The royal marriage which worked

IN an age of disastrous royal weddings the omens were not good when Prince Edward married Sophie Rhys-Jones 10 years ago yesterday. Even before the ceremony at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, a topless picture of the bride, taken when she was a PR woman at Capital Radio in London, had appeared in a national newspaper.

HAPPINESS PERSONIFIED Sophie and Edward are the perfect royal couple HAPPINESS PERSONIFIED: Sophie and Edward are the perfect royal couple

To many ardent royalists, who felt the Queen had been let down by scandals over her children’s feared the middle-class woman he had been dating for five years looked to be heading the same way.

But 10 years on Edward has reached a royal milestone. For although some of his siblings’ marriages might have lasted longer in name he is the only child of the Queen to survive a decade of a first marriage without it hitting the rocks.

He and Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary yesterday by touring a school in London to view projects funded by a charity they set up with cash raised when they married. It

was a cause for celebration at Buckingham place where the Queen, busy entertaining guests at a lavish lunch party before Royal Ascot yesterday, was quietly expressing her pride in her youngest son and his wife after the family’s earlier marital disasters.

For Edward’s brothers and sister had hardly set him a good example. Charles resumed his affair with Camilla only three years after marrying Diana. Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were soon in trouble and separated after six years. And Anne and Captain Mark Phillips endured years of rows before their marriage finally collapsed in 1992 after it was revealed he had fathered daughter Felicity in 1985 during an affair with New Zealand art teacher Heather Tonkin.

For Edward and Sophie, the daughter of a tyre salesman, it has all been a much smoother ride. As she put her arm around her husband and squeezed his waist while they posed for pictures with bouquets of flowers

outside Whitton School and Sports College, south-west London, it was not difficult to see why. “They are an incredibly relaxed, easy-going couple with a good sense of humour,” said one aide who knows them well. “They’re heads down, getting on with their work.

“They’re very happy and get on very well, they share many of the same interests and I think having two children has been the icing on the cake for them.”

There were early hiccups, of course – most seriously when Sophie suffered an ectopic pregnancy and lost her first baby in December 2001. A year later they were both forced to give up outside commercial careers after critics accused them of embarrassing the monarchy and cashing in on their royal connections.

Edward, who had famously failed to make the grade in the Royal Marines, lost money on his film company Ardent and then got into a row with Prince Charles over claims he had breached a ban on filming Prince William at university. Sophie, like Edward, faced claims she had used her royal title to win business and abandoned her career after an undercover newspaper reporter caught her making disparaging remarks about other members of the Royal Family and Tony Blair.

Since then they have concentrated on official duties to support the monarch, raising their two children Lady Louise Windsor, Viscount Severn. Cushioned by a £9million fortune and a 56-bedroom home they have thrown themselves into what friends say are often the less glamorous royal engagements that the Queen and other high-profile royals feel unable to attend. Edward, who is the closest of the royal children to Prince Philip, has taken over much of his father’s responsibilities for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme for young people and will inherit the title upon Philip’s death.

He and Sophie set up their charity Wessex Youth Trust with £550,000 from media organisations, who paid for rights to cover their wedding on June 19, 1999. They have now given £1.1million to 158 charities in the decade since. Edward, 45, and Sophie, 44, went tothe school in Whitton yesterday to see one of those charities, Straight Talking, give parenting classes to pupils in an effort to cut teenage pregnancies. T he couple, who met through their mutual interest in the ancient and rather exclusive sport of real tennis, listened to one young mother describing how she was thrown out of home after getting pregnant at 16.

They talked to children learning about the practicalities of managing a family budget – “you’ll find it all rather more scary than you think,” said Sophie – and handling babies and buggies.

Edward, watching teenagers struggle to lift a baby’s buggy up a flight of stairs and collapse a pushchair, told them: “Can I just say, however old you are, it’s the same problem.”

He is at times a little awkward.

Although polite and anxious to speak to as many people as possible he lacks the more relaxed, natural personality of his wife, who moves easily around people, speaking animatedly and throwing herself into the subject.

Yet together they spark off each other and it is often Sophie who takes the lead. During their tour of the school, for example, Edward looked distinctly uncomfortable when he encountered Jimmy, a North American corn snake, handled by pupil Harry Harrison, 15.

When the teenager asked Edward if he wanted to hold the snake the Prince politely declined, insisting he was worried it would wrap itself around him. “I’ve got lots of snakes at home and I don’t think he would get on with them,” the Prince said. Asked what type he said they were adders and grass snakes, which it transpired were not pets but resident in the grounds of his Bagshot Park home. It was only once Sophie had petted the snake several

times that Edward plucked up the courage to pet Jimmy too.

On their visit the royal couple were joined by two close friends, fund manager Mark Foster- Brown, who is chairman of the Wessex Youth Trust, and Denise Poulton, one of its trustees. Asked why the royals’ marriage had worked Poulton, a long-time friend of Sophie and godmother to Viscount Severn, put it simply:

“They are just a normal couple, they are very much in love.” Foster-Brown, who met Edward 26 years ago when they were both students at Cambridge University, was anxious to praise his old friend’s wife. “Sophie is incredibly grounded, she’s got this charm and ability to deal with stuff. A lot of us would struggle in the role she’s found herself in but they make a good team together,” he said.

Their friends think it helps that the couple married slightly later in life than some of Edward’s siblings. “They’d been dating for five years too, which is how many modern relationships develop, rather than the two-year courtship typical of the Royal Family,” said one courtier. “They’d just had more time to get to know each other. It’s the same with Prince William and Kate Middleton.”

Royal biographer Hugo Vickers echoes the point. “Sophie had time to see the pitfalls that awaited her after watching the women who were married to the other Princes,” he said. Diana overshadowed the Queen and upset senior royals while Fergie’s antics annoyed them almost as much.

Sophie has learned from their mistakes, says Vickers. H e adds: “She is much more supportive and she and Edward get on very well with the Queen and Philip.

They all sit and watch television together. It’s a proper family relationship,” he said. It helps too that Edward, the youngest child, had a closer relationship with his mother than the others. “By the time he and Andrew were born the Queen was more confident about when to stop work and spend time with the children,” said Vickers. “I think that possibly made them both better grounded.”

Why then does the biographer think that Andrew’s marriage failed while Edward’s has succeeded?

“Maybe it’s as simple as Prince Edward chose the right girl and Prince Andrew chose the wrong girl.”

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