The Prince and Princess of Wales have marked their crystal wedding anniversary with a sun-drenched family portrait photographed by Matt Porteous during the family’s Easter break in Cornwall, sharing the image on social media alongside a simple message: “Celebrating 15 years of marriage.”
The candid photograph shows William and Catherine relaxing on the grass alongside their three children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis — the whole family at ease in a moment of rare public informality. It is an image that speaks quietly but powerfully to how far the couple have come since they exchanged vows at Westminster Abbey on 29 April 2011, and how much the nature of that journey has shaped who they are today.
This anniversary carries a weight that previous ones did not. William has spoken openly about 2024 being “the hardest year of my life,” following Catherine’s cancer diagnosis and his father King Charles’s own health battle. That the couple are marking this milestone with a portrait of their family together — healthy, grounded and visibly content — will not be lost on those who have followed their story closely.
On the eve of the anniversary, William made a sentimental return to RAF Valley in Anglesey, where he served as a search and rescue pilot between 2010 and 2013. It was there that Catherine chose to move to Wales to be with him before their marriage, the couple renting a modest home together for £750 a month. William described those early years as “great fun” during yesterday’s visit — a period he has recalled with evident affection as one of the more grounded chapters of his life.
Today, the couple are based at Forest Lodge, a Grade II-listed Georgian mansion set within a secluded area of Windsor Great Park and surrounded by a two-mile exclusion zone that provides the privacy they have long sought for their family. Despite holding only a 20-year lease on the property, it has become the settled family home they built their life around, with the couple known for running it with considerable normality — the children are expected to lay the table, wash up and keep their rooms tidy, and mobile phones remain off limits for the young royals.
Their story began more than two decades ago at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where the pair met as students and became friends before romance followed. According to accounts reported by the Daily Mail’s Royal Editor Rebecca English, it was a charity fashion show in their first year that first captured William’s attention — a 20-year-old Catherine walking the catwalk in a sheer dress before an audience that included William, who had paid £200 for a front-row table. The lace slip she wore that evening later sold at auction for £78,000. They subsequently moved in together with friends in their second year “as friends,” before, as William put it in their official engagement interview, it “just sort of blossomed from there really.”
After a brief separation in 2007, William proposed three years later during a private trip to Kenya, at a cabin roughly 11,000 feet above sea level on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Their wedding on 29 April 2011 drew 1,900 guests to Westminster Abbey, with Catherine arriving in an Alexander McQueen gown designed by Sarah Burton and the late Queen lending her the Cartier Scroll Tiara. Prince Harry served as best man, both brothers dressed in military uniform. The couple’s appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony, where they exchanged two kisses to roaring crowds, became one of the most reproduced royal images of the modern era.
Last year’s anniversary was marked privately on the Isle of Mull — a return to Scotland where their relationship began, with the couple photographed holding each other at dusk in Tobermory. This year, William is understood to have marked the occasion with a gift of jewellery for Catherine, a tradition he maintains for birthdays, anniversaries and the birth of each child.
Catherine’s professional focus continues to centre on her Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, while the couple have undertaken a notably higher number of joint engagements this year, travelling extensively across the country together. Fifteen years on from Westminster Abbey, the picture that emerges — quite literally, in a Cornish field — is of a couple who have navigated extraordinary pressure and arrived somewhere that looks, by any measure, like home.
