Prince Charles Picks a Bride

By Claudia Wallis

It was precisely 11 a.m., and an investiture--a traditional ceremony for bestowing honors on deserving subjects--was about to begin in the grand ballroom at Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth II was smiling broadly as the Lord Chamberlain stepped forward and interrupted the general hush: "The Queen has asked me to let you know that an announcement is being made this morning." What followed produced a gasp, applause and even more jubilant beaming from the Queen. Champagne corks began to pop around the palace. At long last, Prince Charles, 32, heir to the British throne, was to be married. His betrothed: Lady Diana Spencer, 19, a blushing beauty with an impressive pedigree and an impeccable reputation.

Outside, the news was already spreading--leaked to the BBC and the London Times earlier that morning. It quickly set all England rejoicing. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told a cheering House of Commons that the engagement gave the government "great pleasure." Bishops of the Church of England, who happened to be discussing marriage at a general synod that day, rose in a standing ovation. "It's super," said Jane Ogden, a housewife in the crowd that quickly materialized at the palace gates. "People really like her. She's so friendly, and she hasn't lost her head."

On national television, Charles and Diana engagingly discussed the most widely publicized "secret" courtship in the history of the court. It was conducted, said the Prince, "like a military operation." He had proposed, he said, over dinner for two in his third-floor quarters at Buckingham Palace, shortly before Diana's Feb. 6 departure for a vacation in Australia. "I wanted to give Diana a chance to think about it--to think if it was going to be too awful. If she didn't like the idea, she could say she didn't. If she did, she could say that. But in fact she said . . ." His fiancee interrupted: "Yes, quite promptly. I never had any doubts about it."

Still, Charles waited for her return before taking the next proper step: asking Diana's father for her hand. "They rang me up," related Earl Spencer, 57, "and Charles said, 'Can I marry your daughter? I have asked her, and very surprisingly she said yes.' " Spencer's reply: "I'm delighted for you both." Though later he joked: "I wonder what he would have said if I'd turned him down." The father of the bride could not contain his pride: "She is a giver, not a taker, and that is very rare these days. I think Charles is very lucky to have her."

Indeed, the next Princess of Wales appears to be everything the Prince has been searching for in a wife--tall (5 ft. 9 in., 2 in. shorter than he), slim and long-legged--the type he has said he favors. She is also British, another preferred attribute and one that will make her the first citizen to marry the heir to the throne since 1659.* Like the Prince, she is an athlete: an avid bicyclist, swimmer and skier, although she does not share the royal family's passion for horses. Says she: "I fell off a horse and lost my nerve."

The winner of the royal sweepstakes has several distinct advantages over some of the also-rans. Unlike several of Charles' flames, she held up extremely well under the daunting barrage of publicity accorded a royal romance. While one former contender, Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, is Catholic, Lady Diana is an Anglican and thus presents no legal obstacle to marriage with the man who, as King, will head the Church of England. Unlike another of the Prince's dates, the lovely Davina Sheffield, she is also what Fleet Street calls "a girl without a past." This is a matter of some consequence to the Prince, who was mortified in 1976 when Davina's ex-boyfriend publicly commended her wifely virtues, having sampled them, he said, while the two lived together. Diana's pristine past is also a matter of importance to the royal family in view of the romantic history of the last Prince of Wales, who abdicated his throne in 1936 to wed Wallis Simpson, a woman who had previously been married and divorced.

Lady Diana's family, while not royal, is not exactly working class either. The Spencers, who are related to the Churchills, have served the Crown as courtiers for generations and, in turn, been befriended by the royals. Diana's brother, Charles, 16, is Queen Elizabeth's godson. Her father, the very wealthy eighth Earl Spencer, is the late Queen Mary's godson, as well as former personal aide to both King George VI and the present Queen. Her maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, is a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother. Said a consultant to Burke's Peerage, the Who's Who of British aristocracy: "There cannot be another family so stiff with royal connections."

It is no wonder then that Prince Charles has known his future bride virtually all her life, or that she was literally the girl next door, at least for part of each year. Though the Spencers spend most of their time at Althorp, their magnificent 500-year-old home in Northamptonshire, for years they rented a large country home on the royal family's 20,000-acre Sandringham estate. It was there that Charles met Diana as a little girl. He regarded her, naturally, as the playmate of his younger brother Andrew, 21, and later chose to date one of the two older Spencer girls, Lady Sarah, 25. Sarah, in fact, claims credit for playing cupid to the couple, for she reintroduced the Prince to Diana at a 1977 shoot at Althorp. By then Diana's parents had divorced and remarried other partners, and their youngest daughter was a boarding student at the quietly exclusive West Heath School in Kent, doing particularly well in art and swimming. Charles remembers being struck by "what a very amusing and jolly--and attractive--16-year-old she was." Diana thought the Prince was "pretty amazing." Concluded Lady Sarah: "He met Miss Right and she met Mr. Right. They just clicked."

Their romance did not catch fire, however, until last July, when Diana visited Balmoral Castle. Strolling through the sunlit highlands and fishing for salmon with Diana at his side, the Prince says, "I began to realize what was going on in my mind and hers in particular." By the time she was invited back in September, the press had also begun to realize what was going on in both their minds. Reporters and photographers were soon on the trail of "Shy Di," the easily blushing prospective Princess.

She was photographed at the Ludlow racecourse cheering on the bonnie Prince. She was surrounded at the London flat that she shared with three other young women. To her horror, she was snapped holding one of her charges at the nursery school where she taught, the sun at her back clearly outlining her legs and thighs through a diaphanous skirt. That caused a sensation, but it was only the beginning. Fleet Street's overheated tabloids, used to concocting royal "romances" on the scantiest of evidence--a day at the races with Lady Camilla Fane, a chat at the polo grounds with Secretary Jane Ward--regularly made up quotes and printed rumors. Diana was ambushed by paparazzi while riding in her car and reduced to tears. Finally, a story in the Sunday Mirror alleged that she had been trysting with the Prince on the royal family's private train. That was the last straw. Her mother, the Honorable Mrs. Shand-Kydd, fired off a letter to the Times. "Is it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dusk?" she asked. Then the palace took the almost unprecedented step of demanding a retraction of the "love train" story. It did not get one, but chastened editors informally agreed among themselves to ease up on Lady Di.

The newspapers left her alone from early December until New Year's, but then the prospect of snaring Charles' beloved on a visit to Sandringham proved entirely too tempting. The sight of newsmen trampling in the woods of what has always been an off-limits winter retreat enraged the usually imperturbable Queen. "I wish you would go away," she snapped at photographers. That extraordinary crack in her regal facade gave credence to a rumor that surfaced in early February to the effect that Elizabeth had presented her son with an ultimatum to marry Diana by this summer, or not at all. Reportedly she had said: "The idea of this romance going on for another year is intolerable to everyone concerned."

But the flash of cameras, the growls of newshounds, the whisper of rumors are very much a part of royal life. Lady Diana's "baptism by fire, with the press as high priest," editorialized the Yorkshire Post, "was almost a planned test." And, the paper added, she "has shown herself fit to be a Queen."

When she marries Charles, some time late in July and probably in Westminster Abbey, Diana, who will then be 20, will begin sharing his responsibilities. "I was about that age when I started," says the Prince. "It's obviously difficult to start with, but you just have to plunge in." His duties consist, principally of letting himself be seen, not to mention photographed and interviewed, at factories, schools, small-town gatherings and state func tions. That routine will not change much when he finally becomes King--upon his mother's death or abdication (she is 54 and in good health), although he will then have the right to see official papers. Diana will, of course, share in the privileges as well as the pains of the monarchy, an institution that only 10% of polled Brit ons wish to see abolished. Among the royal benefits: Highgrove, the 347-acre Gloucestershire country estate Charles purchased for about $2 million last August, his estimated $400,000 annual in come, and such quaint perquisites as first claim to any whale that washes up on the Cornish beaches.

The girl who will be Queen has already resigned her teaching post and moved from her London flat into royal quarters. At Clarence House, home of the popular "Queen Mum," Elizabeth's mother, and just 200 yds. from Buckingham Palace, she will doubtless be instructed in some of the finer nuances of royal protocol. She has presumably already satisfied the royal doctors that she can bear healthy children and has no family history of hereditary maladies. Asked if she feels prepared for the life ahead of her, the future Queen of England responded in the sweet, storybook style that has already endeared her to Britons: "With Prince Charles beside me, I cannot go wrong."

* In 1659 Prince James--later James II--married Lady Anne Hyde.

With reporting by Erik Amfiheatrof

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