Elizabeth Hurley joins special Shropshire celebration for baby Cosima

It was also a golden wedding celebration for William's parents, Staffordshire MP Sir Bill Cash and his wife Biddy.

Friends and family enjoyed a special dinner on Saturday night before attending the Christening at St Michael's Church in Upton Cressett.

The group included North Shropshire MP Owen Paterson and his wife Rose, who is chairman of Aintree racecourse.

William said: "It was a delightful and gloriously happy family affair."

He joked that there was a 'Family Masterchef' contest, with Laura cooking the Christening lunch of cold fillet of Morville beef and wild mushroom tart, and his mother Biddy cooking for the Saturday dinner party of pork medallions in brandy sauce.

He added: "Guests were jokingly asked to leave voting cards on the table."

The godparents of Cosima included Miss Hurley, a friend of the Cash family, as well as Bugatti driver Charles Dean and Shropshire sheep farmer Grania Reed. Tom Faure-Romanelli flew in with his wife Ilaria from Miami for the weekend and Laura invited her friends Emma de Rosney and Paddy Magan to be godparents.

The group posed for photographs outside St Michael's Church following the ceremony, which included historic costume dancing by Courtesie and choral works by John Rutter and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

William said the highlight of the Saturday night dinner was the speech by Sir Bill, joking: "My father refrained from talking about his 'Thirty Years War' to save British democracy from EU domination and instead told the story of his courtship of my mother at Oxford."

He said his parents met in a cinema trip with friends. His mother was 16 and was studying at Beechlawn. They were married on October 16, 1965, at the chapel of Wardour Castle.

William added: "Apparently the wedding was a nerve-wracking affair as my mother, who was just 20, was late by an hour after being stuck in her car behind a travelling circus in the depths of Somerset."

A third reason to celebrate for the Cash family was that Laura's father Charles Cathcart planted a sapling from one of the surviving seven sweet chestnut trees of Hougoumont farmhouse that survive from the 1815 battlefield of Waterloo.

Two Cathcart brothers fought at the battle, including defending the old Hougoumont farmhouse from the French. General Cathcart had three horses shot beneath him in the course of the battle, the other was aide-de-camp (ADC) to the Duke of Wellington. The new tree is a replacement for some Spanish chestnuts at Upton Cressett that were originally planted in 1815 to mark victory at Waterloo. They have started to die and two have had to be felled.

Although the dinner was to celebrate Cosima's christening and the Cash family Golden wedding anniversary, Sir Bill and Biddy could not claim the longest anniversary of years together. Driving from Norfolk were Laura's grandparents Des and Sue Skinner, who celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary this year.

Des, aged 90 an still active as a racing trainer, saw action in World War Two serving in North Italy.

He recalled how, on returning home Italy, he had bought a large gorgonzola wheel of cheese to take home to his parents on his return where nobody had eaten cheese for years because of war rations.

But, after a week travelling in the heat, the suitcase with his Italian spoils of war had to be abandoned before reaching Norfolk as it "smelt worse than any stink bomb".