On 17 July 2020, Beatrice of York married in one of the chapels of Windsor Castle. It was the first secret royal wedding in the British family in more than 235 years - and today marks six years since it happened.

The original plan was something else entirely: 29 May 2020, St James's Palace, a reception at Buckingham. Then everything fell apart. The scandal around Prince Andrew, the bride's father. Harry and Meghan walking away. And the pandemic. Of those three reasons, only one was outside their control.

They were left with two weeks to organise it. The mothers helped - Sarah Ferguson and Nikki Williams-Ellis. The best man was Christopher Woolf, Edoardo's young son from a previous relationship, and he became the youngest best man ever seen at a royal wedding.

The dress that already had a life

Beatrice wore a vintage ivory silk taffeta dress - a dress belonging to Queen Elizabeth II, made by Norman Hartnell, the official dressmaker to the Queen and the Queen Mother. It has a geometric bodice set with brilliant-cut diamonds. The organza sleeves were added for the occasion; the original had wide straps. It was reworked by Angela Kelly, Elizabeth's personal stylist for more than twenty years, and by designer Stewart Parvin. Elizabeth wore it at least three times in her youth.

The tiara with three lives

The tiara has a better biography than most people. It started out as Queen Victoria's necklace at her own wedding. In 1919, Garrard & Co., royal goldsmiths since 1843, turned it into a tiara. Elizabeth II wore it at her wedding in 1947. So what sat on Beatrice's head was an object that had passed through three centuries and three brides.

The bouquet held roses, jasmine and sprigs of myrtle. Nearly every British royal bride has carried myrtle since the 19th century - a symbol of fertility, love and innocence - ever since Victoria used it in 1840 at her wedding to Prince Albert.

Beatrice and Edoardo knew each other as children through family connections, and rekindled the relationship in 2018 at Princess Eugenie's wedding. Today they have two daughters: Sienna Elizabeth, born in 2021, and Athena Elizabeth, born in January 2025.

What survives from this wedding is not the extravagance - there wasn't any. What survives is that when everything else collapsed, the family went to the wardrobe and pulled out a dress seventy years old. There is something in that which every Balkan household understands: the most ceremonial object in the house is often borrowed, altered and already worn by someone else. The only difference is whose grandmother kept it.