Royal Marriage - or was it ?

Good to see in The Times that (Prof) Stephen Cretney is sticking to his guns over the Royal (?)Marriage. His line is that the Civil Marriages legislation has never covered Royal Marriages (why would they have wanted it to do so ?), and that therefore Prince Charles and (er) Camilla are not married after all. It's not just an Old [Bristol] Uni Tie thing - Lord Falconer has not (so far as I know) explained precisely how the Human Rights Act helps here, beyond vague references to Section 3 and Article 12. Some cynics, of course - and I would not wish to be one - might suspect an attempt to embarrass Prince Charles for his dislike of the HRA.

Richard's theory - for assistance with which his colleague Mr Ian Brown deserves much credit and no blame - is that the flipside of Prof Cretney's point is that the Royals are able to celebrate a common law marriage, which may also be the better view of what difference (if any) the HRA could make. As I understand it, what is needed are words of present and effectual mutual commitment by the parties - which presumably they spoke in the ceremony.

The difficulty facing this is admittedly a couple of 19th-century House of Lords decisions (at least one on an Irish appeal, I think ?) that demand a priest to be present. Richard's view is that they were wrongly decided (!), but it may be that there were some ordinands among the protestors milling around on that day in Windsor - might this suffice ? The Archbishop of Canterbury was, I think, waiting at Windsor Castle.