We've just had another royal wedding! Did you even know? If not, that's okay, nobody
else did, either, at least not until after the fact.
"Hello everyone! It's Beatrice here."
The royal who wed without all the pomp and circumstance and general three-ring circus
hoopla we've come to expect when any Windsor ties the knot was Princess Beatrice, who has
been engaged to fiancé Count Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi since September 2019.
People reports that the wedding had originally been planned for May 29th, 2020, but the pandemic
made the event unsafe. But the Royal Family finally decided that, by late July, things
were safe enough that they wouldn't be putting their quarantining elderly relatives, one
of whom is the world's longest-reigning monarch, at risk if they held a small ceremony.
A statement from Buckingham Palace announced,
"The private wedding ceremony of Princess Beatrice and Mr. Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi took
place at 11 a.m. on Friday 17th July at The Royal Chapel of All Saints at Royal Lodge,
Windsor."
In attendance at the event, which was just a short drive from the palace, were about
20 people in all, including Beatrice's grandmother, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, as
well as the Duke of Edinburgh, aka Prince Philip, or Beatrice's grandpa. The palace
did not confirm if the bride's father, Prince Andrew, was also in attendance. He's kept
a low profile recently due to the ongoing fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Unfortunately, the Queen had to cut her visit to the ceremony short, as she needed to rush
back to the castle in order to preside at the knighting ceremony of Captain Tom Moore,
the 100-year-old World War Two veteran who walked 100 laps in his garden while quarantining
and raised more than $40 million for healthcare workers in the process. Despite the fact that
the Queen was not present for the entire ceremony, the Palace declared that the wedding nevertheless,
quote, "took place in accordance with all relevant Government Guidelines." Good to know!
So what did we miss since Princess Beatrice's wedding was a small, private, and un-televised
one, instead of the larger event we'd all been anticipating? Well, for one thing, People
reports that the May wedding, which had been scheduled to take place in St. James Palace's
Chapel Royal, wouldn't have been all that circus-like, after all. Evidently the couple
both prefer to keep things somewhat low-key, so for one thing they would have passed on
the traditional horse-drawn carriage ride.
The guest list would no doubt have been somewhat larger, although not huge. Hello! reports
the chapel seats just 150. In comparison, the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry
had 600 guests, while Beatrice's sister, Princess Eugenie, invited 800 guests to her wedding.
Prince William and Kate Middleton's nuptials were the craziest in recent memory, however,
with 1,900 invitees all crammed into Westminster Abbey. For the math-averse, that's more than
12 times the number that would have attended Beatrice's wedding as originally planned,
and nearly 100 times larger than the ceremony that actually took place.
Princess Beatrice, who still retains her title, remains 9th in line to the throne. She also
gains a couple of new titles now, thanks to her husband's long-standing aristocratic Italian
heritage. She is now a countess, or "Contessa." Or, better yet, you can call her "Nobile Donna",
which means "noble woman." In addition to inheriting his father's title, Beatrice's
new hubby the count is also first in line for the family's nine-bedroom palazzo, which
is about an hour outside Milan.
Not only is Count Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi Italian nobility, but he has also made seriously big
bucks in the property development biz. He also brings a ready-made family into the marriage,
as he's the father of a son named Christopher with his former fiancée, the American architect
Dara Huang. Christopher would have been a pageboy had his daddy's wedding ceremony taken
place as originally planned, so we missed out on all that cuteness, but there will probably
be many adorable photo ops to come now that he's the Queen's step-great-grandson.
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