James Middleton claims his dog Ella helped him speak at Kate Middleton’s royal wedding

James Middleton, who was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 11, reveals how he coped with his Bible reading at Kate Middleton and Prince William’s royal wedding.

Kate’s younger brother, 37, has shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir — Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life — published by the Daily Mail On Saturday, September 14, he was surprised when the couple asked him to speak at their 2011 wedding at Westminster Abbey.

“A reading? I thought they were joking,” he wrote.

“I remembered school and my hesitant, incoherent efforts to read in front of the class,” James continued. “What were they thinking? Being dyslexic, reading is my least favorite thing to do.”

He remembers asking them, “Seriously?” They said, “Seriously.”

He admitted to “casually lying” and letting them know he would do it, adding: “If that was what my sister and William wanted, then of course I would do my best not to disappoint them.”

He said he was told it would be “the only Bible reading of the service” and that he didn’t know “whether to be honored or dismayed” at the time. He then practiced for months so he could recite it correctly.

“I carried it everywhere with me, taking it out of my pocket to practice lines, which I would stumble and trip over, transposing syllables, putting my ps and bs – my enemies – in a twist,” he explained.

However, with the help of voice coach Anthony Gordon Lennox, who had “helped David Cameron when he was (Prime Minister)” and “offered” to help him with reading, he said he had been able to make progress.

James noted that his dog was with him throughout the training process to help him “relax.” And while Ella wasn’t allowed into Westminster Abbey on the wedding day, she was there the day before for the rehearsal.

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“I stopped there, looked around, spotted Ella and smiled,” he recalls. “I wanted to laugh, but I counted to four and the laughter subsided. But tomorrow I remembered that Ella would not be with me. It would just be me, a packed Abbey Hall and a global television audience of about two billion people.”

On the wedding day, he carried with him a “crumpled phonetic copy” of the reading.

“I wanted to make both Kate and William proud,” he said. “I looked up and saw happy faces I recognised in the congregation and the nervousness subsided. I took a deep breath … and I started.”

He considered it a success and revealed that he had “received thousands of messages and invitations to teach classes in churches around the world” – although he celebrated the event in a more low-key way with his dog after the ceremony.

“After all the wonder of the day, the ceremony and then the celebrations, all I wanted to do was throw on an old pair of jeans and take Ella for a walk,” James recalls. “It was only then that I allowed myself to think about how important this day was.”

She died in January 2023 after a “short illness”.