Adoring public falls for Diana’s fairytale
While the world celebrated her wedding to Prince Charles, Diana was consumed by doubts, walking down the aisle like ‘a lamb to slaughter’
AS LADY Diana Spencer climbed out of the Glass Coach at St Paul’s Cathedral, she looked like a veritable Cinderella.
Her gown unfurled around her, the 7.6m train and veil seemingly unending. She was a cloud of woven silk taffeta, albeit crushed by the coach ride.
And while her father Earl Spencer turned and waved, Diana faced forward, walking slowly and surely into the cathedral and her destiny.
“I was deathly calm,” Diana later told biographer Andrew Morton.
“I felt I was a lamb going to the slaughter.”
But to the world, it was the wedding of the century. When Diana married Prince Charles on July 29, 1981,
750 million people around the globe tuned in to watch it on television. The UK declared it a public holiday and street parties were held all over the country.
Some 600,000 people lined the route from Clarence House to St Paul’s to experience a little of the magic.
Ever since Charles and Diana announced their engagement in February 1981, the world had been enraptured with the shy and blushing 19 year old.
“It’s a tremendous change,” suggested one journalist in their engagement interview.
“Next to Prince Charles I can’t go wrong,” Diana replied. Asked if they were in love, Diana answered, “Of course”, while Charles ominously replied: “Whatever in love means.”
Over the following five months, wedding fever took hold of the world, reaching a crescendo of expectation by July.
“It was like fairyland,” said US First Lady Nancy Reagan. “The stuff of which fairy tales are made,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It certainly looked that way. Diana’s dress, designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, was the absolute embodiment of the 1980s. With giant puff-sleeves and frills of antique lace, the enormous taffeta frock was a bold statement by the young bride.
“She couldn’t do a quiet-looking, low-key little gown,” said David Emanuel, revealing they purposely made the train longer than any other royal bride, embroidered with 10,000 pearls and sequins.
Diana, for all her nerves and inexperience, wanted to make a statement. She succeeded.
“It was gloriously dramatic,” said Jade Beer, editor of Conde Nast Brides.
It also set the benchmark for big white weddings – putting an end to the modest nuptials that had become popular in the 1960s and ’70s.
For the rest of the decade, brides would demand puff-sleeved princess gowns with full skirts and long veils.
Diana did things her way. First, the venue was St Paul’s Cathedral, the only royal wedding to be held there, and she refused to say “obey” in her vows, a controversial decision at the time.
The couple had held “very serious discussions” with the Archbishop of Canterbury, it was revealed, before deciding to be modern. After that, few said obey, certainly not Kate Middleton when she married Prince William 30 years later.
With 3500 guests of royalty and heads of state from all over the world, including Sir Zelman Cowen, the Governor General of Australia, Diana later said she still picked out Camilla Parker Bowles in the pews.
“Walking down the aisle I spotted Camilla, pale grey, pillbox hat, saw it all,” she said.
Followed by her bridal party of five bridesmaids and two pageboys, Diana still managed to think of others during her big day.
She comforted weeping bridesmaid Clemmie Hambro and admitted her main concern as she walked up the aisle was helping her ailing father make it.
The moment Diana falteringly said her vows – accidentally getting the full name of her husband wrong – a great cheer of celebration burst outside and rippled through the cathedral.
When the smiling young couple travelled back to Buckingham Palace in their landau, the crowd cheered, sang and clapped at what one TV commentator called “a couple so obviously in love a whole nation could forget its troubles for one day”.
And they were, for a time.
“I remember being so in love with my husband I couldn’t take my eyes off him,” Diana said.
“I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. He was going to look after me.”
When they finally kissed, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, it seemed, for that moment anyway, that fairytales could come true.
Australian media veteran Ita Buttrose, who covered both Charles and Diana’s wedding and William and Kate’s nuptials, said: “They were both incredible moments in the history of British monarchy and done with all the pomp and circumstance one expects. The big difference was the expectations of the well-wishers.
“When Diana and Charles married people thought of their match as a fairytale but as we all know their marriage was anything but. With Prince William and Kate, nobody thought it a fairytale, rather they wished the couple well and hoped for the best.”
After the wedding breakfast in Buckingham Palace, Diana changed into her pink Bellville Sassoon going away outfit and she and Charles drove away in a carriage with a Just Married sign; the Queen, Queen Mother and Princess Margaret running after them. Little did she know it then, but Diana would be pursued for the rest of her life.