Royal Sensation | Daily News

Royal Sensation

His Royal Highness Prince Edward and his bride Sophie Rhys-Jones who from today, Saturday 19th June 1999, will be known as the Earl and Countess of Wessex leave St George's chapel in Windsor Castle following their marriage.
His Royal Highness Prince Edward and his bride Sophie Rhys-Jones who from today, Saturday 19th June 1999, will be known as the Earl and Countess of Wessex leave St George's chapel in Windsor Castle following their marriage.

He had always refused to toe the line. In the family tradition, he entered the military after graduating from Cambridge, but in a show of independence quit the commando course of the Royal Marines, resigned his commission and returned to civilian life to pursue a career in the theater.

He worked for three years as a production assistant doing backstage jobs in the West End of London. In 1992 he and his friends set up a theater production company, which collapsed a year later, $1 million in debt.

And when he fell in love he did it his way. It was an “ordinary” girl from a working family, raised in a Victorian farmhouse in the Kent village of Brenchley who stole his heart. Her father was a retired tyre salesman and her mother a secretary.

During the long years he courted her he went to elaborate lengths to protect her privacy and keep her name out of the newspapers. When he picked her up at her west London flat, his detective would ring the doorbell and escort her to the car. When he telephoned her at her office, he identified himself as “Richard”.

Who is he? A Prince who does not like to be called a prince, who simply wishes to be known as Edward Windsor, he is Queen Elizabeth's youngest son.

Sophia Rhys-Jones, the head of her own public relations firm, met Edward while she was doing publicity for a charity sports event he was in charge of. “Yes, yes please,” she is reported to have said when he proposed to her five years after they met. On the day of their engagement when he was asked by journalists why he waited so long to propose he laughed and said, ''It's impossible for anyone else to understand why it has taken me this long,but I don't think it would have been right before and I don't think Sophie would have said yes if I had said before and hopefully by the fact that she did say yes, I must have got the timing right.''

When Edward and Sophia married, it came as no surprise that the whole theme and idea of the wedding marked a departure from the royal weddings of the past. Edward did not get married in St. Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey like his older siblings, but in the cozier St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. It wasn't a state occasion and the prime minister wasn't invited. There was no balcony wave, and no kiss for the cameras. Even the guests came dressed in different attire: the early evening wedding demanded long dresses with covered shoulders and no hats for the ladies.

The bridal gown was a departure too. Sophia chose designer Samantha Shaw to create her wedding dress. The end result was a v-neck coat made of hand-dyed ivory silk organza with tulle and silk crepe. The coat was paneled and adorned with approximately 325,000 pearl and cut-glass beads, and featured a train and a long veil. She wore a tiara lent to her by the queen and possibly created from Queen Victoria's Regal Circlet. It was the rest of her wedding jewelry however that horrified fashion experts: the earrings and cross necklace of black and white pearls that she wore and were condisidered by many as 'horrible clunky things' were designed by none other than Edward himself.

Yet the dress and the accessories were also seen as the perfect choice for this bride and this wedding. If the dress was a departure from the previous big fat royal wedding norm, so was the bride: she was 34 years old and ran her own business when she married Edward. She was no young girl fulfilling a fairy tale role.

But as the Mirror tabloid declared about their union; “They’re happy, madly in love, and it might just last!”

- Aditha 


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