The Mail on Sunday is reporting that friends of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall say they will marry in May next year. They have been secretly engaged for some months.

Mike and Zara at Cheltenham races earlier this year

The favoured venue, as of now, seems to be St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, with a reception at Frogmore House. Zara and Mike were clearly impressed with the ambience of her brother Peter’s nuptials in May. They will not be repeating the involvement of Hello! magazine, however.

Zara’s father, Mark Phillips, who coaches his daughter in her three-day eventing specialism, has asked her to delay an announcement until after the Beijing Olympics to concentrate on winning a gold medal. Zara has been the European Champion and currently holds the World title.

Any other Royal wedding planned for next year is likely to be in mid-summer to avoid a clash.

As it’s a slow news Sunday here’s a shot of the River Exe I took this morning.

The River Exe at Exeter with two canoeists enjoying the June weather

How could a “private” Royal wedding between the Queen’s normally well-behaved grandson and a Canadian secretarial assistant end in a minor constitutional crisis?

Weddings and funerals are what Royalty does best, aren’t they?

Last night, Princes William and Harry let it be known they are furious about the extensive Hello! magazine coverage of the event and their own unwitting involvement.

A Royal source said, “Neither Peter nor the magazine sought their approval, and if they had, it certainly would not have been given. What has happened has not gone down well at all. They are very unhappy about it … as far as Harry, Kate and Chelsy are concerned, they were just letting their hair down at a private family event.”

Looking back over the titles of our wedding reports here at Royal Anecdotes, words like “fiasco”, “fandango”, “woes”, “pullout” and “sellout” predominate, some as far back as May the 5th.

I’m inclined to believe that naivety was the central cause of this slow motion train wreck of a wedding, mainly because very few of the participants knew the full extent of the sell-out to Hello! magazine, or even that the official photographs were to be handed to the notoriously voracious celebrity glossy.

From the Kelly family we were fed the sob story that they couldn’t afford the £50,000 ($100,000) for the reception in Frogmore House. That doesn’t begin to stack up because such a relatively small sum would easily have been found from the Royal Family, or their many supporters, had word gone around.

My guess is that Autumn Kelly didn’t want the state of the family finances to become known, so senior Royals were kept in the dark while she used her celebrity connections in Michael Parkinson’s office to broker the £500,000+ ($1m) deal. In that case, Peter Phillips is partly culpable. At some point his instincts as a member of the Royal Family must have kicked in to warn him of the dangers.

As for the Queen, who is now open season for criticism by some anti-Royal Members of Parliament, she must bitterly reflect that nothing much has gone right since the retirement of Sir Robin Janvrin, her Private Secretary, last year.

In November, there was the “double-booking” of a Commonwealth Conference in Africa with her Diamond Wedding Party at the Ritz — eventually cancelled.

Then came Gold Cup day at Cheltenham, when the Queen found she was to open the ill-fated Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport on the same day. Other confusions have occurred too, culminating in the appalling Palace handling of the Phillips wedding. Dare we suggest that the Queen needs a new Private Secretary?

As for Peter and Autumn, they will not easily be allowed to forget the damage they have inflicted on the Monarchy for personal gain.

Let’s hope future Royal weddings, now queueing in the pipeline, are better handled and managed. Some frankness from those concerned might be a very good start.

The rumour we mentioned earlier, that Autumn Kelly (now Phillips) was responsible for negotiating the contract which sold the Queen to a celebrity magazine, is gaining ground.

We are hearing that an unholy row has broken out in Royal circles over what has been a dismal start to Peter Phillips’s married life.

It began with the simple fact that the Kelly family could not afford to foot the £50,000 ($100,000) bill for the reception at Frogmore House. The mother of the groom, Princess Anne, refused to pick it up, as did his father, Mark Phillips.

Faced with those facts, most families would have arranged a much simpler “private” wedding with a small reception and buffet in a private house. However, Autumn decided to go for a celebrity-style pay-out and stage a big bash in magnificent Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle. The sum agreed is thought to be well above the $1m mark so far publicized.

When the first Hello! interview with the couple was published last week, the Queen was said to be mortified. The Palace launched what it called “a damage limitation excercise”. Severe restrictions were placed on who and what could be photographed, and the degree of access allowed. However, the magazine currently has the official photograph of the Queen and the couple on its website, giving the impression that they have bought the whole show. Nobody seems to know what might appear in Wednesday’s edition of the magazine.

This is a bad start to Autumn’s peripheral “Royal” career and will mark her out as “pushy” from the outset.

Peter and Autumn at St. George’s Chapel after the ceremony

Buckingham Palace is confirming that Hello! magazine was not at the wedding service in St. George’s Chapel and will not be at the reception at Frogmore House.

It looks like the Palace has finally put its foot down, possibly encouraged by the Queen, and put a stop to the commercial aspect of this Royal wedding in all but name. Quite what Hello! will publish on Wednesday is now open to question, but it can’t be much, judging by what we were allowed to glimpse.

Both Kate Middleton and Chelsy Davy were there, say the BBC, but didn’t figure in the photograph after the wedding. We look forward to the one official photograph.

What a pity this event has been marred by swirling rumours of a sell-out, even that they sold the Queen to a celebrity magazine.

I can’t imagine this happening in Robin Janvrin’s day.