Spencer

At twenty past eleven on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-ninth of July 1981, Lady Diana Frances Spencer, twenty years old, third daughter of John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer, and Frances Roche, arrived by Glass Coach at the west door of St Paul's Cathedral, London, for her wedding to Charles, Prince of Wales, thirty-two, eldest son of Elizabeth II. The wedding had been announced on the twenty-fourth of February 1981. The bride's dress, designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, with its eight-thousand-pearl bodice and its twenty-five-foot ivory silk train (the longest train in royal wedding history), had been kept secret until the moment Diana emerged from the coach. Three thousand five hundred guests filled the cathedral. The television audience was, by the BBC's published audit, seven hundred and fifty million viewers across seventy-four countries; the largest single live broadcast in television history to that date. The marriage was followed by sixteen years of public scrutiny, two children (Prince William of Wales, born June 1982; Prince Harry, born September 1984), a public separation in 1992 and divorce in 1996. Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris on the thirty-first of August 1997, thirty-six years old.

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