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The winner of the royal sweepstakes has several distinct advantages over some of the also-rans. Unlike several of Charles' flames, she held up extremely well under the daunting barrage of publicity accorded a royal romance. While one former contender, Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, is Catholic, Lady Diana is an Anglican and thus presents no legal obstacle to marriage with the man who, as King, will head the Church of England. Unlike another of the Prince's dates, the lovely Davina Sheffield, she is also what Fleet Street calls "a girl without a past." This is a matter of some consequence to the Prince, who was mortified in 1976 when Davina's ex-boyfriend publicly commended her wifely virtues, having sampled them, he said, while the two lived together. Diana's pristine past is also a matter of importance to the royal family in view of the romantic history of the last Prince of Wales, who abdicated his throne in 1936 to wed Wallis Simpson, a woman who had previously been married and divorced.
Lady Diana's family, while not royal, is not exactly working class either. The Spencers, who are related to the Churchills, have served the Crown as courtiers for generations and, in turn, been befriended by the royals. Diana's brother, Charles, 16, is Queen Elizabeth's godson. Her father, the very wealthy eighth Earl Spencer, is the late Queen Mary's godson, as well as former personal aide to both King George VI and the present Queen. Her maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, is a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother. Said a consultant to Burke's Peerage, the Who's Who of British aristocracy: "There cannot be another family so stiff with royal connections."
It is no wonder then that Prince Charles has known his future bride virtually all her life, or that she was literally the girl next door, at least for part of each year. Though the Spencers spend most of their time at Althorp, their magnificent 500-year-old home in Northamptonshire, for years they rented a large country home on the royal family's 20,000-acre Sandringham estate. It was there that Charles met Diana as a little girl. He regarded her, naturally, as the playmate of his younger brother Andrew, 21, and later chose to date one of the two older Spencer girls, Lady Sarah, 25. Sarah, in fact, claims credit for playing cupid to the couple, for she reintroduced the Prince to Diana at a 1977 shoot at Althorp. By then Diana's parents had divorced and remarried other partners, and their youngest daughter was a boarding student at the quietly exclusive West Heath School in Kent, doing particularly well in art and swimming. Charles remembers being struck by "what a very amusing and jolly—and attractive—16-year-old she was." Diana thought the Prince was "pretty amazing." Concluded Lady Sarah: "He met Miss Right and she met Mr. Right. They just clicked."