Children, wider family members and close friends were all present and correct for the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Quite right, too. This was not just the formal union of two people very much in love but an occasion to be set down for the historical record.
Amid the snappily tailored crowd filling the Windsor Guildhall in April 2005, two distinguished guests were notably missing.
The Queen and Prince Philip, mother and father of the groom, were nowhere to be seen when the civil ceremony took place.
Where were they? Why would the monarch choose to stay away from the wedding of her own son?
There was no shortage of conjecture. Did she think a mere ‘town hall’ wedding to be beneath her dignity?
Others assumed that Queen Elizabeth disapproved of her son’s relationship.
At one stage the Queen referred to Camilla as ‘that wicked woman’.
Yet the real explanation for why The Queen was missing is much more straightforward than many might think.
As ruler, The Queen was Head of The Church of England. Both Charles and Camilla had been married before and later divorced.
While recognising divorce as a sad fact of life, the Church of England does not encourage it.
The Queen, herself was a devout believer and couldn’t be seen to question the Church’s values in any way.
Weeks before the wedding, a newspaper outlet reported that The Queen had told one of her friends that she wasn’t able to go to the wedding because she didn’t feel that her position permitted it.
There was also family history to consider. Just one generation before Elizabeth’s rule, the monarchy had been hurled into disarray, perhaps even jeopardy, by her uncle Edward VIII’s declaration on marrying the ‘woman he loved’, who was also a divorcee and which went against the strictures of the Church, of which he, too, was head.
Queen Elizabeth wished the married couple well and with Prince Philip, she attended the religious blessing at St George’s Chapel, which followed the civil ceremony at the Guildhall.
The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh then had a wedding bash for the couple. However, The Queen’s relationship with Camilla, now Queen Consort had not always been an uncomplicated one.
The Queen’s reasons are the very basis for why Charles shouldn’t be the head of the Church of England.
Charles is now head of the Church of England, yet he’s an adulterer and he’s set himself as Defender of Faith. The people of the United Kingdom were not asked about this and Charles certainly has a brass neck.
They really are too old to be King and Queen of the United Kingdom, and it should have been passed to William, his son.
Whenever I see Charles and Camilla together, she always looks like a mummy replacement for a boy who looks like a man.
Charles was an adulterer and head of the Church of England but then so was Henry VIII and you can’t get any bigger adulterer than that.
I have no sympathy for Camilla, but the real villain is Charles. If he truly wanted Camilla and there’s no accounting for taste, he should have married her before she got married herself. Instead, he went along with this ridiculous medieval folly of marrying a suitable bride.
Charles has always been weak. If he wanted to marry Camilla, he should have just married her. Of course, he was the heir apparent but what were they going to do, knock him off and replace him with Andrew?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 