Royalty’s Link With the Abbey.

Franklin Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2, 7 January 1935, Page 2

Royalty’s Link With the Abbey.

The wedding of the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina represented the first occasion on which one of the children of the present King and Uueen has married a member - of a royal house. The Princess Royal married the Earl of Harewood in' 1922 and he was created Viscount Lascelles. The marriage of a Royal princess to a man of other than royal rank has been, of course, the exception rather than the rule, but circumstances have changed to-day. The list of monarchies which have been metamorphosed into republics and dictatorships is a long one. The second occasion on which there was a royal marriage in the present reigning family was when the Duke of York wedded Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, of very old family but not royalty. There is royal blood in the Bowes-Lyon family, “but so there is in every gentle family in England and in many not gentle,” as “The Times” remarked on the occasion of the marriage.

The Abbey Church of St. Peter at Westminster where the latest wedding took place .has been inseparably connected with the Rigal House since the burial of Edward the Confessor and the coronation of Harold. * The holy remains of Edward, canonised by the

Pope in 1161, attracted' the English sentiment of Henry 111 and began that special devotion to St. Edward which was to- last so long and to have such influence on English history. It was this sentiment which gave Henry’s son the name of Edward and caused him to be knighted on St. Edward’s Day in 1254. The King conceived the project of replacing the Confessor’s church by a more stately fabric and before this even began there took' place in the church one marriage which linked the Royal family to a powerful noble, Richard, Earl of Crom •

well, marrying the sister of Henry’s Queen.

King Henry’s quire had only just been completed when in 1>269 Edwaid Grouchback, second son of the two surviving sons of the King, was married in the church to Aveline, daughter of William de Forz, Early of Albemarle. It was. in the Abbey, too, that Richard II married Anne of Bohemia in 1382. He was the first and only reigning sovereign to be married there. Two days later, on the Feast of St. Vinvent, Anne was crowned by William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury. Before going to meet the insurgents at Smithfield, Richard spent a long time in prayer before St. Edward’s shrine imploring- “help where human counsel was altogether useless.” When Anne died, Richard’s grief was so great that he razed her palace to the ground. His second marriage took place elsewhere, but he brought his infant Queen, Isabel of France, to her coronation in the Abbey in 1397. It was almost five and a half centuries before the next Royal wedding tok place within the walls of Westminster.