Lady Diana Spencer's wedding

Some weddings are private acts witnessed by a crowd. Others are public acts in which the private person has been asked, on a morning's notice, to step aside and let the symbol go up the aisle in her place. The bride knows the difference before she leaves the house. The country, watching, does not.

THE HOUSE ON THE MALL

She is twenty years old, and the antechamber at Clarence House has the kind of sash-window light that makes the silk look like something poured rather than sewn. Lady Diana Frances Spencer, born at Park House on the Sandringham estate on the first of July 1961, third daughter of John Spencer, then Viscount Althorp and later 8th Earl Spencer, and the Hon. Frances Roche. Riddlesworth Hall. West Heath. A kindergarten assistant in Pimlico six months ago. Engaged in February to the elder son of the reigning monarch. The Spencers have been at Althorp since 1508; a Spencer woman has walked into the royal family before, and another, and another, and the line of portraits in the long gallery in Northamptonshire is, in a manner of speaking, a queue. She is at the front of it now.

Her father is with her, sixty-seven years old, in the morning suit, leaning a little on the stick he has used since the stroke of 1978. He has practised the walk down the nave with her in the drawing room. He will not let go of her arm. The dress has been in the house since the previous evening, brought up Brook Street in unmarked cars by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, ivory silk taffeta, eight thousand pearls and sequins on the bodice, mutton-leg sleeves, a twenty-five-foot train, the Spencer family tiara from the case at Althorp. Outside, on the radio at six o'clock, the BBC has said six hundred thousand people on the route. The figure does not feel like a number. It feels like weather.

THE GLASS COACH

The Glass Coach has been the royal vehicle for state weddings since 1910. It was not designed for a train of twenty-five feet. The Emanuels know this; they have been told the train will crumple, that the photograph at the west door will show a creased dress, that an assistant, Nina Missetzis, will be waiting in the porch with a steamer and ninety seconds. They have agreed. There is no other coach. The bride and her father step in at half past eleven. The door closes. The horses move off down the Mall.

The drive will take thirty-two minutes. Inside the coach there is the small leather smell of the upholstery and the muffled sound of two million throats outside the glass, and the train heaped on the seat opposite like a second passenger, and her father not speaking, and the slow regular sway of a vehicle built for procession rather than transit. She watches the flags through the window. The country has been on a wedding-pitch since February. The bunting is in places she has never seen bunting before. A woman on the kerb at Admiralty Arch is holding up a tea-towel with her own face printed on it.

A SECOND OF TIME ON THE MALL

Somewhere between Horse Guards and Ludgate Hill there is a stretch of road where nothing is required of her. The coach rocks. Her father's hand is on hers. She has not seen Charles since the rehearsal on Monday afternoon. She knows about Camilla. She has known about Camilla in the precise, settled way one knows a fact since before the announcement in February, and the engagement ring on her finger is the one Charles chose from the Garrard tray and is also, by every account she has heard, the second choice; the first having been understood by another woman to be already, in some private register, hers. She is aware of this. She is also aware that the cathedral is full, that the Archbishop is in his vestments, that her dress is being unfolded in the porch by a woman with a steamer, that the country is at a window or in front of a television, and that seven hundred and fifty million people across seventy-four countries are, by the BBC's published audit, about to watch her walk up an aisle.

She could, in this minute, ask the coachman to stop. The thought is not theatrical; it is administrative. A door, a step, a different afternoon. She does not. She thinks, instead, about the difference between the wedding and the marriage, and decides that they are two separate questions, and that the first is owed to the day and the second is owed to the years, and that she will answer them in that order. The wedding is the wedding. The marriage will be a longer conversation. She straightens her back against the upholstery. The coach turns onto Ludgate Hill. The bells of St Paul's are already going.

THE WEST DOOR

The coach reaches the west door at four minutes past twelve. The photograph that will be on the front page of every English-speaking newspaper the next morning shows her stepping out of it in a dress visibly creased from the ride. Nina Missetzis is on her knees inside the porch with the steamer. The train is straightened and laid out on the cathedral floor, twenty-five feet of ivory silk behind her. Her father takes her arm. The procession begins at six minutes past twelve, and Jeremiah Clarke's Prince of Denmark's March lifts from the organ into the dome of Wren's cathedral.

Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, is at the high altar. Three thousand five hundred guests are in the cathedral. In the wedding-vow, she addresses the groom as Philip Charles Arthur George instead of Charles Philip Arthur George; the dyslexic transposition, picked up by the BBC microphone, becomes by nightfall the most-quoted line of any royal wedding before or since. The groom, in his turn, says all thy worldly goods where the rubric reads all thy goods. Runcie, in the address, calls it the stuff of which fairy tales are made. The phrase, recorded by the BBC and printed in every paper, will become the load-bearing irony of the next sixteen years. They sign the register in the Dean's Aisle. The procession out, to Elgar and Walton, takes twelve minutes. The drive back to Buckingham Palace, through (by the Metropolitan Police count) about two million people, takes fifty.

THE BALCONY

At twenty-five past one they come out onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace. The kiss is the first public kiss in the history of British royal weddings; no previous couple has done it. The Mall, from the Victoria Memorial to Admiralty Arch, is a single packed mass. From the balcony the crowd has the appearance of a sea with the tide in. Photographs taken from the roof show the head of the Mall and beyond it, in a long unbroken column, people. Somewhere in that column is the woman with the tea-towel.

Inside the Palace, at the wedding breakfast for one hundred and twenty in the Ball Supper Room, Charles proposes a toast to the bridesmaids. The cake, by David Avery of the Royal Naval Cookery School, is five feet tall. The bride has had, since waking at Clarence House, a small steady high-pitched sound in one ear that she will later identify to her sister as the noise the day is making at the back of her head.

THE YEARS

Prince William of Wales is born on the twenty-first of June 1982, Prince Henry of Wales on the fifteenth of September 1984. The marriage runs on, with increasing public scrutiny, for ten more years. The separation is announced by the Prime Minister, John Major, in the House of Commons on the ninth of December 1992. The divorce is finalised on the twenty-eighth of August 1996. The Penguin paperback of the Andrew Morton book, the Panorama interview with Martin Bashir in November 1995 in which she says there were three of us in this marriage, the charity work on landmines and AIDS, the title Princess of Wales retained: all of it belongs to the years between the balcony and the tunnel.

She is killed in a car accident in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in central Paris on the thirty-first of August 1997. Thirty-six years old. The funeral at Westminster Abbey on the sixth of September is watched, by the BBC's audit, by about two and a half billion viewers, the largest single live broadcast in television history, surpassing her own wedding. She is buried, on her brother's instruction, on a small island in the lake at Althorp in Northamptonshire, the Spencer seat since 1508.

THE LONG GALLERY

Some weddings are private acts witnessed by a crowd. Hers was a public act in which the private person, on the ride down the Mall in a coach built for procession, made the small administrative decision to let the symbol go up the aisle in her place and to keep the marriage as a separate question, answerable in years rather than minutes. The country saw the dress and the kiss and the fairy tale. She saw a longer conversation she had not yet begun. The dress, eight thousand pearls and a twenty-five-foot train, is on permanent display at Althorp House. On the twenty-ninth of July each year, the anniversary of the wedding, the visitor traffic to the house is, by the family's published figures, the largest single day in its calendar; and the line goes past the case and out towards the lake.