Westminster Abbey requires hats to be worn by women for a Royal Wedding, I believe.
When I was a kid my mother used to make me wear a hat to church. I was about the only kid wearing a hat - a pill box number, very popular at the time thanks to Jackie Kennedy (as she was then). I hated it. My mother had sewn hat elastic to it, to keep it on my head even in a high wind. A kid at Sunday School used to keep hitting me over the back of the head to flip the hat over my face. Funny thing - she and I became firm friends (when I stopped wearing the hat) and we are still friends, all these years later.
I have a hat collection, some are weird. But what we saw last night include some really, really weird contraptions! I was feeling sorry for people stuck behind large radar dish hats and not able to see a thing...
Royal protocol is very strict. During "God Save the Queen" everybody is supposed to stand. The Queen gets curtseyed to by the women (including members of her own family). But it's not because she's up herself - it's the rank people are curtseying to, not the individual. She insists on the right thing being done because she has a very strong sense of duty. And tat sense of duty will keep her in the job until she dies. She took an oath at her coronation to serve the British people for the rest of her life, and she takes that very seriously.
Queen Victoria lived a very long time, had a very long reign. Her eldest son (Edward VII) was a king in waiting with few royal duties, he only came to the thrown very late in life and would have been a marvellous king if he had lived longer. The current Queen was not born to the job; when she was born, her parents were not expecting to ever be in the forefront. Then came the constitutional crisis over Edward VIII (who actually was never crowned, he abdicated before the coronation in order to marry Wallis Simpson) and a shy, stammering man (George VI) was thrust into the lead role. His wife, the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, became Queen Elizabeth (but without numerals, she was consort and not monarch). When George VI died, his daughter had been married for a few years and happened to be in Kenya with her husband. George Vi's wife became Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the daughter became Queen Elizabeth II. She has now reigned longer than Queen Victoria did, I believe. And from what I recall of Queen Victoria, I think this Queen has also been far more involved with the job for the whole time. Queen Victoria isolated herself for some years after her husband Albert's death.
Marg
. He's a history buff and he watches things like this simply because of the history of it, he likes a ring side seat even if things normally wouldn't interest him. I can tell though that he's liking the romance part of it all too, but I promised myself to not rib him about it lol. 
