IT must be comforting for the House of Windsor that Tatler magazine rates the Duke of York as Britain's most eligible bachelor, and the most wanted celebrity guest at Britain's high society parties this year.

Otherwise, the royal family may have felt that the eclipse had come early and turned off its sun, or that the Nostradamus prediction that the end of the world was scheduled for this past weekend applied to it alone.

Because at the weekend, another queen was ascending her throne in true majesty; another young bride plighted her troth in true fairy-tale splendour before an audience hungry for the stuff of which Camelot was made.

The British public is nothing if not fickle. On the one hand, it has bayed for the monarchy to get a life, to get real, to come down to earth.

On the other, it sets off in its collective shellsuit for Ireland to camp overnight outside the grounds of the 560-acre Luttrellstown Castle to catch a glimpse of Victoria Adams and David Beckham getting married in the kind of style which would have put the Sun King's gas at a peep.

Ms Adams is a singer, one of the four remaining Spice Girls. Mr Beckham is a footballer. Together, they seem to have an income which allows them to re-create Couture's Romans of the Decadence.

Not to suggest for one moment that the guests behaved themselves in quite the same way as the artist depicted those last debauched days of the Roman Empire, but if Caligula ever signed a contract with OK! magazine, he would have been hard pressed to match the scene which that publication contracted to photograph for a reputed #1m.

It was that little nest egg which allowed Posh Spice, the Manchester United star, and their baby son Brooklyn, to indulge in a fantasy which was sired by Disney out of the Palace of Versailles.

The ''let them eat cake'' wedding was creatively devised by Ms Adams and Mr Beckham, supported by a London events and party planning company. Ms Adams had expressed a wish for a fairytale wedding, and spent #500,000 getting it. Her specifications included hanging red apples from the trees inside the wedding marquee, layers of rose petals for the guests to walk across, and footmen in silk stockings and purple sashes.

The bride had a 20ft train, a #100,000 gold and diamond crown, two little bridesmaids dressed as angels, and 125 security guards.

Whatever other accessories guests chose to grace their wedding outfits (Spice girl colleague Mel G wore slinky black with red shoes, while Sporty Spice had a white leather biker's jacket). each, including baby Brooklyn, also wore a security tag at all times.

The castle was swathed in 10,281ft of fabric, purple pennants bearing the initials of the couple and their child were raised above it, and there were purple carpets leading to the thrones on which the couple presided at the reception.

The place was awash with vintage champagne and sticky toffee pudding. The decor included statues of gilded naked women which looked a little as though they had been appropriated from the windows of a West End store, and black cats in the style of Ancient Egypt.

This eclectic style led a Spice Girls mole to mutter: ''The ceremony would have been moving for Posh and Becks, but even so it was a bit tacky by some people's standards.''

A hundred white doves were released after the ceremony, overkill by most standards.

The wedding, conducted by the Bishop of Cork, was to be private, with the loving couple allegedly paying for previously booked members of the public to vacate the premises. Public hunger for the pomp and ceremony denied it by the Wessex wedding, however, has led to an unseemly squabble over the publication of pictures, and the spice is off OK!'s gingerbread.

So whither royality in the new millennium? Should the Windsors dust off the glass coaches and feed up the white mice? Should Sophie Wessex be forced to wear a tiara to work? Or do we simply sing ''God save our gracious Spice'' and thank our lucky stars that someone still knows how to do things in style?