HRH Charles, the Prince of Wales married Lady Diana Spencer in a ceremony at St. Paul’s cathedral on July 29, 1981. Their wedding procession was viewed by over 250,000 people, and some persons had camped out on the streets for days to secure choice viewpoints. 2,500 invited guests witnessed the wedding and 750 million more watched it on television, which gave it the largest viewing audience of any event up until then. At that time, the significance of the day was that the widely admired heir to a popular dynasty had married and ensured the continuation of the House of Windsor well into the twenty-first century. The bride was a beautiful, charming young English aristocrat whom the public had taken to their hearts during a relentless media barrage that she faced with unruffled poise. The marriage was seen as the culmination of a fairytale romance by everyone, since Diana was literally the girl next door who had grown up in the shadow of the royal home at Sandringham. The good feelings generated by the wedding also provided  reassurance that the riots which had plagued several British cities that summer and an assassination attempt against Queen Elizabeth II in June were anomalies from the normal tenor of British life; and the festivities surrounding the day also provided much-needed succor to an ailing economy, since millions of pounds were spent on food, drink, party supplies, entertainment, travel expenses, accommodations, and acquisition of some of the more than 2,000 commemorative souvenirs manufactured for the occasion, some of which you see here. Only a few dissenters expressed skepticism: both a Labor member of Parliament with republican sympathies and a Communist newspaper condemned the large amount of money being spent when millions were unemployed. A feminist group protested the fertility tests that Diana had submitted to and distributed buttons reading, “Don’t Do It, Di!” And the Spanish royal family boycotted the wedding because the royal yacht Britannia was sailing from the British colony of Gibraltar, which the Spanish felt was rightfully theirs. But these were the only blights on a day marked by universal happiness and confidence in the future of the House of Windsor. Such rosy optimism prevailed that if anyone had predicted what was to come, they would not have been believed.

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