Lady Kitty Spencer, the niece of the late Princess Diana, has met her match! The English model is reportedly engaged to her much older boyfriend, Michael Lewis, after more than a year together.
Lewis, 60, who shares a 31-year age gap with his love, popped the question to Spencer, 29, right before the Christmas holiday, according to a Tuesday, January 7, report from the Daily Mail. Lewis is five years older than Spencer’s father, Earl Charles Spencer.
Though Kitty and Lewis have been an item for quite some time, they didn’t make their romance public until this past summer. The now-engaged pair were first spotted out together in July during a trip they took to the Hamptons.
The couple’s Southampton appearance came months after Kitty attended Duchess Meghan and Prince Harry’s May 2018 wedding at Windsor Castle’s St George’s Chapel. Nearly a year after the lavish event, she admitted that her attendance at the royal affair resulted in her Instagram follower account growing.
“I thought I was in someone else’s account,” she said of seeing her increased following the next day to Marie Claire Australia in May 2019. “I turned off my phone — it was a bit overwhelming. I felt like someone was watching me!”
Lewis, for his part, is a South African-born English businessman. He earned his wealth through his involvement with South African retailer Foschini, for which he serves as the chairman.
Kitty isn’t the only person connected to the royal family who got engaged in recent months. In October 2019, Duchess Kate’s brother, James Middleton, secretly proposed to his girlfriend, Alizee Thevenet, after more than a year of dating.
“❤️She said OUI ❤️,” James, 32, captioned an Instagram snap of the couple’s special moment. “Our secret is out but we couldn’t be happier to share the news. #jalizee 🇬🇧🇫🇷”
Though James has kept much of his personal life off of social media, he has previously spoken about his battle with depression. In an essay for the Daily Mail, he admitted that he was not “immune” to the health issue despite his “privileged” life.
“It is tricky to describe the condition. It is not merely sadness. It is an illness, a cancer of the mind,” he wrote in January 2019. “It’s not a feeling but an absence of feelings. You exist without purpose or direction. I couldn’t feel joy, excitement or anticipation — only heart-thudding anxiety propelled me out of bed in the morning. I didn’t actually contemplate suicide — but I didn’t want to live in the state of mind I was in either.”
