Here’s a little taste of an impressive collection of facts on the royal wedding, compiled by London’s The Independent newspaper.
*Bookmakers are offering odds of 25-1 against Prince Harry being too drunk to finish his speech.
*Guests at the palace reception will drink Pol Roger champagne and £8.50-a-bottle Chapel Down white from Tenterden in Kent.
*The royal wedding: trees, tiaras, and trestle tables
Also see The Los Angeles Times: Royal wedding by the numbers
*Those who have been invited include: David and Victoria Beckham; Guy Ritchie (a distant relation of the bride); Sir Elton John; Rowan Atkinson; Gary Goldsmith, Kate’s inventively tattooed uncle; Tara Palmer-Tomkinson (with new nose); 27 members of Prince William’s search-and-rescue team at RAF Valley in Anglesey; more than 40 foreign royals (including Prince Albert of Monaco, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, the Sultans of Oman and Brunei and – health and rebellions permitting – Prince Mohamed bin Nawaf bin Abul Aziz of Saudi Arabia and King Mswati of Swaziland); around 200 members of government, Parliament and the diplomatic corps (including David Cameron and Ed Miliband, both now expected to wear morning dress); around 60 Commonwealth Governors-General and Realm Prime Ministers; more than 100 ambassadors (including North Korea’s Ja Song-nam); and at least six people who are reported to be the exes of either the bride or the groom (including Rose Farquhar, Rupert Finch and Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe).
*Two nights before the current Queen’s wedding in 1947, her parents gave a dance at Buckingham Palace that threatened to get out of hand. King George led a conga through the state rooms, while an Indian rajah got drunk and attacked the Duke of Devonshire.
*The custom of the post-wedding wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace was instituted in 1858 by Queen Victoria, who insisted that the royal family go out to acknowledge the cheering crowds following the marriage of her daughter Victoria to the future German Kaiser Frederick III. The cheers were reported to have included the chant: “God save the prince and bride! God keep their lands allied!” The union produced a son, Kaiser Wilhelm II (see previous item), who was Britain’s principal enemy in the First World War.
*If the royal bride subsequently becomes Queen, she will arguably be the sixth Queen Catherine in British history. (The “arguably” is necessary because some used different spellings: Catherine of Valois, Catherine of Aragon, Kathryn Howard, Katherine Parr and Catherine of Braganza.) She will also be the first British Queen with a university degree.
*The bride’s favourite drinks include Jack Daniels and “Crack Baby”– a cocktail sold at Boujis nightclub in London.
Who has designed Kate’s dress? Latest from the Daily Mail.
* Kate and William are 15th cousins, both being descended from Sir Thomas Fairfax (c1475-1520). But Kate is none the less considered unusual for a royal bride because she is a “commoner” – that is, neither royal nor an aristocrat. In fact, five of the last six royal weddings have involved a commoner: Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, Mark Phillips in 1973, Sarah Ferguson in 1986, Sophie Rhys-Jones in 1999 and Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005. But that 1960 wedding – Princess Margaret’s – was considered scandalous at the time: it was only the second time in 200 years that a British royal had married a commoner.
*The wedding is so un-secret that it will be streamed live on YouTube, with a real-time Twitter-feed from Clarence House (and countless other tweeters) and an official Flickr gallery for the photos.
*According to a report by Greenlight, the wedding gets a new mention online every 10 seconds. Positive comments outnumber negative ones by six to one.
*The royal wedding-related culinary creation that takes the biscuit must surely be the Marie biscuit, which was invented in 1874 in honour of the marriage of Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred, to the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia.
From The Independent, London