A nation celebrates

SIR – Along with friends in eastern Europe, I have watched and absorbed the effects of the royal wedding.

The celebrations throughout Britain said more about this country than an endless parade of soulless military weaponry. LA Lawrence

Devizes, Wiltshire

SIR – Let’s hope that women around the world with collagen-filled lips, Botoxed brows and far too much make-up take notice of Meghan Markle’s appearance at her wedding.

Less is more. Susan Sang

Petersfield, Hampshire

SIR – I would like to offer a word of praise for the leading outrider in the procession after the ceremony.

This rider managed to keep control of a very nervous and fractious horse in the streets of Windsor and on the Long Walk to the castle.

How relieved he must have been to finish the ride. Well done that man. Pamela Chalk Fair

Bournemouth, Dorset

SIR – Charles Moore (Notebook, May 21) refers to the affection in which the first Duke of Sussex (below) was held.

Curiously, his “civil and obliging” nature, commended by the diarist Thomas Creevey, was initially withheld from his niece, the young Queen Victoria.

“I always screamed when I saw him,” she wrote, having been told he would administer severe punishment if she misbehaved.

Later, she was much attracted by his soft-heartedness and eccentricities. He sobbed throughout her wedding in 1840, adorned by a black skull-cap to keep his head warm.

In return for his affection she removed the stigma attached to the second wife he had married illegally, by creating her Duchess of Inverness in her own right. Together they amassed a library of some 50,000 books, including some 1,000 editions of the Bible. Lord Lexden

London SW1