William & Kate's Original Wedding Guest List Was Ripped To Shreds (With Elizabeth's Blessing)

Around a million people took to the streets of London in celebration of the wedding of William, Prince of Wales, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, in 2011. It looked like a fairytale wedding to everyone watching at home, and The List readers consider it their favorite royal wedding. A  select group of 1,900 people got to watch the ceremony in person at Westminster Abbey, and those 1,900 should consider themselves lucky to have made it in because William didn't actually like the first version of the guest list. He took his issues with it to Queen Elizabeth II, and she was on his side to redo it.

William talked about the pivotal moment in an interview with ITV1 in 2012. "There was very much a subdued moment when I was handed a list with 777 names on, not one person I knew, or Catherine knew," he said. Instead of simply accepting that those people all had to be there, he went to the queen to get her advice about the situation.

He said the queen told him, "Get rid of it, start from your friends, and we'll invite those we need to in due course." It's nice to know that she was there for him in that moment. William described the queen as being his "grandmother first, queen second" in the same ITV1 interview, and it's moments like this that really show how she lived that out for him.

With the queen's blessing, William, Prince of Wales, and Catherine, Princess of Wales, got to be like any ordinary couple getting married — focusing on making sure that their loved ones would be there for their wedding. So friends from St. Andrews University, where William and Kate first met, got one of the coveted invites.

William and Kate also invited 80 representatives linked to charities that they had worked with or were passionate about, like Seyi Obakin, Chief Executive of Centrepoint, a youth homeless charity that was William's first patronage. A number of celebrities made the invite list as well, like David and Victoria Beckham, Elton John, and Joss Stone.

However, every royal wedding still has a number of traditions and rules to follow, and William and Kate's wedding was considered a "semi-state" event, per The Guardian. So it couldn't just be friends and family. It's not clear who got cut from the first version, but the revamped guest list still included members of government, foreign dignitaries, and other royals, like Belgium's then-Prince Philippe and Princess Mathilde.