Prince Andrew walks Princess Beatrice down aisle - but is missing from wedding photos

Princess Beatrice isolated with Prince Andrew at the family’s home in Windsor Park’s Great Lodge “for some time” so that he could walk her down the aisle, insiders have claimed.

But while the Duke of York was able to give his eldest daughter away at her wedding to Italian property developer Edo Mapelli Mozzi on Friday without breaking coronavirus rules, the proud father was “conspicuously absent from official photos”, says The Telegraph.

Beatrice had been scheduled to marry Mozzi at the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace in London on 29 May, but the ceremony was cancelled owing to the global pandemic.

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Instead, the pair tied the knot last week at the Chapel of All Saints on the Windsor estate. The surprise ceremony was attended by just 20 people, “in line with social distancing guidelines, and in order to shield the Queen, 94, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 99, who are in the vulnerable category”, the Daily Mail reports.

According to Town & Country, “there was no avoiding the controversy” surrounding Prince Andrew, who did not appear in her wedding photographs in order to avoid “casting a negative shadow on the event”.

“There is no getting away from the fact that the narrative surrounding Prince Andrew’s friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has, sadly for Princess Beatrice, characterised much of the discussion around her nuptials,” the magazine adds.

The official photo released following the wedding show the newlyweds with the bride’s grandparents, with enough distance between the two couples to adhere to social distancing rules.

Princess Beatrice wore a vintage Norman Hartnell dress from the Queen’s collection, along with the tiara that the Monarch wore on her own wedding day, Sky News reports.