Roads were closed, balloted tickets offered to members of the public and the streets of Windsor scattered with royal devotees, but this was, insisted the father of the bride before the service, “not a public wedding. This is meant to be a family wedding.”

And so it turned out when Princess Eugenie, the younger daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of York, married Jack Brooksbank, a “tequila ambassador”, at St George’s chapel on Friday, in a service that was both a highly formal royal event and a somewhat idiosyncratic ceremony reflecting the distinct character of the younger generation of royals.

As befits a ceremony where guests ranged from the Queen to Ricky Martin, the service was conducted by the Dean of Westminster, with music by Andrea Bocelli, while the bridal party included Prince George and Robbie Williams’s daughter Teddy. The readings included a lesson from St Paul’s letter to the Colossians and an extract from The Great Gatsby, read by the bride’s older sister, Beatrice, which raised eyebrows for its description of the lead character as “an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over 30, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd”.

The passage, the dean later explained in his address, had “reminded [Eugenie] immediately of Jack”, though it was particularly the description of Gatsby’s smile as having “a quality of eternal reassurance” that she had meant, he said pointedly.(theguardian)…[+]