LONDON, (Reuters) – Britain’s Prince William will marry his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton next year after an on-off courtship that has lasted nearly a decade.
The elder son of heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana proposed to Middleton with the large blue oval sapphire and diamond engagement ring his mother once wore as Charles’s 19-year-old fiancee.
“It’s very special to me,” William told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s my way of making sure my mother didn’t miss out on today and the excitement and the fact we are going to spend the rest of our lives together.”
The two 28-year-olds will marry in the spring or summer of 2011, 30 years after Charles and Diana’s spectacular but ultimately ill-fated wedding.
“I didn’t realise it was a race, otherwise I would have been a lot quicker, but also the timing is right now, we’re both very very happy, and I’m very glad that I have done it,” William told reporters in London as the beaming couple posed arm-in-arm for the cameras of the world press.
Diana, who was said to be the world’s most photographed woman during her lifetime, was divorced from Charles in 1996 and died a year later in a car crash after a high-speed chase through Paris with the paparazzi in hot pursuit.
Middleton will now have to get used to the huge media attention that her role will attract, but she looked calm as she appeared with William, blinking at the glittering flashbulbs of the massed ranks of photographers.
In an informal interview with an ITN reporter, she said Diana was an “inspiration” whom she wished she had met.
She told reporters that becoming a royal was daunting, but she hoped to “take it in her stride” with William’s help.
William said: “It’s about carving your own future, no one is trying to fill my mother’s shoes. It’s about making your own future, your own destiny, and Kate will do a very good job of that.”
It was the first time the future princess, who described the proposal as “very romantic”, had spoken so publicly.
Although the couple had discussed their future, Middleton described the shock when William proposed during a recent holiday in Kenya.
Asked if she expected the proposal, Middleton said: “I thought he might have maybe thought about it, but no. It was a total shock when it came, and very exciting.”
William had carried the ring in his rucksack for about three weeks before summoning up the courage to pop the question.
“Everywhere I went I was keeping hold of it because I knew this thing, if it disappeared I would be in a lot of trouble and because I’d planned it, it went fine,” he said.
William’s grandparents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and other members of the royal family said they were delighted.
“(I’m) obviously thrilled, thank you very much,” Charles told reporters during a trip to southwest England, before joking: “They’ve been practising for long enough.”
A statement from Charles’s office, Clarence House, said William had sought the permission of Middleton’s father.
