On Tuesday afternoon, a 28-year-old brunette stood before a wall of photographers here with her old college boyfriend and newly minted fiance, wearing a royal blue dress and a matching sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring. The dress was from designer Issa; the ring once belonged to the late Princess Diana, who would have been the bride's mother-in-law.

No pressure there.

As Britain's Prince William announced his engagement to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton, the couple stepped into the spotlight with the ease of media-romance veterans. They have already spent an eight-year courtship under the harsh scrutiny that comes with the possibility of one day being the King and Queen consort of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland -- not to mention fifteen other Commonwealth realms.

The couple have been photographed on ski slopes and coming and going from nightclubs in the wee hours. Ms. Middleton was branded 'Waity Katie' by British tabloids in honor of her long wait for the prince to pop the question. A brief breakup a few years ago has been combed over like a key episode in Churchill's war rooms.

'We were both very young,' Prince William, 28, explained calmly in a nationally televised interview on the British Broadcasting Corporation Tuesday night. 'We were growing up.' By agreeing to take each other in holy matrimony, the couple has volunteered to be the lead players in one of Britain's signature spectacles: a royal wedding with all the trimmings, chiming church bells and horse-drawn carriages.

The news launched what will certainly be the U.K.'s most closely watched soap opera between now and the wedding itself, to be held in the spring or summer. The drama is enhanced by the fact that Prince William is the first-born son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, who shot to fame in the early 1980s when her own engagement was sprung on the world. She became one of the world's most familiar faces and then died in a 1997 car crash in Paris, with paparazzi giving chase.

If the couple's debut on Tuesday was any indication, they are accustomed to the spotlight; Prince William dropped the bombshell that he had been carrying his mother's engagement ring around 'in my rucksack for about three weeks' before proposing to Ms. Middleton on a trip to Kenya recently. He allowed that he held the pack tightly because losing it would mean he'd 'be in a lot of trouble.'

With Britain struggling to emerge from the global financialcrisis, and facing steep deficit-reducing budget cuts that signal an age of austerity, Prime Minister David Cameron seized on the news to say that next year's wedding was 'a great moment for national celebration.' He said he had camped in the streets before Charles and Diana's marriage, an over-the-top contender for wedding of the last century.

But it didn't take long for sniping to start either, as newspaper columnists and Twitter wags quickly noted that such a wedding could divert attention from the brutal economic problems facing Britain.

'Blimey, it took Thatcher three years to need a royal wedding to distract the UK from its woes,' wrote one Twitterer, referring to the marriage of Charles and Diana during a tough recession in 1981, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

Another quickly added: 'Call me a cynic, but does it seem to anyone else that they roll out a royal wedding every time there's a recession?