Queen for a New Day

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(2 of 9)

"Last week in our second episode, Separate Stables, we watched Charles, by now a ripe old 32, reach back into his past, and turn the girl-next-door into his Queen-to-be. The announcement of his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer, who was just 19, was greeted with sighs of editorial relief and good will throughout what was still rather wistfully recalled as the British Empire. Wars, assorted political crises and the irresistible flux of world events had buffeted Britain badly. The empire had not existed in fact for over 30 years. But it lingered in memory. The romance of it. The pomp of it. And it was the new promise of pageantry that seemed, in the first tumultuous year of a most troubled and tumultuous decade, to be a kind of rejustification. A reassertion, if you will, of a dream.

"The fact that Lady Diana was such an ideal choice to play her magisterial role contributed greatly to what I recall was the giddiness, even the magic, of the occasion. She was beautiful, she was young, and she was—in every sense of the word—fresh. Much was made of her virginity at the time—the very notion having become, by then, something of an antique novelty and perhaps, in some circles, even an embarrassment—and the palace did all it could to keep Lady Diana unspoiled. No interviews. Not too much exposure. But Lady Diana had a mind of her own that soon showed the nickname given her by the press, 'Shy Di,' to be wide of the mark.

"Her first public appearance with Charles, when she wore a strapless gown, caused the kind of minor sensation that seemed to belong to a more innocent age. In those first early days, as she was preparing for the wedding and preparing to be Charles' consort away from the gaze of press and public, she had already become an instant part of popular mythology, an indelible woman of the new decade, as we will see in Dressed to Thrill, Chapter 3 of Monarchy in Love."

"May I kiss the hand of my future Queen?" asked Nicholas Hardy, 18, proffering one golden daffodil from the far side of a police barricade.

Lady Diana, who had landed at Dean Close School only moments before in a helicopter piloted by her betrothed, took the flower, considered the proposition and smiled prettily. She seems, after all, to know no other way. "Yes, you may," she said, extending her hand. Nicholas kissed, schoolboys laughed, and the Queen-to-be giggled, "You will never live this down."

Meantime, in an unaccustomed position just outside the direct center of attention, the Prince of Wales looked on, watching his intended turn the crowd to putty. Hers was an adept, admirable performance on an occasion of mundane princely politesse. Charles had come down to Cheltenham to meet the local constabulary, who keep an eye on the country house, Highgrove, where he and Lady Diana will spend what time they can manage away from the royal routine. "I couldn't have married anyone the British people wouldn't have liked," he said last month. That statement will now want a little contemporary emendation: he couldn't have married anyone the British people would have liked more.