Cressida Bonas has penned an essay about her ‘perfectly imperfect’ lockdown wedding and the ‘recycled’ Whistles dress she wore to say ‘I do’.
Bonas, who is a professional dancer and actress, opened up about her marriage to Harry Wentworth-Stanley, which took place in July during the coronavirus pandemic.
In a newly-published essay for The Spectator, the White House Farm star notes that she and her now-husband organised a ’30-person, socially-distanced, sanitised church service’ in just under two weeks.
‘Not what we’d envisaged, but a more intimate and special day than we could ever have imagined. Imperfect yet perfect — a day we will never forget,’ she writes.
Four days before her wedding – which is believed to have taken place in West Sussex – the then-bride-to-be says she was trudging up and down Oxford Street in search of a wedding dress.
‘Finding nothing, I remembered an old Whistles dress I once wore for a James Arthur music video. I went home and found the dusty frock at the back of my cupboard. After some ironing, it looked good as new,’ she notes of her sustainable wedding day outfit.
Bonas wore the dress – believed to be the Guinevere design worth £389 – in Arthur’s 2017 music video for his song ‘Naked’. The dress is spun entirely in embroidered cotton tulle which drapes in tiers down the skirt.
Unfortunately for Bonas, things took a turn a couple of days before the wedding when she woke one day to find a stye on her eyelid.
‘It was red, bulbous and seemed to be growing,’ she candidly shares. ‘My mum recommended the old-fashioned Golden Eye ointment. That only made it worse. The doctor said it would need operating on after the wedding. Not ideal timing, I thought. “Well, it could be worse,” the doctor said. How, I wondered.’
From getting lost on the way to the church (‘a supposedly 20-minute journey took an hour’) and stepping into a puddle just before walking down the aisle, to ‘strong winds and horizontal rain’, it seems like the dancer and her beau had all the elements thrown at them on their big day but, as Bonas notes, ‘a wet knot is harder to untie’.
‘The Covid regulations, the uncertainty, the plans that got turned upside down, all were gone when I took Harry’s hand,’ she writes, concluding:
Having a small portion of Harry’s and my family in the church made it just simply special. After the service, swapping heels for trainers, we rode away on horses. At first my horse looked at me nervously. He didn’t seem keen on my dress. Once finally aloft, with hearts full, we rode off into the stormy weather and into our future life.
The sweet essay comes months after The Daily Mail reported that the the 31-year-old had wed her then-fiancé, who is the son of the Marchioness of Milford Haven, at Cowdray Park, in Midhurst, West Sussex.
The bride’s step-brother, Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, reportedly shared a photo on Instagram of the newlyweds ‘riding off into their beautiful future’ on horseback following the nuptials which makes far more sense given Bonas’ recent account of events.
Bonas previously dated Prince Harry from 2012 to 2015 before his relationship with MEghan Markle. The Duke of Sussex proposed to Meghan Markle in November 2017 and the couple married in May 2018.
In an interview for ES Magazine, Bonas – who is a close friend of Harry’s cousin Princess Beatrice – explained why she chooses not to discuss her ex and his wife’s relationship, in particular attention to Markle’s by the press.
‘I wouldn’t take a position on that because it would be a headline. Also out of respect. It feels like a long time ago. When it comes up it feels strange because I’m in a different place,’ she noted.