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    LIFE Royal Weddings: Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition
    LIFE Royal Weddings: Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition
    LIFE Royal Weddings: Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    LIFE Royal Weddings: Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition

    By The Editors of LIFE

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    About this ebook

    A generation ago, hidebound royal traditions would have prevented Prince Harry from marrying his love, Meghan Markle, a divorced American actress. But times are changing, even at Buckingham Palace. Celebrate this new chapter as well as the historic marriages of the British Royal family in this special edition, LIFE Royal Weddings.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLife
    Release dateApr 13, 2018
    ISBN9781547842582
    LIFE Royal Weddings: Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition

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      Book preview

      LIFE Royal Weddings - The Editors of LIFE

      carriage

      INTRODUCTION

      A New Chapter

      A generation ago, hidebound royal traditions would have prevented Prince Harry from marrying his love, Meghan Markle, a divorced American actress. But times are changing, even at Buckingham Palace

      BY PATRICK ROGERS

      FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

      ALL SMILES On a drizzling November morning Prince Harry and Meghan Markle strolled through the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace to talk to the press about their engagement. The first question was easy: How are you guys feeling?

      For royal watchers, no other occasion promises such grandeur and romance as the wedding of a high-ranking member of Britain’s House of Windsor. The horse-drawn carriages parading in the streets of London, fanfares from silver trumpets, and the flash of gold braid and medals on crisp uniforms pay homage to the ruling monarchy. Under a cathedral vault, a real-life prince or princess promises life and love to another, ensuring the seamless survival of an ancient dynasty. Inevitably, the term fairy tale enters the picture, as the bride, trailing lengths of white silk and lace, makes her way up the aisle under the halo of a jeweled tiara. Outside, the public waits to catch a glimpse of the royal newlyweds, just as an estimated one million spectators packed into the streets of London when Prince William and the former Kate Middleton made their way from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace on April 29, 2011.

      Now Prince Henry of Wales, 33, and his bride, the American actress Meghan Markle, 36, will become the latest to wed in the royal British tradition. Their union represents as much the start of a new chapter in that history as it does a continuation of an old one. For he is a prince and she a princess-to-be like none before them. A former army officer who has long championed the disabled, Harry, who follows William’s children in the line of succession to the British throne, is easily the most popular of the Windsors. He also carries the torch passed to him by his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, the rebel royal who won the hearts of her people before her early death in 1997. Markle, meanwhile, is a mold-breaker to the royal tradition: The biracial daughter of an African American mother and a white father, she is a former TV star, and an outspoken activist for women’s rights. And a divorcée, too.

      That fact alone might have barred Markle from joining Britain’s royal family just a generation ago. But the history of Windsor wives and husbands over the past half century has been one of evolution and liberalization. On the eve of the Second World War, the recently ascended King Edward VIII—uncle of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II—in love with an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson, faced a drastic choice. The Church of England at that time barred persons who had divorced from marrying again if the ex-spouse was still living, as Simpson’s was. The British monarch is also the supreme governor of the Church of England. Edward could continue to serve as Britain’s king, or he could marry the woman he loved—but not both. Edward chose love. He gave up his crown and married Simpson in a private ceremony at a borrowed chateau in France in 1937.

      In the 1950s, the queen’s only sibling, Princess Margaret, was forced to turn down the marriage proposal of a man she loved, Group Captain Peter Townsend, also divorced, for similar reasons. Since her sister was titular head of the Church of England, for Margaret to marry a man who had defied church teaching was deemed unseemly. Yet as a string of other royal family members would subsequently learn, even a wedding in Westminster Abbey couldn’t ensure long-term happiness. The marriages of Princess Margaret to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960; of the queen’s daughter, Princess Anne, to Captain Mark Phillips in 1973; and of her son Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson in 1986 all ended in divorce. Indeed, the most magnificent of all that generation’s nuptials—the July 29, 1981, wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in St. Paul’s Cathedral, witnessed by an estimated global TV audience of 750 million—also ended in divorce, a spectacularly sordid split in 1996.

      Still, a royal wedding is an occasion not only for pomp but also for hope and joy. In time, church law has loosened, and love seems to have replaced duty and antiquated notions of the propriety in the choosing of royal mates. After a compassionate loosening of the rules governing divorce in 2002, members of the Church of England may now remarry. That one change allowed Prince Charles finally to join with the only woman he has ever truly loved, Camilla Parker Bowles, at a civil ceremony followed by a service of blessing led by the Archbishop of Canterbury at St. George’s at Windsor Castle in 2005.

      In the months before Harry

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