GREAT FUN AND BOUNCY AND FULL OF LIFE,” Charles would recall of his earliest impression of Lady Diana Spencer. His then-girlfriend Sarah’s kid sister was wearing, he remembered, an anorak, corduroy pants and Wellington boots the day they met at a hunting shoot at Althorp, her family home. Diana would later admit she found the not-quite-30-year-old future King “pretty amazing.”
A little more than two years later, in July 1980, Diana, by then 19 years old and working as a teacher at a kindergarten, and Charles met again at a post-polo barbecue. He had long since broken up with Sarah Spencer but remembered Diana. “They just clicked,” Sarah later told biographer Penny Junor. It seemed, she said, “he met Miss Right, and she met Mr. Right.” And according to royal watchers,…