ALTHOUGH the Queen will not attend her eldest son’s second wedding in person, she will of course have a presence at Windsor Guildhall.

The registrar who conducts the ceremony will after all be a public servant who, in theory at least, owes his or her office to the Crown.

But should the Queen attend in person? Nowadays it is customary but not obligatory for parents to attend a second nuptial, and royal parents are likely to feel entitled to establish customs rather than follow them.

Ever since polyphilogamous Henry VIII, the founder of the Church of England, royal weddings have always created their own new rules. Royals are not bound by the etiquette of subjects. And in any case second weddings are less conventional than first time round.

The great growth of second weddings in this generation is still at work establishing modern manners and traditions.

For a second wedding, the parents of the bride and groom are less directly involved. Everybody is older, possibly hors de combat. The parents are mere spear-carriers (one hopes benevolent ones). The invitations are more often sent out by the couple who are marrying than by the parents of the bride.

Sometimes they are sent out by the children of bride and/or groom. Children of the previous marriages should, if possible, be included in some way in the second wedding, for example by inviting the guests, or “giving away”, their mother, or acting as “best man” for their father. Traditionalists may ask the father of the bride to cough up, though he may feel that he did his stuff first time. In most second weddings both sides share the cost.

One can understand why the Queen does not want to attend the civil ceremony. She has sound reasons of security, crowd control and general avoidance of unseemly hurly-burly on her short passage between ceremony and home base at Windsor Castle. She takes her role of Supreme Governor of the Church seriously, and disapproves in principle of divorce and remarriage.

She will attend the blessing in St George’s Chapel and be hostess for the reception in her home. She is behaving more generously than many mothers. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to interpret her decision not to attend the ceremony as a signal of royal disapproval. And she must know that.

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