Clarence House revealed this week that the invitations are in the mail for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s April wedding. The Prince of Wales’s website offered a quick rundown of the way that the approximately 1900 available places were sorted out – let’s have a look at some of those who will be attending, shall we?
IN: The Windsor Clan
According to the official breakdown, about fifty members of the British royal family have been invited to William and Kate’s wedding. This number includes the obvious – the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Camilla, Harry, the Yorks, the Wessexes, and Princess Anne’s clan. It also likely includes the Linleys, the Chattos, the Gloucesters, and all of the branches of the Kent family. To make the number come near to an even 50, it’s possible that the invite list doesn’t include most of the children of the family (especially those who aren’t yet teenagers), but two of the royal kids are definitely going to be there: Lady Louise Windsor, daughter of the Wessexes, and the Hon. Margarita Armstrong-Jones, daughter of the Linleys, are both bridesmaids.
OUT: Sarah, Duchess of York
As many expected, Fergie won’t be among the guests in Westminster Abbey, despite reports that William was insistent that her name be on the guest list. Sarah has attended a few royal events since her 1996 divorce from Prince Andrew – most notably the funeral of the Queen Mum in 2002 – but she generally still seems to be persona non grata among the Windsor clan (and last year’s cash-for-access scandal certainly didn’t improve her standing). Interviews with Sarah over the last few days suggest that she never expected she would be invited and even made other plans for the wedding weekend. Whether that’s true or not, who knows, but one thing’s for sure: the next royal wedding we’ll see Fergie attending will likely be the nuptials of either Princess Beatrice or Princess Eugenie.
Earlier this week, The Sun’s Duncan Larcombe reported that Prince William and Kate Middleton will be digging in to major royal duties a bit earlier than many thought after their April wedding – by undertaking a joint royal tour of Canada in July. Larcombe’s sources suggest that the tour could be a two-week affair, covering the Commonwealth realm from coast to coast, including at least one solo engagement for Kate.
Many have raised an eyebrow at Larcombe’s story, suggesting that the duration of the tour sounds a bit long and that it doesn’t fit with previously announced plans for the two to live a quiet life in Wales while William finishes his commitment to the RAF. But Larcombe, even though he writes for a tabloid paper, has had a rather impressive string of spot-on stories about Prince William and Prince Harry. He has recently returned to his position as royal editor at The Sun; it’s entirely possible that he still has access to reliable royal sources and perhaps even the favorable opinion of the Wales princes themselves.
But how common is it for newly-married Windsor couples to embark on a lengthy tour of a Commonwealth country? Prince William’s parents, Charles and Diana, famously brought him along on their first major royal tour to Australia and New Zealand; it took place not quite two years after their wedding, in the spring of 1983. That tour was significantly long – six whole weeks, in fact. William stayed on a cattle ranch with nannies while Charles and Diana hopped around various local sites, but they did frequently stop back by the southern Australian property to check in on their baby son.
This week, the 35th annual International Circus Festival of Monte-Carlo opened in Monaco, under the watchful eyes of the country’s circus-mad princely family.
The festival, inaugurated in 1974 by the late Prince Rainier III, was the first international circus festival to be held anywhere in the world. It is designed to help spotlight the artistic and athletic qualities of circus performance. In the program for the debut festival, Rainier wrote, “This International Circus Festival was created thinking of the circus community, of this family of underestimated people, so that you, attentive spectators of their efforts and of their work, could know them better, and celebrate them better.” Rainier’s support for the festival lasted until the end of his life, and after his death in 2005, the festival staged an impressive tribute to the prince.
Today, the patron of the festival is Princess Stéphanie, Rainier’s younger daughter. Stéphanie has taken her father’s passion for the circus a step further – ten years ago, she even ran away with a Swiss circus. She lived with the Knie Brothers’ Circus in Zurich for two months with her three children, Louis, Pauline, and Camille, who occasionally appeared in the ring. She became romantically involved with the circus’s owner and elephant trainer, Franco Knie, after she presented him with an award at the 1999 International Circus Festival. Stéphanie’s relationship with Knie soon ended, but it was through the same circus that she met her third husband, Adans Lopez Peres, a Portuguese acrobat. Their marriage was also short lived, but her love for the circus has endured.
This week brought news about all three of the major royal weddings scheduled for 2011. First, royal granddaughter Zara Phillips surprised many by choosing Edinburgh for her wedding location instead of more expected sites like her home county of Gloucestershire or Windsor, where her older brother Peter’s wedding was held in 2008.
Zara’s decision to marry rugby player Mike Tindall in Scotland echoes her mother’s second wedding to naval officer Timothy Laurence in 1992. Princess Anne wed Tim at Craithie Kirk, the church near Balmoral where the royal family has been worshipping since the days of Queen Victoria. Though the Windsors have a long-established affection for Scotland, even more so since George VI married a Scot, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Anne’s decision to marry north of the border had more to do with religious obligations than territorial preferences. The Church of Scotland allows divorced people to remarry in the church, while the Church of England does not (hence the brouhaha over Prince Charles’s 2005 wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, which had to be conducted in a registry office).
As neither Zara nor Mike has ever been married, they aren’t facing the same issues as Princess Anne was twenty years ago. But some reports have suggested that they’ve picked Edinburgh because they want to avoid the hoopla of a London royal wedding – how that translates to Windsor or Gloucestershire, I’m not entirely sure. The wedding will still have royal connections, however, even if it’s not conducted in the English capital. Edinburgh is home to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence in Scotland and the likely location for the wedding reception.
Congratulations to Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, who welcomed twins on Saturday morning!
The long-awaited infants, a boy and a girl, were born at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen on January 8. The little prince was born first, at 10:30 AM; he weighs 2674 grams (5 lb. 14 oz.) and is 47 cm (18.5 in.) long. His little sister, the second princess of the family, was born half an hour later at 10:56 AM. She weighs 2554 grams (5 lb. 10 oz.) and is 46 cm (18 in.) long. The twins, who came a few weeks early, were born naturally. They are both reportedly very healthy, with excellent APGAR scores.
Crown Prince Frederik addressed a contingent of Danish and Australian press at the hospital this morning, exclaiming that he and Mary were “relieved and overjoyed” at the birth. The babies’ royal grandparents, Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik, also visited their newest grandchildren at the hospital. Margrethe told reporters that the twins were “not so big” but were doing well. When reporters asked Henrik if he would be babysitting the twins, he joked, “That’s not a job for me!” Crown Princess Mary’s father, John Donaldson, admitted that he cried at the news of the twins’ arrival.
