A DECADE after the Prince of Wales borrowed his wife, and broke up his marriage, Andrew Parker Bowles yesterday welcomed the prince to the wedding of his only daughter.

In the Wiltshire village of Lacock, Laura Parker Bowles, the 27-year-old daughter of Andrew and Camilla — now Duchess of Cornwall — married Harry Lopes, a 30-year-old Calvin Klein underwear model turned accountant.

The wedding presented Charles with a series of delicate problems of diplomacy and etiquette, as he and other royals mingled with a family in whose fortunes they have for 40 years been so closely entangled.

Prince William arrived to the most tumultous cheer of the day with his girlfriend Kate Middleton. It was their first appearance together at a family wedding, a sign that Middleton is intended as a permanent fixture in the young prince’s life.

The 24-year-old, who wore in a long cream embroidered coat and neat feathered hat with two-tone high heels, did not attend Tom Parker Bowles nuptials last year for fear of upstaging the bride, nor Charles’s betrothal to Camilla.

The couple were bronzed having just returned from a holiday in Mustique.
Prince Harry, who arrived with his brother, had also flown in from holiday. He had been skydiving with his girlfriend Chelsy Davy in Cape Town, but her absence from the wedding suggests her full acceptance into the family may still be some way off.

The Duchess of Cornwall was clearly enjoying the occasion and waved and smiled enthusiastically at the 2,000 wellwishers lining the streets when she arrived with Charles.

Other guests included Lord Howe, former foreign secretary, who arrived with Lady Howe, a distant cousin of Camilla. and Lady Sarah Chatto, daughter of Princess Margaret, and her husband Daniel.

The ceremony, in the 11th-century church of St Cyriac’s, was conducted by Sally Wheeler, a Church of England vicar and mother of five. She was assisted by Dom Anthony Sutch, the former headmaster of Downside and a friend of Andrew Parker Bowles.

The bride, who had arrived a stylish five minutes late, wore a layered ivory silk chiffon dress with a train designed by Robinson Valentine — who provided her mother’s outfits for her wedding to Charles last year — and a tiara apparently encrusted with diamonds.

Sutch in his sermon told the couple to “cultivate the virtues of love” and concentrate on tolerance and patience to make their marriage work. He said he would be sending them a card every year and one of the things he would put on it would be a Chinese proverb, “How shall I talk of the sea to a frog who has never left the pond”, making the point that the couple needed to expand their horizons.

Tom Parker Bowles, the bride’s brother, brought a touch of literary style to proceedings when he read the WH Auden poem When China Meets Africa.

Laura, who runs an art gallery, attended a Catholic boarding school in Dorset and studied the history of art and marketing at Oxford Brookes University before backpacking her way around South America.

Aged 21 she was to be found working as a waitress and potwasher in a juice bar in west London for £3.50 an hour. However, she did ask for time off to join the princes, with whom she had been friendly since she was a teenager, and their father on a Mediterranean yachting holiday
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Lopes, who attended Eton and Edinburgh University, is also a distant cousin of William and Harry and will inherit Gnaton Hall in Devon and the 3,000 acre Skelpick estate in the Highlands. His grandfather was the late Lord Aston of Hever, and his father George Lopes is a fine-art consultant.
Lopes, regarded as a bit of a party lover at university, has modelled for British and Italian Vogue. The couple live together in Notting Hill.

As the guests trooped out vicar Sally Wheeler said: “I really enjoyed it and so did everyone else. They are very much in love and it was lovely to see them enjoy their day.”

After the ceremony, a candlelit dinner and dancing awaited the 400 guests at Ray Mill, the duchess’s home in Lacock. Michael Fawcett, an aide to Charles, organised the food and flowers after his success arranging the Queen’s birthday gala dinner at Windsor Castle two weeks ago.

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