NEED TO KNOW
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Princess Diana and Prince Charles got married in July 1981, and like most weddings, it had its mishaps
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Diana spilled perfume on her wedding gown and had to cover up her stain while walking down the aisle
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She also included a secret, 18-carat gold charm in her wedding dress
It’s been over three decades since the late Princess Diana and Prince Charles tied the knot. But their royal wedding has remained one of the most talked-about ceremonies in history.
Three years after they were introduced by Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale (née Spencer) in 1977, the former couple started dating. Diana and Charles — who became King Charles III in September 2022 — were married on July 29, 1981, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
However, according to Diana’s astrologist, Penny Thornton, the wedding almost didn’t happen. She claimed in ITV’s 2020 documentary The Diana Interview: Revenge of a Princess that Diana revealed that Charles told his fiancée the night before the wedding that “he didn’t love her.”
Diana and Charles ultimately went through with the nuptials. According to royal biographer Ingrid Seward’s 2023 book My Mother and I, Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, may have changed her mind about calling off the wedding.
From altered dresses and wedding day jitters, here are eight secrets from Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s royal wedding.
Diana’s dress had to be altered
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Princess Diana and Prince Charles on their wedding day in July 29, 1981.
Designer Elizabeth Emanuel recalled that the young bride-to-be’s body changed as the weeks elapsed before her wedding to Prince Charles, and she lost a notable amount of weight.
“Most brides do lose weight,” Emanuel previously told PEOPLE. “So we weren’t that worried when she did. She ended up with a 23-inch waist from a 26- to 27-inch.”
Years later, Diana spoke publicly about her struggle with bulimia during the time of her wedding.
“The bulimia started the week after we got engaged (and would take nearly a decade to overcome),” Diana said in Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story — in Her Own Words.
“My husband [Prince Charles] put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me. And the Camilla thing,” she said, referencing Charles’ relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
“I didn’t like myself; I was ashamed I couldn’t cope with the pressures,” Diana continued. “I had bulimia for a number of years, and that’s like a secret disease. It’s a repetitive pattern which is very destructive. It was my escape mechanism.”
Diana spilled perfume on her wedding gown
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Princess Diana on her wedding day.
Diana walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral wearing one of her favorite scents: Quelques Fleurs. However, according to her makeup artist, it almost wore her.
Barbara Daly famously revealed that the young princess, then 20 years old, accidentally spilled some perfume on her dress as she tried to put some on her wrists after getting dressed in the world-famous bridal gown.
Daly said she told Diana to simply hold that spot on her dress as she was walking to make it seem like she was lifting the front of her dress so she didn’t step on it. Diana was even spotted trying to cover the spot where the perfume spilled with her hand as she approached the altar.
Diana told her bridesmaids to “do your best”
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Princess Diana, Prince Charles and the royal family on their wedding day.
Diana knew her dress’ 25-foot-long train was difficult to handle and let her young bridesmaids know it. Charles’ goddaughter, India Hicks, recounted the details when she and Diana’s niece, Sarah Armstrong-Jones, were in charge of guiding the gown down the aisle.
Hicks wrote in a May 2018 essay for Harper’s Bazaar that as Diana entered the cathedral, she told the girls, “Do your best.”
“We knew what that meant: If we pulled too much, straightening the material, her tiara and veil would slip,” she continued. “But if we didn’t pull enough, the effect of the train would be lost.”
Diana had two wedding bouquets — because of the Queen
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Princess Diana and Prince Charles on their wedding day in July 29, 1981.
Florist David Longman told Express in May 2018 that after Queen Elizabeth lost the flowers during her own wedding, she started the tradition of having two identical bouquets made to prevent a similar mishap.
“We made two bouquets,” said Longman about Diana and Charles’ wedding. “The first one had to be delivered at 8 o’clock to Buckingham Palace. We had a police escort motorcyclist who took us all through the city to the Palace.”
He continued, “Then we came back, and by that time, they had finished the second bouquet, and back we went again.”
There were some wedding day jitters
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Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their wedding day in July 29, 1981.
Nerves got the best of Diana while she was saying her vows. She accidentally referred to her groom as “Philip Charles” rather than “Charles Philip.”
(To be fair, his full name is Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. With so many names to remember, anyone would slip up!)
The dress featured a secret charm
Although it wasn’t visible in photographs, there was a hidden good luck charm in Diana’s dress: an 18-carat gold horseshoe trinket studded with white diamonds.
“[The dress] was the fulfillment of her princess fantasy,” wrote biographer Tina Brown, per Vanity Fair. “She was insistent in her demand for its puffy sleeves and floating silk, its twenty-five-foot taffeta train, its nipped waist, and its antique lace embroidered with pearls and sequins.”
They were (kind of) ready for rain
In case of poor weather, Diana’s dress designer made a parasol featuring the same lace as the dress and hand-embroidered pearls and sequins.
However, the skies were clear for the big day.
“It was probably a good thing. It was made of such light material that it certainly wasn’t waterproof,” Emanuel told the Daily Mail in August 2017. “It wouldn’t have done her much good!”
Camilla was in attendance
Despite Charles and Camilla’s dating history, she still made the royal wedding’s guest list — likely due to her husband Andrew Parker Bowles’ role as the Commanding Officer of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment.
According to the biography Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, Charles felt pressured into his marriage to Diana and was still torn about his love for the then-married Camilla. He even cried over it the night before his nuptials.
Charles and Camilla infamously had an affair during their respective marriages. They went public with their rekindled relationship after Diana’s death in 1997.
The couple married in April 2005, and Camilla received the title of Duchess of Cornwall. After Queen Elizabeth died on Sept. 8, 2022, Charles became King Charles and bestowed the title of Queen Consort upon Camilla.
Read the original article on People
