Earl Spencer is set to marry longtime love Caroline Freud in December, the couple announced on Sunday. The two are expected to wed in a low-key ceremony at his family estate in Northamptonshire.
“Earl Spencer and Caroline Freud are delighted to announce that they are to be married on Saturday, December 15,” reports a spokesman for the Earl. “The wedding will take place at Althorp and will be a quiet family ceremony.”
Diana’s brother Charles met Caroline, a former schoolteacher known to close friends as Pidge, when the two were students at Oxford. She later married famed PR executive Matthew Freud, with whom she has two sons, but the pair fell out in 1997.
This will be the second trip to the altar for the Earl, who divorced former model Victoria Lockwood acrimoniously in 1997. They had four children together.
Matthew Freud famously wed Elisabeth Murdoch, heir to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, in August of this year. The high-profile heirs – he is the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud – went public with their romance in 1998.
Earl Spencer was strongly criticised this year after opening up Althorp – the site of Princess Diana’s burial – to visitors. Some said the 36-year-old was exploiting the memory of England’s Rose.