HRH Prince Jaime De Bourbon Parme Marries Viktoria Cservenyak
Apparently, his mother is one of the princesses of the Netherlands, and when she divorced his father, they went back to the Netherlands and lived with the Queen, which is why they got married in the Netherlands and half the Dutch royals are in attendance. Lord Wikipedia says he is "a Dutch diplomat," and he has a BA from Brown and a Masters from Johns Hopkins, so probably not too dumb. And I guess he does a lot of work to combat blood diamonds so....probably not evil, either. BORING.
HRH Prince Jaime De Bourbon Parme Marries Viktoria Cservenyak
She is a lawyer. Her dad is a Hungarian water polo star! Her dress was designed by the melodically named Dutch designer Claes Iversen, and it's very simple. I wish the lace at the bottom didn't rather look as if she had walked through a field of spitballs en route to the ceremony.
HRH Prince Jaime De Bourbon Parme Marries Viktoria Cservenyak
You guys know I love the "turn around to look back before entering the church" shot. I also like that her bouquet seems to be made of wildflowers.
rincess Margarita de Bourbon de Parma and Tjalling ten Cate
Margarita is the groom's twin sister -- the Brenda to his Brandon. Only two of these kids belong to them. She looks somewhat beige, but she has a SCANDALOUS FIRST MARRIAGE! Settle in:
Per Wikipedia, with grammatical errors corrected by yours truly: "Princess Margarita married the entrepreneur Edwin Karel Willem de Roy van Zuydewijn (never trust a man with that many names)... De Roy van Zuydewijn was, however, not trusted by the Dutch Royal Family, and the marriage was therefore not attended by its senior members. (If none of the Royal Family comes to your wedding, this is a bad sign. If you yourself are royalty, anyway. The rest of us are okay)
In 2003, a series of incidents had become known as the Margarita Affair. (It's a REALLY bad sign when something happens that becomes the [YOUR NAME] Affair) Margarita and her husband accused the Dutch Royal House and the Dutch secret service of obstructing the affairs of Fincentives, de Roy van Zuydewijn's company. They also said that their telephone conversations had been secretly taped. After some while it was revealed that the Queen's personal Cabinet had indeed ordered an investigation. (In other words, "we TOLD YOU we didn't trust him!)"
Then the Dutch royal family basically banned her from family events until she divorced that first dude, which she did. I have no idea if this dude WAS shady -- please weigh in, Dutch readers -- but it seems like that relationship was doomed from the get-go.
Princess Beatrix of The Netherlands, Countess Luana and Princess Mabel
Princess Beatrix looks lovely and only vaguely upholstered in a way that ladies her age can totally pull off. Mabel is the one who SCANDALOUSLY was accused of having associated with a drug lord before she married Prince Friso, and she also had an affair with the married Bosnian UN ambassador, so I think it's fair to say that she makes questionable life decisions. I was going to make a mean crack that she looks like she's in mourning but it turns out she is in morning because remember how Prince Friso was in a coma because he got caught in an avalanche? The poor guy died. And YES, all of those sentences are TRUE. Anyway, they all seem to be holding up okay after such a terrible turn of events.
Princess Ariane, Princess Amalia and Princess Alexia of The Netherlands
These three are Willem-Alexander and Maxima's kids -- remember them from W-A and M's coronation? -- and the aforementioned King and Queen didn't seem to attend. (I think W-A is the groom's....cousin? So this isn't like a HUGE SNUB, especially since they sent the little princesses, who are cute indeed.
Princess Carolina de Bourbon de Parme and Prince Carlos
You can tell this wedding is pretty low-key on the royals scale because no one's hat appears to be eating her face.
Princess Carolina is the groom's sister and she went to Harvard and Oxford and now she works for the UN and she went to Indonesia to help tsunami victims so she's clearly also a terrible dumb person who wears awful colors except the opposite of that.
Carlos is her brother, I think, and his Wikipedia involves the sentence, "He is generally considered as the pretender to the defunct throne of Parma under the name Carlo V," and it's a great tragedy of my life that I'm not the pretender to ANY throne. He also fathered a child with someone named "Brigitte Klynstra, the stepdaughter of Count Adolph van Rechteren Limpurg, Lord of Enghuizen." I feel like someone named Count Adolph van Rechteren Limpurg is likely to challenge you to a dual for that. He then married someone called "Annemarie Gualthérie van Weezel" whose entire Wikipedia page is in Dutch, so I can't tell you if she ever had an affair with a Bosnian or a drug lord or a water polo player or challenged anyone to a duel.
Princess Marilene and Prince Maurits
So now we know who DIDN'T call each other before the wedding to see what they were wearing. AWKWARD.
Prince Jaime de Bourbon Parme and Princess Irene
Almost everyone, in fact, went for her Low Key Fascinator. This is the groom walking in with his mother, who looks lovely; I want that coat. She's very interesting; apparently, her entire family fled to Great Britain during WWII when she was an infant, because the Nazis had invaded. Per Wiki, "As the family was leaving the Netherlands, the port where they were boarding the British warship was fiercely attacked by a German air raid; one of the German bombs exploded within 200 yards of the family. Irene was placed in a gasproof carrier to guard the child against chemical warfare." THEN the Blitz started and they went to Canada.
We've talked about her before, I think -- she was studying in Spain and fell in love with Carlos Hugo, Duke of Parma and SECRETLY CONVERTED to Catholicism for him and her family found out when they saw a photo of her GETTING MASS on the front page of the paper, which is a hell of a way to tell someone about your religious conversion. Then there was this WHOLE escandelo about her marrying a Catholic that included BOMB THREATS, in part because the Dutch were still mad about her marrying into a country that supported Hitler, so her mother, the Queen, tried to stop the wedding and there was all this back and forth and everyone decided Irene was under the thrall of General Franco (!!!) and then it turned out that she KIND OF WAS! And then she tried to get the Pope to talk everyone into okaying the marriage and the Pope was kind of like, "I don't know, dude" and then she married the guy ANYWAY and she was basically dead to the Dutch, and THEN she was exiled from Spain due to being kind of a political wackjob, so she was ALSO dead to the Spanish, so she and her husband kind of jet-setted around for awhile.
THEN they got divorced and now she writes books about how she talks to trees (!!) and dolphins (!!) and apparently wears nice coat and the Dutch have decided they're going to just deal with her.
Prince Pieter Christiaan of The Netherlands, Princess Emma of The Netherlands, Princess Anita of The Netherlands, Princess Magali of The Netherlands and Prince Floris of The Netherlands
How can you even follow a woman who caused an international scandal and now talks to plants? You just can't.