LONDON (AFP) – Prince William and his fiancee Kate Middleton received a flood of congratulatory messages Wednesday after announcing their engagement, with the wedding planned for spring or summer next year. Middleton said she was daunted but happy to be marrying into Britain’s royal family after William had proposed, offering her his late mother Diana’s engagement ring. The couple announced their forthcoming marriage on Tuesday after an eight-year courtship, much of it in the full glare of the world’s media. When the couple marry in London next year it will be Britain’s biggest royal wedding since William’s parents Prince Charles and the then Lady Diana Spencer married at St Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981. William said the sapphire-and-diamond ring his father, the heir to the throne, gave Diana in 1981 was “very special to me”. Giving Kate the ring “was my way of making sure that my mother didn’t miss out on today and the excitement and the fact that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together” he said. Blinking in the glare of flashbulbs, Middleton told a press conference at St James’s Palace that the second-in-line to the throne had proposed during a holiday in Kenya…