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Camilla missed from New Year royal prayers

LONDON — An Anglican clergyman surprised British royal-watchers yesterday when he failed to mention Prince Charles’s new wife Camilla in prayers at a New Year’s Day church service attended by Queen Elizabeth II.

Reverend Jonathan Riviere named the monarch, her husband Prince Philip and heir to the throne Charles during a service at St Mary Magdalene church on the royal estate at Sandringham, in the east of England.

But he conspicuously made no mention of the former Camilla Parker Bowles, now Duchess of Cornwall, who Charles married in a civil ceremony in April last year, despite having spoken of her at Christmas prayers a week earlier.

Neither Charles nor Camilla were at the service, but several people in the 500-strong crowd that swelled outside the church to see the royals said they noticed the omission.

“I cannot understand it,” said Ted Bailey, a royal enthusiast from the university town of Cambridge. “If they prayed for her before, why didn’t they today?”

But another member of the crowd, who did not want to give her name, said: “There are bigger things in the world to worry about. He probably just forgot.”

Queen Elizabeth did not mention her eldest son’s wedding to Camilla in her Christmas Day broadcast to the nation last week, an omission that was interpreted as a “snub” by some commentators.

This Christmas was Camilla’s first at Sandringham, and her presence at the vast estate guaranteed big crowds and applause when she attended the Christmas Day church service.

Charles was previously married with two sons to the glamorous Princess Diana. They divorced in 1996, a year before she died in a Paris car crash alongside her lover Dodi Fayed and their driver.