If something odd happens at a royal family function, there's a decent chance royal protocol is to blame. The Firm is definitely modernizing, but they also still observe a whole host of traditions, rules, and protocols that date back decades or even centuries.
One shining example of royal protocol leaving royal fans scratching their heads occurred at Princess Eugenie's royal wedding to Jack Brooksbank in October 2018, where one of the best seats at the ceremony was mysteriously left empty.
When Eugenie and Jack exchanged vows at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, the guest list was long and included A-list celebrities like Liv Tyler, Demi Moore, Cara Delevigne, and Ellie Goulding, among others, in addition to Eugenie's famous royal relatives.
With such an impressive guest list, royal fans were baffled to by the empty seat in the front row at St. George's Chapel. At the time, royal fans and onlookers had a range of theories about the empty seat, from theories that it was intentionally left empty out of respect to a deceased relative to speculation that a VIP guest had missed the wedding.
Jack Brooksbank and Princess Eugenie, looking toward the noticeably empty seat in the front row of their wedding at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle.
According to the Daily Mail, however, the real answer was a simple matter of royal protocol—and the late Queen Elizabeth's personal preferences.
While the outlet notes that the Queen and the rest of the royals traditionally sit in the right-hand choir pews at St. George's Chapel, it also points out that royal protocol clearly states that no one is allowed to obstruct the Queen's view by sitting in front of her.
Usually, this empty seat problem is easily avoided by seating the monarch in the front row, but, according to the Daily Mail, the seat in question was one that Queen Elizabeth "didn't find comfortable." Obviously, there's no royal protocol that requires the monarch to sit in an uncomfortable seat just because it happens to be in the front row, so Elizabeth opted to sit in the second row, next to her husband, Prince Philip.
Since no one was allowed to engage in monarch view-obstructing, the seat remained empty, which means the Queen also saved anyone else in the royal family from having to suffer through the hour-long ceremony in the uncomfortable seat, which really sounds like a win-win situation all around.