If you want an answer to the tricky question of whether it is right for the Queen to boycott her son’s wedding, turn to that leading constitutional expert, Max Clifford: ‘Of course she should go. She’s his mum.’
Once the legality of the wedding is established, the love of a mother for her son is all that matters. Constitutional experts can say all they want about how unseemly it is that the Queen should have to visit a register office, even if she has been photographed beaming from the arcade of that same register office in Christopher Wren’s fine Guildhall at Windsor, presiding over a procession of flower-pot men in 2002.
Historians can say that monarchs have boycotted weddings before. Queen Victoria refused to go to the marriage of her son Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra in 1863. But then the Widow of Windsor was still deep in mourning for the death of Prince Albert two years before.
The Queen is in good health, happily married and, quite literally, the monarch of all she surveys. What constitutional experts and historians think about the propriety of wedding venues shouldn’t bother the Queen. The national religion of this country has been changed in the past to accommodate unusual royal wedding plans. Taking the 184 steps from Windsor Castle’s portcullis to the Guildhall will not let in much destructive daylight on the magic of royalty.
It is quite understandable that the Queen listens carefully to those courtiers who are sticklers for royal etiquette, who couldn’t bear the sight of her inching past the Windsor branch of McDonald’s en route to the register office. But millions of her subjects, plenty of whom will have had second marriages in register offices with their mothers and mothers-in-law in attendance, will not think it at all beneath her that she should make the trip.
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