Well, that was fun. A good time was had by all. In the words of one well-placed source, “the ceremony was over very quickly, in about fifteen minutes. Then everyone hit the dance floor. It seemed they all just wanted to party.”
No, wait. Hang on, that was Meghan Markle’s first wedding, held in 2011, in Jamaica. Then came her second wedding, at the end of last month, when, in the guise of Rachel Zane, she married Mike Ross, formerly a fake lawyer, as the seventh season of “Suits” drew to a close. (“We’re getting married, and it can be as small as possible, with just our close friends, O.K.?” Rachel once said.) Given that he had proposed to her in the fourth season, the wait had been a long one. Mike was played by Patrick J. Adams, who greeted the announcement of Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry with a pained lament: “She said she was just going out to get some milk.”
And so, at last, to the festivities of today, when Markle was hitched to her true love—her true true love, forever and ever—at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Third time lucky. The heavens above were of an unfamiliar blue. Ever since Elizabeth II was crowned under soaking skies, the pact between good news and bad weather has been a matter of national pride, yet here we were, suffused with warmth—an event so rare that it was greeted by Amal Clooney in a dress of liquefied sunshine. Her husband’s suit, to judge by its tint of shimmering gray, had been woven from the same material as his beard. Oprah Winfrey was in pink and continued to radiate satisfaction, despite the fact that, having turned up promptly at a quarter to ten, she had to occupy her spot in the knights’ stalls of the chapel (not the coziest of perches) for two and a quarter hours before the main event. So contagious were “the atmospherics,” as one member of the palace staff described them, that even Victoria Beckham was affected. She didn’t actually smile, but there were several moments when it looked as if she might.
The surrounding mood was of a buoyancy not seen since the London Olympics in 2012. Ordinary citizens initiated conversations of their own free will rather than, as custom dictates, either waiting for their dogs to sniff each other or deciding not to speak at all. More than two thousand members of the public had been invited onto the castle grounds and were guaranteed a clear view of the proceedings. The invitation was, in part, a vote of thanks for services rendered. One such guest, Helen Mack, had worked in the hospice movement for thirty years, providing care for the terminally ill; another spectator, Cavita Chapman, is not only a senior manager in the treatment of mental health—a cause to which Harry has lent outspoken support—but, as I learned, an expert on the insanely complex plot of “Suits.” Chapman was crisp in her assessment of the real-life couple, expecting great things of Meghan (“She’s a feminist”) and the Prince—“Harry’s always been, you know, ‘Why not?’ ” Put together, Chapman said, “Both of them will change the world.”
Some aspects of the world, meanwhile, remain unchangeable, and what lent such singular flavor to today’s ceremony was its mashup of old and new. The Queen, for instance, is widely deemed to be immortal—constitutionally forbidden to die, one might say, in the minds of her more loyal subjects—and she continues to be driven around in vast and silent cars. Having stationed myself a few yards from her Bentley as it stole past, I can report that it makes slightly less noise than a Burmese cat lying down on a bed of cashmere. We were told that the vehicle in question “now has a biofuel engine,” but I don’t believe that. I think it runs on air and prayer. Similarly, the morning coat worn by the Prince of Wales was apparently made by Anderson & Sheppard, his regular tailors, back in 1988. Fine. Why didn’t he go all the way, though, and match it with a windblown haircut and a pair of royal leg warmers? And how about Camilla in a power suit with padded shoulders? Some folk have no sense of adventure.
Like all outbursts of joy, this one was attended by a host of ironies. A few of them lurked underfoot. Three hours before the service, I processed up the aisle of the chapel, tracing the route that the bride would soon be taking, and, believe me, you cannot do so without trampling on an awful lot of kings. One of them is Henry VIII, under whose aegis the English Church was sundered from papal authority; if His Majesty, interred below, was incensed at the passing of Markle, who was educated at the Immaculate Heart High School, in Los Angeles, he didn’t show it. The marble floor stayed cool.
More piquant still, the last monarch whom you come to before you reach the altar is George III, from whom America was both determined and delighted to tear itself away. As Markle walked all over him, at noon today, one wondered how recently she saw “Hamilton,” which is now playing to thunderous acclaim in London, and which portrays King George as a spoiled and petulant fop. Just to add extra spice to the occasion, his direct descendant, who has now been on the throne for more than sixty years, was standing a few feet away, missing nothing, and clad in a coat of lime silk tweed. With frogging. I like to think that Harry leaned over to Meghan and whispered, “Tread softly, for you tread on my relatives.”
All of this brings us to the thorny question of the family trees. What occurred today, in summary, was this: an American divorcée married a man whose brother will only become king because of his paternal grandmother’s father, who only became king because his brother wanted to marry an American divorcée. History goes around in circles.
The Markle clan, Lord knows, has its own predicaments, and the distressing business of the bride’s father—should he, could he, walk her down the aisle?—was settled and quelled with hardly a day to spare. (As a rule, if the shock troops of the tabloid media, in print or online, can’t catch you in the act of committing a sin, they will cunningly create a sin for you to commit, and then flay you for having done so. That was the hook on which poor Thomas Markle was snagged.) In all honesty, however, the Windsors are in no position to lord it over the Markles when it comes to marital resilience, apart from the example set by the Queen; of her four children, all but one are divorced. So it seemed only fitting, as the principal players briefly left the stage, in St. George’s Chapel, to sign the register, that a touch of benign equality prevailed. Prince Charles reached out and took the hand of Doria Ragland, the bride’s mother. Quite right, too. She had shouldered the far from enviable task of representing an entire family, single-handed, with a couple of billion people watching her every move, and had done so with composure and grace.
More from The New Yorker on the royal wedding.
The service itself was surprisingly swift, and the language of the liturgy had been stripped of booby traps. Not for Meghan the multiple first names in which her mother-in-law, Diana Spencer, got her tongue twisted, in 1981, when trying to address Charles Philip Arthur George at the altar. Nor did Harry have to stumble through “And thereto I plight thee my troth,” a phrase over which so many grooms have tripped. Instead, he said, “In the presence of God, I make this vow.” Simple stuff. Mind you, he was, by common consent, much the more flustered half of the couple—rosy with emotion, and barely a sniff away from sobs when he first caught sight of his bride, who glided toward him, trailing her five-yard train and looking frighteningly calm. As one royal fan, camped out overnight on a Windsor sidewalk, remarked of the groom, “He’s absolutely besotted.” Just so. As a revelation of character, today was a far cry from his brother’s wedding, in 2011, when Harry, in his capacity as scamp-in-waiting to the Royal Family, grinned like an imp at the rear view of the bride’s sister. He has grown up since then, and I’m not just talking about the beard.
Other details, cleverly applied: first, the flowers. The day was a sensation jamboree. If you reckon that St. George’s Chapel looked lovely, and that the anthems echoing around its vaulted ceiling were rich and sonorous, you should have smelled the place. It was still being festooned through the final hours of darkness, before Saturday was awake. I walked in, through the “cascading hedgerow” that was wreathed around the church’s west door, and caught the full impact of the floral arrangements within. So overpowering was this that, to be frank, I wasn’t sure whether I should be taking notes or gathering pollen. If the guests had stayed in their pews for long enough, they would have ended up producing their own honey.
The singing, too, bore the imprint of precision. “Stand By Me,” performed by the Kingdom Choir, would not have been so stirring had it not been preceded by Thomas Tallis’s “If Ye Love Me,” one of the most serene motets in the canon of English music. Combine the two, and what do you get? “If ye love me, stand by me”: a commandment in itself. Then, there was the opening hymn, “Lord of All Hopefulness,” the words of which were written by Jan Struther, who happens also to be the author of “Mrs. Miniver”—a book that, in consort with the movie adaptation of 1942, was famously effective in fortifying the wartime alliance between Britain and America. Nice.
In a similar vein, much praise has been directed toward Meghan Markle’s veil, which, in accordance with her wishes, was embroidered with a flower from each nation of the Commonwealth. There are fifty-three in all, and, if you didn’t know that the Sepik Blue orchid is the favored bloom of Papua New Guinea, shame on you. But the good sense displayed by the bride, in choosing such a feature, is what counts; call it a smart update on the move made by the Queen when, as Princess Elizabeth, she colluded in the fashioning of her own wedding dress by saving up ration coupons (because the whole country was still laboring under rationing in 1947) in order to pay for the fabric. She wanted to be on the level, in however small a way, with the people over whom she would reign.
And so to the sermon. Or the address, or maybe the homily, or, as I prefer to think of it, the aria. Some listeners found it too long. I wanted more of it—hour after hour of oceanic incantation, wave upon wave. Martin Luther King, Jr., was name-checked within seconds. Fifteen minutes in, and Bishop Curry was just warming up, in the instinctive assurance that nothing of this timbre, or of this mettle, had ever been heard before in this sacred edifice. Behind him, you could just make out the Dean of Windsor; even in profile, his demeanor was that of a man who, enjoying a gentle set at his local tennis club, suddenly realizes that Rafa Nadal has started practicing his overhead smashes on the adjacent court. As Harry is reported to have said, when first making the acquaintance of Meghan Markle, “I need to up my game.”
Meanwhile, those anthropologists who have spent many years studying the various royal species in their natural habitat were having a field day. No one could say exactly what was testing the soul of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, but her pink feathered hat was having a hissy fit. The woman was brimming. Zara Phillips, who is pregnant, lay back in shock, arms flung wide, like a welterweight sprawled on his corner stool at the end of Round Nine, still not sure what hit him. Even now, I can’t quite decipher the expression on the face of the Queen, who is hard to decrypt at the best of times. All I will say is that it was identical to the expression on the face of Elton John. God save them both.
At last, regrettably, the bishop was done. “A forceful address,” the BBC commentator said, his hair presumably still standing on end. Normal service was resumed. And so, with a few words, and a handful of gestures, the Prince and the actress (which, once upon a time, would have sounded like the beginning of a joke) became one. Meghan Markle entered the chapel as a Ms. and came out as a duchess: a transmutation that Superman himself, who merely changes his underwear in a confined space, would be the first to applaud. The couple, entwined in matrimony, emerged into the dream-bright day, got into an open carriage, and set off—at a bracingly fast lick, it must be said—to begin their companionable life.
There is an underside to this merry tale, and it has to do with all the non-merriment that could have been inflicted upon us, but was not. No public mustering is free from menace in these fervid days, when a kitchen knife or a rented van can be turned into a weapon, and it was difficult not to sense that threat as the royal wedding drew near. I wandered through Windsor on Friday night and watched the police sealing the scarlet mailboxes, to prevent the insertion of explosive devices. The next morning, an entire avenue was lined with ambulances, which, it was plain, were primed for something far worse than the occasional partygoer keeling over in the heat. Around dawn, numerous roads were closed off, to insure that no vehicles could be driven at speed into the crowds. Access to one central zone, on foot, was via a metal detector, conveniently situated next to a branch of Krispy Kreme. I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to pass through an Original Glazed Ring than for a terrorist to enter the castle of Windsor.
And here’s the thing: the plan worked. The great harm did not descend. Love, as warmly recommended by the preacher, held sway. The sole unpleasantness that crossed my path took the form of a burly fellow wearing a fascinator, with ripped jeans and mirrored shades: not an outfit that I will soon forget. And the only note of dissent that I heard, in regard to security, arose from a gaggle of American visitors, on the eve of the wedding. They were arguing, over drinks, about which of the armed policemen they had met so far had been the hottest. Tough call. Happy days.
