Forty-five years ago, The Wedding of the Century took place. Perhaps it might more fairly be called the Last Wedding of the Century.
Thirty-four years earlier, Winston Churchill had pronounced the wedding in November 1947 of Princess Elizabeth and the freshly-minted Duke of Edinburgh ''a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel''.
On 29 July 1981, the Princess was now Queen and she and the duke were the parents of the groom; Churchill’s great-granddaughter, Clementine Hambro, was a bridesmaid.
The night before, ‘the most tremendous fireworks display since 1749’ took place in Hyde Park. Fourteen-year-old David Cameron had arrived at 10 am to bag a spot in The Mall and set-up camp overnight. In one of his memorable television reviews for The Observer, Clive James had some fun with BBC1’s commentary by Raymond Baxter, “…excelling even Prince Charles in the strain he put on a certain vowel, or veil. ‘The Queen and twenty craned heads from other lands ... bonfire built by Boy Skates ... the Boy Skates, Sea Skates and Air Skates ... the fuse darts ate across the grass.”
The bride was absent, spending her last night as a virgin under the roof of the Queen Mother and her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, at Clarence House. As they watched the Royal Fireworks and then Dad’s Army on television, Diana was upstairs having eaten everything in sight, and claimed to be, as ‘sick as a parrot’. The Prince of Wales had sent a loving eve-of-wedding note (“Look ‘em in the eye and knock ‘em dead”) and a signet ring featuring his feathers. Before going to bed, Diana went downstairs looking for company and came across an equerry and William Tallon, the Queen Mothers’ longtime Page of the Backstairs. They had a drink together (Diana an orange juice) then the bride saw Tallon’s bicycle and began riding it around and around singing “I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow! I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow!”
THE Day began early. The bridesmaids arrived at Clarence House at 7.45 to find the bride wearing jeans - & the Spencer tiara. At 9am the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret descended to see the bride in her billowing taffeta. In fact, she introduced David Emmanuel to Her Majesty & Her Royal Highness as he literally emerged from under The Dress.
At 10am the 3,500 guests were being shown to their seats at St Paul’s: more than a dozen Presidents, 8 of Europe’s 9 reigning monarchs among them, three former sovereigns, fifteen Commonwealth heads of state, twelve governors-general. Nancy Reagan and Princess Grace brought a touch of Old Hollywood to the Cathedral. The poor Spanish Bourbons had to decline as it was announced the Britannia would dock at and depart from Gibraltar on the honeymoon tour.
Clive James quipped, “Spike Milligan, who loves whales, showed up after all: having learned at the last minute that Prince Charles was responsible not for whales but for Wales, he had temporarily shelved his protest on behalf of the threatened cetaceans and made it to Moss Bros just in time.”
Less august guests were not forgotten: former schoolteachers of the groom, fellow shipmates from the minesweeper Bronington, members of staff at Windsor, Balmoral and Sandringham; Flo Moore, who kept his Cambridge rooms in order; Henry and Cora Sands, who baked for him on holidays in Eleuthera; the bride’s loyal flatmates - souls of discretion from Coleherne Court; Patrick and Nancy Robertson, the American couple for whom she had recently nannied.
Dear old Barbara Cartland, step-grandmother of the bride, had been discouraged from attending. Labelled an embarrassment. Pretty mean as her fiction had been Diana’s favourite reading. In the end, the plucky legend dressed in the brown uniform of the Order of St John held a party for volunteers.
The glass coach bearing the bride passed some 600,000 spectators along The Mall. 750 million watched on television. The biggest event in the history of Britain’s Royal family since, well, ever. The Queen’s biographer, Ben Pimlott called it, “from start to finish … popular modern Monarchy in excelsis”
At 11.23 the bride (and the longest train in royal wedding history) on the arm of her proud father, Earl Spencer, took nearly four minutes to walk up the aisle to Jeremiah Clarke’s ''Trumpet Voluntary''.
Charles had anticipated he would be in tears for half the ceremony, having chosen his favourite music and performers. Among them Kiri te Kanawa, looking like a bird of paradise, as incandescent as she sounded - put the Bright into Handel’s Seraphim. Later claiming to have felt like ‘a lamb to the slaughter’, Diana chose ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’.
The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a thoughtful homily, “Here is the stuff of which fairytales are made ... but fairytales usually end at this point with the simple phrase: 'They lived happily ever after.' This may be because fairy stories regard marriage as an anticlimax after the romance of courtship....”
They fluffed their vows. Instead of endowing ‘All my worldly goods’, Charles endowed all of Diana’s. Diana almost wed Philip (Charles Arthur George) rather than Charles (Philip….). A mere slip in a perfect day. Clive James, already half in love with her himself, called it “a blunderette that completed the enslavement of her future people by revealing that she shared the capacity to make a small balls-up on a big occasion.”
The clapping and cheering from outside flooded into the cathedral (as it would into the Abbey, but without the cheering, only sixteen years later).
But the day on its own was a case - to twist Bagehot - of letting the magic in upon the magic.
