LONDON—Last minute rehearsals for this week’s wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton got under way before dawn in central London on Wednesday with the royal couple expected to put the final touches to their preparations.
Roads around Buckingham Palace and along the route the couple will take from Westminster Abbey after Friday’s service were closed as about 1,000 members of the armed forces took part in a full-scale practice for the couple’s big day.
Carriages that will carry members of the wedding party also took part alongside mounted cavalry, with a full dress-rehearsal involving the clergy and broadcasters scheduled for Thursday.
The abbey itself has already been closed off to the public, and William and Middleton will be there for some final rehearsals on Wednesday, although royal officials declined to give details.
“As with anybody’s wedding, you can imagine rehearsals happening up until the eve of the wedding,” a spokesman for William said.
Across the capital, bunting is going up and flags are beginning to be hoisted, while a small army of media from around the world has descended on makeshift studios set up outside Buckingham Palace and along the route.
The ceremony is predicted to attract a global TV audience of some two billion people.
“We have been coming over in waves, we have a cast of thousands,” said NBC Washington news anchor, Wendy Rieger.
“I called back to work yesterday, and said the only Americans I can find here right now are people with cameras on their shoulders, you know. The media is bumping all over each other,” she told Reuters TV outside Westminster Abbey.
Some royal fans have already begun camping outside the abbey to secure the best spots to watch Friday’s events, and hundreds of thousands of people are expected to start arriving in London in the next days.
MORE THAN A MILLION VISITORS
VisitBritain, the national tourism agency, is predicting an extra 600,000 tourists in the capital on the day, meaning there would be a total of some 1.1 million visitors with 40 per cent of those coming from abroad.
“That could bring anything up to 50 million pounds,” a spokesman said.
The number of inbound flights to Britain for the weekend had risen by 244 per cent while online travel booking company Expedia said hotel bookings had surged 266 per cent when the wedding date was announced, the spokesman added.
London and Partners, the agency which promotes the city, said it expected there would be 600,000 people actually lining the streets, the same number as came to watch the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles to Princess Diana.
Despite the interest, those planning last minute trips could still find somewhere to stay.
“From what we’re being told by contacts in the industry there are still rooms available,” a spokeswoman said.
However, anyone coming to London to watch the procession or camping out could be in for a cold and wet experience, with weather forecasters predicting showers and a brisk wind.
On Tuesday, police appealed to the public to help them spot any potential troublemakers, while promising that they would not tolerate any attempt to disrupt the event.
Some 5,000 police officers will be on duty to deal with potential threats ranging from international Islamist militants to anarchists and stalkers.
Meanwhile the one-and-a-half mile processional route has undergone a deep clean to get it looking spic and span.
Much has been made of Kate Middleton’s pedigree: the coal in her veins, the Ellen DeGeneres connection, the tattooed uncle.
Any woman who marries a royal will have her family tree scoured for signs of weakness, intrigue and significance. As soon as Middleton emerged as a serious girlfriend, U.S. genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner began digging through the documents.
Reitwiesner, who has published genealogies on U.S. political figures, royals and noted Europeans, amassed thousands of British records and plotted out the family lines with a colleague, but died a few weeks before the engagement was announced.
Along with discovering — no surprises here — a working middle class background, Reitwiesner found that Ellen DeGeneres and Middleton, along with Prince William himself, share a common ancestral couple: Sir Thomas Fairfax and Agnes Gascoigne. That makes them all 14th cousins.
“You will have millions of 14th cousins,” said Christopher Child, a genealogist with New England Historic Genealogical Society, who edited Reitwiesner’s account.
The Middleton family tree is a beacon for Britain’s upwardly mobile, a testament to the fact that fairy tales can come true, so long as your great grandfather moves from the coal mines of northeastern England to a carpentry gig near London.
Kate Middleton, like every human being, has 64 great great-great-great grandparents. Through their marriages and job choices, these lawyers, butchers and miners set into action a course of events that none of them would have been able to predict: a Royal marriage.
In 1821, Middleton’s great-great-great-great grandfather James Harrison was a miner in the north east corner of England. Industrialization was well underway and new rail lines had opened the possibility of mining operations in smaller inland villages like Hetton-le-Hole.
The underground world where Harrison toiled was brutal. He and his colleagues were “slaves in all but name,” according to the town’s historical record, working long hours for little pay.
It was far removed from palace life in London, where Prince William’s great-great-great-great-great uncle, King George IV, was incurring major debts, a bad case of gout and a spare tire around his waist as an overly indulgent monarch.
When George IV died and his younger brother ascended the throne, Harrison’s male children, as young as 11, were being lowered into the coal pits. It was Harrison’s great grandson Thomas, (Middleton’s great grandfather), who broke from the coal mining tradition, learned carpentry and moved closer to London after World War II, where his daughter, Dorothy, made a match with an engineer and lorry driver named Ronald Goldsmith. Their marriage would produce a daughter named Carole, who would become an airline stewardess, and later, mother-in-law to Prince William.
While Carole Middleton’s hard-working ancestors died of exhaustion, internal strangulation and emphysema, her husband Michael had a more middle class pedigree where death from natural decay, heart disease or diabetes was more common, according to the census records obtained by Reitwiesner. Michael’s Yorkshire ancestors were lawyers, aldermen and gentry. Of course, there was one relative — Edward Thomas Glassborough — who spent some time in prison for unspecified acts in 1881. Every family has one of those.
“It could have been debts, we don’t really know. He was older and married with children,” Child said.
One of the most successful branches of Michael Middleton’s family tree is the Lupton family. The Luptons were descended from tradesmen, clergy and surgeons. Olive Lupton, Kate Middleton’s redoubtable great grandmother, held the family together after World War I. She schooled her four children in camping and survival skills in the Lake District, taught them resilience, and perhaps most importantly, left them the equivalent of $15 million when she died in 1936, undercutting the rags to riches mythology of Kate’s family.
One of those children was Kate’s grandfather, Peter Middleton, who was a pilot in the Royal Air Force and later a civilian pilot.
His son Michael carried on the tradition and met his wife when he worked for the airlines.
After Carole and Michael Middleton began their own family, they left the skies for the more whimsical world of children’s party supplies. Their lucrative mail-order company Party Pieces gave the family the resources to send their children to Marlborough College, where boarding fees are currently £29,310 ($46,000) a year. Their eldest daughter Kate then attended St. Andrews University in Scotland, where she met Prince William and eventually became his girlfriend.
Since the relationship was exposed, the class differences between the two have been fodder for the British press. At Prince William’s passing-out parade at Sandhurst, Carole Middleton was ridiculed for chewing gum.
Making fun of the “commoner” who marries well is nothing new for those who roll with the elite.
Elizabeth Woodville, who married King Edward IV, was “recent gentry, rather like the Middletons,” said Morris Bierbrier, a former co-editor for Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, in London.
“When the marriage took place in the 15th century, people regarded her as extremely low born, not fit to be a queen. She was aristocratic on her mother’s side, but her father was, how do I say it, a handsome young man who ran off with the widow of the duke.”
Bierbrier says there are working class strains in all recent marriages into the royal family.
“With the Duchess of Cornwall you find the same sort of mix, but her aristocratic ancestors are more aristocratic (than Middleton’s),” he said.
Bierbrier said genealogists thought they might find connections to the more aristocratic Welsh Middleton family, but that wasn’t the case.
“Compared to Mark Phillips (former husband of Princess Anne) and Lord Snowdon (former husband of Princess Margaret), she’s got a more important line descending from King Edward III,” he said.
But that’s nothing special. Millions of people are descended from the king, who reigned in the Middle Ages.
Consider the tattooed Gary Goldsmith, Middleton’s uncle. Goldsmith, who is also a descendant of the good king, owns an Ibiza mansion named “Casa de Bang-Bang” and occasionally shames the Middleton family with his antics. He’s been on his best behaviour lately, trying to get in his sister’s good books after undercover reporters filmed him allegedly offering up some cocaine and prostitutes in 2009.
It just goes to show, you can have a family tree with working class ancestors, middle class ancestors, and even a king from centuries past, but you can’t prune the Gary Goldsmiths of the family. You can only polish them and hope for the best.
