On July 29, 1981, 750 million people tuned in to watch Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, marry a 20-year-old commoner named Diana Spencer. That's more than ever witnessed a previous royal wedding, or any other since. It was an event like no other, lavish and public and oh-so-expensive, and no detail was too small to be covered in the press. However, some of those details carried an ominous tone, as if to foreshadow the unhappiness that would come later.
The two were first introduced in 1977, when Charles—then dating Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah—attended a party at the Spencer family’s Althorp estate. But as royal biographer Penny Junor tells History Extra, the prince only started viewing Diana as a potential girlfriend in the summer of 1980, when the pair crossed paths through a mutual friend. The 19-year-old nursery teacher’s assistant expressed sympathy for the loss of Charles’ great-uncle, who’d been assassinated by the Irish Republican Army the year prior, and in doing so, “really touched a nerve in Charles,” according to Junor. “[S]he said just the right thing to him, at the right moment, and he was moved by her.”
Under pressure to settle down after years of playing the field (including with on-again, off-again lover Camilla), the prince invited Diana to spend a weekend at his family’s holiday estate, Balmoral. During this “audition,” in the words of Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller, Charles’ relatives deemed the demure yet lively young woman an ideal candidate for marriage. Of both impeachable lineage and character, she was, most importantly to the royal family, a virgin “with malleable qualities necessary for a future queen,” writes Miller.
The two barely knew each other, but Diana checked off all the boxes for the role of future queen and mother to royalty. Read about the wedding of the century at Smithsonian.
LADY Diana was not a commoner.She was related to Chuck about three different ways.