The wedding made Charles the first member of the Royal Family to be civilly wed in England. Official documents had been published by BBC that stated such a marriage was illegal,[34] though these were dismissed by Clarence House,[35] and explained to be obsolete by the sitting government.[36]
It's called a civil wedding so I'm wondering if this is a different kind of marriage than the normal legal marriage. And would he be able to become king because of it?
Found an old article about the civil union of Charles & Camilla... You might find it interesting.
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LONDON, Feb. 17 - It was, perhaps, inevitable.
In a country that can argue endlessly about such royal minutiae as whether it is appropriate for the queen to keep her breakfast cereal in plastic containers, a backlash against the second marriage of Charles, the Prince of Wales, is well under way.
Whether the couple will win acceptance with their subjects remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: for Charles, it will not be anything like the first time.
"Boring Old Gits to Wed" was how The Star announced the news last week- the other "old git" in the headline being Charles's fiancée, Camilla Parker Bowles. "What is there to celebrate?" asked Amanda Platell in The Daily Mail. "That a 56-year-old man has finally married his mistress?"
Britons have various reasons for their misgivings about the wedding, which is to take place April 8. Some feel that Charles, who cheated on his first wife, Diana, with Mrs. Parker Bowles, does not deserve to live happily ever after with the woman they regard as the agent of Diana's distress. Others simply object on general principle to Mrs. Parker Bowles, who has long been cast as the wicked stepmother in the ruined royal fairy tale.
Still others simply wish the royal family would go away and stop bothering everyone.
"Why should these meaningless people be embedded in our national imagination?" wrote Polly Toynbee, a columnist with The Guardian. "Ludicrous and grotesque for the wretched royal performers and their subjects alike, this is the least dignified of all state institutions."
Certainly all the speculation about Charles's mother, Queen Elizabeth, and her meddlesome attitude toward the wedding has been extremely undignified.
At first the queen seemed almost giddy with joy, at least by her modest emotional standards. "We're very happy," her office said in a statement on the day the engagement was announced. But since then, the queen has appeared intent - if you believe the popular press - on controlling the wedding plans, even if it means overriding her son's wishes.
In normal family weddings, the role of older-generation wedding irritant is rightfully claimed by the mother of the bride, who exercises her natural-born duty to challenge everything from the size of the guest list to the color of the trim on the bridesmaids' sashes. But this is not a normal family, and the queen - who is to be host at the reception, at Windsor Castle - outranks anyone she feels like outranking.
According to Trevor Kavanagh, The Sun's political editor and a man as knowledgeable as anyone when it comes to these matters (which isn't saying a lot), Elizabeth has nixed Charles's idea of having a romantic reception at "dozens of intimate candlelit round tables." Instead, The Sun reported, she wants a muted, stuffy dinner at "one long, formal rectangular table."
More alarmingly for a couple who between them have lived 113 years and produced four children (with other people), the queen has also apparently instituted what The Sun calls a "pre-wedding sex ban," decreeing that they should spend the night before the wedding sleeping "in different wings of the castle." She has also exerted her monarchical prerogative over the menu, Mr. Kavanagh reported, airily dictating that Charles "won't be able to serve dinner guests his beloved organic vegetables from Highgrove."
Whatever her issues with organic produce, at least the queen is resigned to the marriage on the ground that having her son safely wed would remove some of the awkwardness surrounding his relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles. But others are not happy. No sooner had the engagement been announced than a motley parade of constitutional experts and royal protocol-watchers emerged from the woodwork to provide various reasons the marriage could not, or should not, take place.
There was much talk of the precedent, of tradition and of the 1836 Marriage Act, which according to Stephen Cretney, emeritus professor of legal history at Oxford, could well make their planned civil marriage illegal. The act, which legalized nonchurch weddings for the first time, "does not apply to members of the royal family," he told the BBC.
In an indication of the difficulty of the arrangements, Prince Charles's office announced Thursday that the wedding would be moved to the Guildhall in Windsor, saying that licensing the castle itself for the wedding would be too disruptive.
Then, there was the question of Camilla's status. Not making her queen, argued the historian Andrew Roberts, was "an insult to Camilla and British women." At the other end of the argument was the nagging fear of what an Express headline darkly called the "Queen Camilla Plan," which Charles is said to be plotting to make Camilla queen, even though he said he would not.
The theory goes that the engagement announcement used the word "intended" when saying Camilla would eventually become the princess consort - not the queen - as a sneaky rhetorical way of providing a future escape hatch. As The Express pointed out, the prince had publicly declared several times that that he had "no intention" of remarrying - and look what he is doing now.
Ultimately the issue comes back to Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, and whether people like them or not. The jury is out on this matter. Unfortunately for the couple, news reports about the engagement have invariably rehearsed, in grisly detail, less-than-proud moments from their shared history: the way she is said to have orchestrated Charles's marriage to Diana because she thought (wrongly) that Diana would prove pliable and clueless; the way he grandly informed Diana that he did not intend to be the only Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress.
Worst of all was the publication in 1993 of a bugged 11-minute telephone conversation the couple had had when both were married to other people (Charles and Diana separated in 1992). In it was intimate talk of the most excruciating kind, culminating in Charles's distinctly un-regal wish to live, he said, inside his mistress's trousers.
"It was all deeply humiliating," Elizabeth Grice wrote in The Daily Telegraph, in an appraisal of the couple's chances of gaining public acceptance. "None of the dignity that has accrued to them since, through time and patience and good works, will entirely obliterate some of these images."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/18/international/europe/18royals.html?sq=&st=nyt&scp=291&pagewanted=all&position=