Planning their wedding must have been a gauntlet of royal protocol for Prince William and his then-fiancée, Kate Middleton. But the newly minted Duke of Cambridge now reveals how his grandmother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, was flexible – and how she was not.
In a new book, Our Queen – which is excerpted in the Daily Mail – William, 29, recalls being handed a list of 777 names of dignitaries expected to be invited to the April 29 nuptials.
“And not one person I knew,” William, 29, says in the book by Robert Hardman. So, William went to his grandmother for advice.
“I rang her up and said ‘Do we need to be doing this?’ ” William says. “And she said, ‘No. Start with your friends first and then go from there.’ And she told me to bin the list.”
But while The Queen may have been flexible with the guest list, there was something that William was ordered to do on his big day: don his new scarlet Irish Guards uniform.
“So you don’t always get what you want,” he says, “put it that way.”
Does William, who is second in line to the throne, ever think of the day he’ll be a King able to make royal commands?
“As I’m flying along in my helicopter through the mountains of Wales, I try desperately hard not to think about it. That can wait until I’m a bit older,” William, who pilots rescue helicopters, says.
Hardman’s book, which will be published Oct. 6 in the U.K. and in the U.S. in the spring, will mark the upcoming diamond jubilee of The Queen’s reign of 60 years. And William reveals that his grandmother, 85, has no intentions of cutting back on her royal duties.
“We do hint at taking some things off her, but she won’t have anything of it,” he says. “She’ll want to hand over knowing she’s done everything she possibly could to help, and that she’s got no regrets and no unfinished business.”
Story courtesy of Aaron Parsley and Simon Perry of People.com
