Yahoo Lifestyle Queen Elizabeth Breaks Royal Protocol in Resurfaced Video
Queen Elizabeth II makes surprise appearance at Manchester couple's wedding.
Queen Elizabeth II made royal watchers swoon with a special public appearance in 2012, and now fans are re-living the moment as the video documenting it all resurfaced online.
Over a decade ago, the late queen received an invite to the wedding of Frances and John Canning, two people whom she'd never met before, and to the couple's surprise, she said "yes."
While many to-be-wed couples send celebrities and respected A-listers invitations to their upcoming weddings, rarely do they attend. In fact, when it comes to the royals, sometimes they even forgo attending weddings for other members of their family—making the Cannings' wedding a unique celebration and an apparent deviation from protocol.
"We never dreamt we would be able to meet her," Frances told Manchester Evening News at the time. "When we had our ceremony, the staff asked us to wait for a moment in the corridor and just a few minutes later the Queen arrived. She knew both our names and apparently we had been especially added to her rota."
The lovebirds, originally from the town of Prestwich located in the Greater Manchester area, had booked Manchester Town Hall for their civil wedding in March 2012. But four weeks before they were set to say "I do," the couple received a phone call from the venue informing them that they would be "sharing the building with a VIP" who was due to visit the premises on the same day.
Upon learning that the VIP was actually the queen, the couple decided to send her a formal invitation to their ceremony, penning a "lighthearted" letter to Buckingham Palace. And to the surprise of everyone–from the couple, their 40 guests, and probably even the employees at town hall–the queen attended the event.
John was shocked by her visit. "I’m a big fan of the royal family. When we found out who the VIP was we wrote to her, a bit light-heartedly, and got a nice letter back from a lady in waiting."
"We didn’t expect anything further to come from it," the groom noted, before going on to say the moment felt "like a dream."
The couple explained that the queen even entertained a thoughtful conversation, asking "how we were feeling" and congratulating the newlyweds. "Prince Philip was asking where in Italy we were going for our honeymoon," John added. "They had clearly been briefed about what we were doing."
According to several reports, the queen's Diamond Jubilee visit to Manchester and Salford is what brought her to the town hall in the first place.
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