for any bride to walk down the aisle on her wedding day,
so you can imagine how Diana felt when she had 3,000 guests in attendance. Unlike most brides,
her stroll was considerably longer. She was accompanied on the long walk by her father,
who stood by her side despite health problems. The entire process took her
3 1/2 minutes from the carriage to the altar at St. Paul's Cathedral.
You can't help but wonder what was going on in Diana's head as
she was preparing to tie the knot with the future king of England.
What we do know is that she scanned the crowd during her big day, keeping an eye
out for Camilla Parker Bowles. Camilla had dated Charles briefly in the early 1970s,
and the pair remained friends. Charles didn't hide the fact that he was friendly with Camilla,
although Diana had some suspicions about their relationship from very early on.
In 1991, Diana revealed to author Andrew Morton that she did see Camilla at the ceremony,
and could recall the moment vividly, right down to the outfit she was wearing.
Diana was a trailblazer when it came to her fashion, charity work, and personal
image. One of the things she altered for her wedding ceremony wound up having
lasting effects for both her children and other members of the royal family.
As far back as 1662, royal weddings followed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that
included the line "to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part."
Diana did not like the word "obey," and after a
discussion with Charles the couple agreed to omit it from their vows.
While the decision to change the vows was treated by some as controversial,
Dr. Edward Carpenter, the Dean of Westminster Abbey, told the New York Times at the time that he
agreed with their decision, saying that marriage should involve two equal partners. He said,
"If there is going to be a dominant partner,
it won't be settled by this oath. I think this is much more Christian.”
Diana's son, Prince William, and Kate Middleton also excluded the word "obey" from their vows in
2011, as did Meghan Markle and Diana's younger son, Prince Harry. In 2018, Princess Eugenie
and her husband Jack Brooksbank also omitted the phrase from the vows at their own wedding.
AFP special correspondent Michel Leclercq witnessed the wedding and noted how the couple was
quite nervous, which is completely understandable. Wedding day jitters are common among many people,
so you can imagine the pressure that Prince Charles and his bride felt when they stepped
out of their carriages and into the church with literally millions of eyes upon them.
Their voices reportedly trembled during the exchange of vows,
and Diana accidentally inverted her husband's names,
calling him "Philip Charles Arthur George" instead of "Charles Philip Arthur George."
The couple were officially husband and wife at 12:20 p.m.,
and both the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth II were visibly emotional as
they watched the pair tie the knot. The couple later shared that infamous kiss
from the balcony of Buckingham Palace before they went to their reception.
Charles and Diana tied the knot in a traditional Church of England ceremony presided by Alan
Webster, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, and Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The TV audience was huge. The ceremony was broadcast on the BBC and ITV,
drawing an audience of 750 million viewers in 74 countries, including 28.4 million from just the
United Kingdom. In comparison, 24 million Brits watched Prince William and Kate Middleton wed
in 2011, and just 18 million Brits watched Prince Harry and Meghan Markle wed in 2018.
In addition, a crowd of approximately 600,000 people gathered in the area
around the cathedral to try and catch a glimpse of
the royal couple -- not to mention the 3,500 people gathered inside the church.
The archbishop referred to Charles and Diana's wedding as a fairy tale, telling
those in attendance that the wedding day was the, quote, "place where the adventure really begins."
The wedding day itself was also a bit of an adventure for everyone in attendance.
The wedding was a massive security operation for the city of London, involving police helicopters,
armed police on rooftops, and more than 5,000 uniformed officers on patrol,
including undercover agents monitoring the proceedings while keeping a low profile.
The uniformed police were a conspicuous presence in the thick crowd, and made
themselves known by searching some spectators, moving unattended bags, and even arresting people
as needed. Guards on horseback prepared for the wedding by training in anti-terrorism tactics,
and stayed close to the carriages they were defending for the sake of acting as
shields for their occupants in case anything should go wrong.
Following the ceremony, Prince Charles and Princess Diana hosted a wedding breakfast at
Buckingham Palace with 120 guests. Dishes included brill in lobster sauce, chicken stuffed with lamb
mousse, and strawberries and cream. There were also 27 wedding cakes, including the official
cake created by David Avery, the head baker of the Royal Naval cooking school in Kent.
It took Avery 14 weeks to finish the fruit cake, which featured Charles's coat of arms,
the Spencer family crest, as well as roses, lilies of the valley, and orchids.
In August 2021, a slice of the couple's cake sold for over $2,500, bringing in much more
than the anticipated $700 auctioneers initially predicted. The cake had belonged to a woman named
Moyra Smith, who worked for Queen Elizabeth II at Clarence House. She stored the cake in a tin
with the slightly inaccurate label, "Handle with care — Prince Charles & Princess Diane's wedding
cake," along with the wedding date. A private collector bought the slice in 2008. So what does
a 40-year-old piece of cake look like? According to a similar slice of cake shown off in 2011,
not great. The auction house in 2021 claimed that the famous dessert was still in, quote,
"the same good condition as when originally sold," but also recommended no one actually eat it.
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