Who is Lady Jane Fellowes, the relative with a major role at the royal wedding?

Erin Donnelly
·Yahoo Life Senior Editor
Lady Jane Fellowes at a 2012 wedding. (Photo: Indigo/Getty Images)
Lady Jane Fellowes at a 2012 wedding. (Photo: Indigo/Getty Images)

Kensington Palace has confirmed several new details about the royal wedding on May 19, including news about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle‘s honeymoon plans (it’s postponed) and who will walk the bride down the aisle (her dad).

A statement released by royal officials has also revealed that the bride and groom will include a nod to Princess Diana by having Lady Jane Fellowes do the reading during the ceremony at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.

And just who is Lady Jane Fellowes? She’s the groom’s aunt and one of his late mother’s two older sisters.

Born Cynthia Jane Spencer but formally known as Baroness Fellowes through her marriage to Robert Fellowes, the onetime private secretary of Queen Elizabeth II, the 61-year-old has played a key role in royal history. It’s rumored that Diana’s visit to Scotland for the birth of Fellowes’s first daughter, Laura Jane Fellowes, in the summer of 1980 sparked a courtship with Prince Charles. They were married the following year.

Fellowes (in red) supported her sister at the 1981 royal wedding. (Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Fellowes (in red) supported her sister at the 1981 royal wedding. (Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In 1997 Fellowes joined Prince Charles and the eldest of the three Spencer sisters, Sarah — who had previously dated the future king — to escort Diana’s body home from Paris following her fatal car crash.

The sisters were rumored to have had a strained relationship, but Diana was a bridesmaid in her big sister’s 1978 wedding. Jane’s eldest daughter, Laura Jane Fellowes, is a godmother to Princess Charlotte. Lastly, Fellowes is distantly related to Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson; Ferguson’s late father is a first cousin of Fellowes’s husband.

Aside from a 2013 interview about her charity work, Fellowes has mostly shunned the spotlight. But with her reading taking place during the most high-profile wedding of the year, all eyes will undoubtedly be on her.

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