It’s a short walk from Windsor Castle to the city’s Guildhall, where Prince Charles will marry Camilla Parker Bowles on Saturday, but clearly a step too far for Queen Elizabeth II.
The mother of the groom won’t be at the unprecedented civil service — a conspicuous absence that has had the press buzzing since February.
Charles at first planned to have the civil ceremony in the castle, but found that wasn’t legal. When the ceremony was shifted to the town hall, the queen let it be known that she wasn’t going — officially, at least, in keeping with the couple’s wish for a ”low key” ceremony.
That sparked a headline frenzy over the latest instalment in the Charles and Camilla wedding saga, with the Daily Mirror labelling it a ”Royal wedding snub sensation”.
”Royal bombshell: Queen won’t go to wedding”, was The Sun‘s take, while the Daily Mail‘s headline read: ”Queen snubs the wedding”.
The queen’s husband, Prince Philip, is also skipping the civil ceremony but both will attend a church blessing held later the same day in Windsor Castle’s chapel. In contrast, both attended the wedding when their daughter, Princess Anne, took her second husband in a Scottish church.
Catherine Brooks-Baker, a commentator on royal affairs, suggested the wedding has put the queen in a quandary.
”She’s obviously having to grit her teeth about this marriage, she’s weighed it up and decided this is the best way it should go, but I don’t think she’s enjoying the process very much,” Brooks-Baker said in a telephone interview.
But some royal watchers dismiss the notion of a royal snub.
”A snub is when no member of the royal family attended the marriage of the duke and duchess of Windsor in Paris in 1937,” Hugo Vickers, a prolific author of royal books, told The Daily Telegraph.
The duke, King Edward VIII, was in disgrace for marrying a twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson.
However, divorce has become acceptable in this royal family.
Princess Anne and the divorced Prince Andrew will both be at the civil ceremony, supporting their divorced elder brother.
Rumors of a frosty stand-off between the queen and the heir to the throne have increased in the lead-up to the wedding. Newspapers have carried pages reporting the queen’s anger, attributed to unidentified ”courtiers”.
Several newspapers have said the queen believes her son is putting personal gratification before royal duty by wedding Parker Bowles, with whom he acknowledged having an affair while still married to the late Princess Diana.
Courtiers were quoted as saying the queen is ”lukewarm” about the marriage and is worried it could tarnish the monarchy.
Friends reportedly said the queen believes attending a civil ceremony for the heir to the throne will be incompatible with her role as supreme governor of the Church of England.
Charles and Parker Bowles are marrying in a civil ceremony because the Church of England traditionally frowns on church marriages for divorcees whose partners are alive.
Charles divorced Princess Diana in 1996 and she died in a car accident the next year. But Parker Bowles’s ex-husband, who remarried, is still living.
The pair had planned to hold their civil wedding inside the walls of Windsor Castle, but when they discovered they would need to register the medieval castle as a wedding venue, opening it up to commoner’s weddings, the ceremony was switched to the 17th-century town hall.
Some royal watchers, who scoffed at the official palace line about the queen’s non-attendance, suggest the real reason the queen won’t be going is because she is unhappy her son has been forced to marry in an ordinary and common town hall.
But others insist the queen’s problem is not with the wedding, but with the woman her 56-year-old son has chosen as his bride.
News reports claim that the queen once referred to Parker Bowles as ”that wicked woman”. Some observers believe she is relieved to have the excuse of keeping the ceremony ”low key” to skip it.
The queen’s spokespeople have insisted that she is not snubbing the wedding, pointing out that she will attend the blessing and is hosting the reception after the civil ceremony.
Many Britons still harbour ill feelings toward Parker Bowles, who is widely blamed for breaking up Charles’s marriage to Princess Diana and is seen as a poor substitute for the much-loved ”people’s princess”.
Speculating as to why the queen has distanced herself from her future daughter-in-law, Peter Archer, royal correspondent for Britain’s Press Association, wrote: ”The answer can only be that she fears her new daughter-in-law could disrupt the closing years of her long reign and damage the monarchy.” — Sapa-AP