The  wedding of British royals in the Vatican environs ….on Guy Fawkes weekend.

The Queen officially gave her go-ahead at a Privy Council meeting in October, opening the way for a register office ceremony in London that took place two weeks ago.

This was the first time since the royal marriages act in the 18th century that a monarch had sanctioned a fully Catholic royal wedding (although George IV secretly — and illegally — wed his Catholic mistress).

Paola’s Catholicism comes from her father Louis, a distant relative of 17th-century Croatian royalty. Her mother Ingrid is a Swedish professor who advises the Vatican on international law, wrote a set text on the rules of war and speaks some 13 languages.

The event in Rome could not have been a bigger contrast to that in Lewes, Sussex which every year holds the greatest show of Protestant triumphalism outside Northern Ireland. In contrast to the magnanimous words for the Queen in Rome, the traditional “bonfire prayer” reads: “A penny loaf to feed the Pope, a farthing o’cheese to choke him.”

For Windsor, his conversion and wedding after a five–year courtship of Paola, a professional artist, have been a vital part of putting a sometimes difficult youth behind him. Windsor, 36, the Queen’s first cousin once removed, lives quietly in his Pimlico terraced house near Westminster cathedral, where he worships daily. Windsor occupies himself with charity work, teaching children with special needs and gardening.

The wedding was in St. Stephen of the Abyssinians – the Ethiopian national church.