Queen to miss Charles and Camilla's wedding

Britain's Queen Elizabeth will not attend the civil marriage ceremony of her son Prince Charles (pictured) and his partner Camilla Parker Bowles. File picture / Reuters

LONDON - Britain's Queen Elizabeth will not attend the civil marriage ceremony of her eldest son Prince Charles and his partner Camilla Parker Bowles, Buckingham Palace said on Tuesday.

The queen will instead go to a church blessing of the couple by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to be held after the service on April 8.

The wedding has been dogged by controversy since it was announced on February 10, with newspapers claiming the queen and the heir to her British throne are engaged in a bitter row over how some of the marriage plans have unravelled.

"The queen will not be attending the civil ceremony because she is aware that the prince and Mrs Parker Bowles wanted to keep the occasion low key," the palace said in a statement.

Royal watchers say the wedding has been badly planned and the problems have heaped embarrassment on the House of Windsor.

Charles was forced to change the venue from Windsor Castle, the queen's royal residence west of London, to Windsor Town Hall because of difficulties in getting a licence for the castle.

Constitutional experts have been arguing over whether members of the royal family are even allowed to marry in a civil ceremony in England.

Some opinion polls suggest the British public is opposed to the marriage of the Prince of Wales and his long-time lover.

Under the headline The War of the Windsors, the top-selling tabloid Sun newspaper reported this week that the queen is "horrified" by aspects of the wedding.

The paper said the queen was unhappy that the venue had to be changed and that the original plan for a low key event had started to spiral into something bigger.

Charles was divorced in 1996 from the late Princess Diana, whose beauty, charm and later marital difficulties captivated the British tabloid press for years.

Parker Bowles has faced an uphill struggle to escape the shadow of Diana, whose sudden death in a 1997 Paris car crash caused an unprecedented outpouring of national grief in a nation which once prided itself on its stiff upper lip.

Camilla is widely depicted in the tabloid press as the "other woman" who has held Charles' affections since he first met her in 1970 and was considered by Diana to be the third person in her marriage to the prince.

- REUTERS