“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. The news that the not wholly impecunious Earl Charles Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, has tied the knot for the fourth time, proves that at least this one man of good fortune is in want, not of a single wife, but of several of them.

Marriage and divorce are an unavoidably expensive business that usually leaves the male partner badly out of pocket

Marriage and divorce are an unavoidably expensive business that usually leaves the male partner badly out of pocket

Spencer, 61, married his Norwegian girlfriend Professor Cat Jarman, an archaeologist 18 years his junior, in a sparsely attended ceremony in the United States that was notably different from his previous three high society nuptials. The newlyweds, who met in 2021 when Cat came to his Althorp estate in Northamptonshire to dig for a lost Roman village, were pictured against a background of Arizona’s big skies and red desert. It is an appropriately dry and dusty background perhaps, as they set out with more........

© The Spectator