Earl Spencer marries archaeologist girlfriend at secret wedding ceremony in Arizona

Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer married his archaeologist girlfriend in a secret ceremony in Arizona, the Daily Mail has revealed.

Charles Spencer quietly married Professor Cat Jarman five years after he arrived with a pickaxe at the historic Althorp Estate for an archaeological dig.

This is the fourth marriage for Earl Spencer, whose acrimonious divorce from third wife Karen was finalized in February. The wedding also took place just weeks after the conclusion of a bitter court fight between the two women.

Was the fanfare or lack of advance notice surrounding the wedding due to sensitivities regarding the controversial history of this relationship? After all, the bride is 44 years old, 18 years younger than the groom. And the couple has nine children between them.

Perhaps, but the astonishing wedding photos, almost cinematic in their scope, tell a more complex story.

In an interview with this newspaper in November 2024, Earl Spencer admitted that Norwegian academic Cat was an unlikely future countess; Someone who was not ‘ostentatious’ and bewildered by aristocratic traditions had stolen her heart and set her on a different path of life.

‘Cat is completely different from anyone I’ve ever been with before,’ he said, adding that this new relationship made him determined to do things differently.

The wedding photos she shared today seem to convey what she means. All three of Earl Spencer’s previous marriages were traditional society events, heavy on etiquette and seating plans, and the weight of inherited expectations was keenly felt.

While details are still scarce, it’s clear that this celebration is a million miles away from an aristocratic English wedding.

Earl Spencer married Professor Cat Jarman just weeks after the conclusion of a bitter court fight between his third wife Karen.

It was an escape, belonging more to the High Chaparral than to society. The wedding took place against the backdrop of wide desert skies, red rocks and canyons; The bride and groom look as if they have been teleported to another planet. Maybe it is.

It is unknown if any guests made the trip to Arizona, but Hello! magazine strongly disagreed. One of the photos the couple shared was a selfie taken by Cat herself.

The speed with which Earl Spencer embarked on another marriage will undoubtedly raise eyebrows – and the three previous Countesses Spencer (count them in!) may have some thoughts on the union and some advice to offer the new bride – but a statement released by the couple underlined their joy.

‘We both feel incredibly lucky to have progressed from colleagues to friendship and deep love and connection.

‘Every stage of our relationship is fueled by laughter and we share a passion for life,’ they said.

The relationship between ‘The Toff and The Prof’ was quite scandalous when it was made public.

The pair met in 2021 when Cat came with a camera crew to Althorp, the ancestral home of the Spencer family and where Princess Diana is buried.

He was excavating a lost Roman village; but somehow I unearthed something bigger.

At first, she and Earl Spencer were just kindred spirits, bound by a shared love of history, they insisted.

Although he is an internationally recognized expert on the Viking age, he is also a historian and the author of nine books.

They bonded over their passion for ‘nerd’, they tell me, and eventually collaborated on a hilarious podcast they co-host with the often irreverent Reverend Richard Coles.

The idea of ​​any romance was implausible because Cat was 18 years younger than Earl Spencer. ‘I’m too old for hearts and flower things,’ he said.

The relationship between ‘Toff and Proff’ also began with scandal after they met when Cat came to Althorp for an archaeological dig in search of a Roman village.

But at the time, Earl Spencer was going through a personal crisis and was writing memoirs that would document the abuse he suffered at boarding school.

He was questioning everything about his life, especially his relationships, which were often worrying. He concluded that his childhood experiences shaped the ‘wreckage’ of his first and second marriages.

He said boarding school ‘deprived him of any sense of intimacy’. His third marriage, to American socialite Karen, was also collapsing, or as he put it to me, ‘at the end of the marriage’.

The pair insisted they were both free once love blossomed, even though Karen made it clear she believed otherwise.

Cat’s marriage to her husband Tom had definitely been over for years, although they never divorced.

Around March 2024, they became more than just friends. Earl Spencer was extraordinarily candid about how Cat had changed his life even then.

‘I don’t pretend to be something I’m not with him. “He knows exactly who I am and who I am not,” he told me. ‘It brings out the best in me.’ He confirmed that this was a novelty in the relationship.

Cat, on the other hand, said that conversations about her childhood led her to “understand the man and what made him this way.”

Let’s fast forward to last month; When I met Cat again, this time as the newly installed chatelaine at Althorp.

Even though she now rode every morning (she had never ridden a horse before she met Charles) and was the owner of pet alpacas, she had the air of a woman who could hardly believe the world in which she now lived.

‘I come from a country where we don’t have any of these,’ he told me in the library in Althorp, whose walls were full of historically significant portraits.

‘We don’t actually have an aristocracy. Nobody really cares about them, not even the royal family in Norway. It’s so weird living here. ‘I’m a normal person immersed in an abnormal world.’

The Norwegian academic is 18 years younger than Earl and does not hold a “luxury” job. This will be her second marriage. ‘I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not with her,’ Earl Spencer said

Happy couple’s wedding was a million miles away from last three traditional British traditional society events

It’s an often chaotic, goldfish-bowl world. While Cat and Charles’ relationship was still in its infancy and Karen was still residing in Althorp, Cat took the extraordinary step of suing Karen for disclosing private medical information about her, namely that she had multiple sclerosis (something only a few people in her life knew).

Charles, then a relatively new partner, was not one of them. She was devastated to learn that Karen had told this not only to Earl Spencer, but also to staff at Althorp and even staff at her daughter’s school.

The legal wrangling dragged on for a year and was only resolved last month; Cat felt ‘vindicated’ by the outcome and was finally able to move on. Karen said she accepted the settlement offer without admitting any liability or wrongdoing and considered the matter closed.

So I asked Cat if she’d consider marrying Charles. Wouldn’t any woman in her shoes want the title of ‘Countess’? He nodded. ‘I have titles I have already won; my doctorate and my professorship.

‘Where could the Countess go with this? And I don’t want to give them up. ‘I worked hard for them.’

Whether she chooses to use the new title or not, she is now officially Countess Spencer, for better or worse.