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

Charles Spencer tied the knot quietly with Professor Cat Jarman on Friday – five years after she arrived at the historic Althorp Estate, pickaxe in hand, on an archaeological dig.

This is a fourth marriage for Earl Spencer, whose acrimonious divorce from his third wife Karen, was finalised in February. The wedding also comes just weeks after a bitter court battle between the two women was settled.

Was the lack of fanfare, or advance notice, about the wedding down to sensibilities over the controversial history of this relationship? At 44, the bride is 18 years younger than the groom, after all. And the couple have nine children between them.

Perhaps, but the astonishing wedding photographs – almost cinematic in their scope – tell a more complicated story.

In an interview with this newspaper in November 2024, Earl Spencer admitted that Norwegian academic Cat – an unlikely future Countess; one who didn’t do ‘posh’ and was bemused by aristocratic convention - had stolen his heart, and put him on a different life path.

‘Cat is completely different to anyone I have been with before,’ he told me, confiding that this new relationship had made him determined to do things differently.

The wedding photographs he shares today seem to illustrate what he meant. All three of Earl Spencer’s previous marriages were conventional society events, heavy on the etiquette and seating plans, the weight of inherited expectation keenly felt.

Although details are still sparse, this celebration was clearly a million miles from an aristocratic English wedding.

This was an elopement, more High Chaparral than high society. The wedding took place against a backdrop of vast desert skies, red rocks and canyons; the bride and groom looking as if they’d been transported to another planet. Perhaps they have.

It isn’t known if any guests made the journey to Arizona but Hello! magazine certainly wasn’t in attendance. One of the pictures the couple shared was a selfie taken by Cat herself.

The speed at which Earl Spencer has embarked on another marriage will doubtless raise eyebrows – and the three (count em!) previous Countess Spencers may well have some thoughts on the union, and some advice to offer the new bride – but a statement issued by the couple underlined their joy.

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

'Each stage of our relationship has been underpinned by laughter and we share a passion for life,’ they said.

The relationship between ‘The Toff and The Prof’ was quite the scandal when it became public.

The pair had met in 2021 when Cat arrived at Althorp, the ancestral home of the Spencers, and where Princess Diana is buried, with a camera crew in tow.

She was digging for a lost Roman village; but unearthed something bigger, somehow.

At first, she and Earl Spencer were, both have insisted, simply kindred souls, bound by a shared love of history.

While she is an internationally recognised expert in the Viking age, he is also a historian, and the author of nine books.

They bonded over their ‘nerdy’ passions, they told me, and ended up collaborating on a very funny podcast, which they hosted alongside the often irreverent Rev Richard Coles.

Any idea of romance was preposterous because Cat was 18 years younger than Earl Spencer was. ‘I’m too old for hearts and flowers stuff,’ he said.

At the time, though, Earl Spencer was going through something of a personal crisis, writing the memoirs which would document the abuse he suffered at boarding school.

He was questioning everything about his life, and in particular his often fraught relationships. He concluded that his childhood experiences had shaped the ‘wreckage’ of his first and second marriages.

Boarding school had left him with ‘no understanding of intimacy’ he said. His third marriage, to American socialite Karen, was also collapsing, or as he put it to me, he was ‘at the tail-end of a marriage’.

Although Karen has made it clear she believed otherwise, the pair have always insisted they were both free agents by the time love blossomed.

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

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

‘With her I don’t pretend to be anything I am not. She knows exactly who I am – and who I am not,’ he told me. ‘She brings out the best in me.’ This, he confirmed, was a novelty in a relationship.

For her part, Cat said that their conversations about his childhood had led her to ‘understand the man, and what had made him the way he was’.

Fast forward to last month, when I met up with Cat again, this time as the newly installed chatelaine at Althorp.

What with the fact she was now riding every morning (she’d never been on a horse before meeting Charles), and was the owner of pet alpacas, she had the air of a woman who couldn’t quite believe the world she was now inhabiting.

‘I come from a country where we don’t have any of this,’ she told me, in the library at Althorp, walls filled with historically significant portraits.

‘We don’t have an aristocracy, really. Even the royal family in Norway – no one cares about them very much. It’s very strange to be living here. I’m a normal person plonked in an abnormal world.’

An often chaotic, goldfish bowl of a world too. When Cat and Charles' relationship was still in its infancy, and Karen was still in residence at 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 about.

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

The legal wrangle went on for a year and was only settled last month, with Cat feeling ‘vindicated’ by the result, and clearly able to finally move on.

I did ask her, then, if she thought she and Charles would marry. Wouldn’t any woman in her shoes want the ‘Countess’ title? She shook her head. ‘I already have titles I have earned – my PhD and my professorship.

'Where would the countess go in that? And I wouldn’t want to give them up. I’ve worked hard for them.’

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