Fiji Sun

Duke Spared Public Appearance for Daughter’s Secret Wedding

- Princess Beatrice marries fiance Edoardo Mapelli. Inset: Prince Andrew.

Prince Andrew walked his daughter Beatrice down the aisle on Friday in the first ‘secret’ royal wedding for 235 years.

The disgraced royal put his troubles over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to one side to give the princess away in a remarkable private ceremony.

The clandestin­e nature of the hastily arranged nuptials meant the Queen’s beleaguere­d son was spared appearing in public.

Beatrice, 31, wed her fiance Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 37, known as Edo, at All Saints Church on the Queen’s Windsor estate in an intimate ceremony, with just 15 family and friends.

The couple had planned a much bigger event in London for May but had to cancel due to lockdown.

Her grandparen­ts, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, were the only royals present beside Beatrice and her immediate family including her mother, Sarah, Duchess of York, and younger sister, Princess Eugenie.

The monarch shared her delight with Captain Sir Tom Moore, who she knighted at Windsor Castle hours after the nuptials, telling him: “My granddaugh­ter got married this morning. Both Philip and I managed to get there – very nice.”

Edo’s son Wolfie, four, was his ‘mini best man’ as Beatrice became the first ‘blood princess’ to become a stepmother.

The last royal believed to have married in secret was George IV, who wed his mistress Maria Fitzherber­t in 1785 in a furtive ceremony in her Mayfair drawing room.

Details of Beatrice’s wedding were briefly confirmed by Buckingham Palace on Friday. But the Daily Mail can also reveal that:

■ Only members of the family’s ‘inner circle’ were told about the wedding and were sworn to secrecy;

■ The bride and her mother organised the wedding in just two weeks after government restrictio­ns were relaxed, so that her grandparen­ts could attend before relocating to Balmoral for the summer;

■ Beatrice walked from her father’s home Royal Lodge – where she had stayed the night before the wedding – to the nearby church and had only a single bridesmaid;

■ Wolfie’s mother, Dara Huang, is not believed to have been present;

■ The bride wore the wedding dress she had planned to show off back in May;

■ Guests, including the Queen, stood socially-distanced in the church and had an outdoors reception at Royal Lodge.

Family friends insisted the secretive nature of the wedding was not down to Prince Andrew’s issues over the Epstein scandal.

The FBI wants to question him over his close friendship with the convicted paedophile, who killed himself while awaiting trial on further charges last summer.

Pressure on Andrew, 60, intensifie­d following the arrest in the US

of his close friend, Epstein’s exgirlfrie­nd, Ghislaine Maxwell.

But the sources said the secrecy was explained by Beatrice and Edo’s desire for a quiet, private ceremony and the fact they did not want to overshadow Sir Tom’s knighting at Windsor.

But Dario Mapelli Mozzi, Edo’s cousin once removed, told the Mail: “We heard it was postponed to next year but that was clearly to keep it secret. Maybe they did it now to be sure that the Queen could be there.”

Daily Mail

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