LIFE Royal Weddings: Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition 9781547842582, 154784258X

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Royal Weddings Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition

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PURE DELIGHT After taking formal portraits in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace on July 29, 1981, the Prince and Princess of Wales let down their guard with members of the wedding party.

Introduction: A New Chapter The Look of Love

The People’s Prince Henry Charles Albert David, a groom like no other

Mad About Meghan Buckingham Palace’s new California girl

When Harry Met Meghan An enchanting royal couple goes off script

The Royal Tradition

A Defiant Love Match Princess Elizabeth fell hard for her penniless prince The Wedding of the Century When Prince Charles exchanged vows with Lady Diana The Stars in Their Eyes William, Kate, love, marriage, and the baby carriage

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

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 and Meghan’s own big day, May 19, 2018, the anticipation, not to mention speculation, mounted with the disclosure of each detail. Their engagement ring, designed by Harry, featured diamonds that once belonged to Princess Diana. Harry’s best man, not surprisingly, was announced as his brother, William. The first of the couple’s thousands of wedding presents to arrive was an apron from an admirer in Finland, since both Harry and Meghan are avid cooks. Among the hot questions: Would Markle come down the aisle in the queen’s Cartier Halo Tiara, as Kate Middleton had, or in a nod to the other side of Harry’s family, the Spencer Tiara, which Diana wore at St. Paul’s (where it infamously wobbled on her head)? On one matter, tradition held. The wedding would be celebrated in the same 15thcentury chapel at Windsor Castle where Harry was christened 33 years ago. In other words, the popular prince and his commoner wife would set out on a joyful new chapter of life on the same holy ground where he had started his first.

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Breaking with Tradition: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1937.

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The Prince of Wales with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, in 2005.

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Princess Margaret with Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960.

The Look of Love Prince Harry, Britain’s most-loved Windsor, and Meghan Markle, an outspoken American activist, are redrawing the lines of the modern royal marriage

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IT’S FOR REAL Prince Harry and Meghan soon after announcing their wedding plans.

THE LOOK OF LOVE The People’s Prince Older brother William came into the world as “the heir” and Harry as “the spare.” But of the two, it was the charming “Ginger Prince” who, like his mother, Diana, won over Britain with a big heart, love of fun, and youthful missteps. Then suddenly Harry was transformed into a shining prince. He served two tours in Afghanistan and started charities to help wounded soldiers, people with mental illness, and AIDS patients. He also revealed a soft spot for kids. No wonder Meghan Markle fell for him

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CALL OF DUTY Prince Harry, who served two tours with the British army in Afghanistan, visited Walking with the Wounded, a nonprofit that helps ex-servicemen transition into civilian life, in September 2017.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the moment the British public fell head over heels for Prince Henry Charles Albert David. His older brother, William, the Duke of Cambridge, second in line for the throne, seemed self-contained from the start, like his father, Prince Charles. As a boy, William followed the rules and imagined growing up to be a policeman. Harry, in contrast, seemed to emerge from the womb with a twinkle in his eye and a scrape on his nose. His ginger hair, spiking this way and that, was the tipoff. He grew into a fun-loving, rowdy lad-at-the-pub type, more every-kid than Windsor. And he spoke his mind—just as he is wont to do now. “Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time,” Harry told Newsweek in 2017, a comment that prompted gasps—or plaudits, depending on one’s view of the monarchy—zinging around the globe. The royals, he noted, were doing it “for the greater good of the people.” With his marriage to American actress Meghan Markle, the unpredictable prince continues to push royal boundaries, not unlike his mother, Princess Diana. In fact, Harry seems like Diana in many ways: He is committed to helping the mentally ill, children in need, the homeless, and AIDS patients, and he has learned to use the press to bring attention to those issues. He is charming and a risk-taker. He has stumbled in public more than once, famously dressed like a Nazi soldier at a party (he apologized later), admitting to pot smoking and underage drinking, and being photographed dancing naked in Las Vegas. Some of this was acting out in the wake of Diana’s untimely death in

1997, when Harry was 12. But in recent years, the prince has rebounded in the public eye, serving valiantly in Afghanistan, reaching out to wounded soldiers, and speaking frankly about the emotional demons he battled following his mother’s fatal car accident. That he looked dashing in camouflage and proved to be a gentleman—he issued a blistering attack on the press for hounding Markle—certainly helped buff his image. No wonder he was voted the most popular royal in the U.K. two years running. It may in fact be Harry’s imperfections that make the public love him, as The Crown Chronicles, a royal-watch website, posited in 2016, noting some of his less than savory exploits but also his outgoing personality, knack with children, and cheeky sense of humor. “Harry is not afraid to make fun of himself or his brother,” the site stated, “and he even sports a beard, something the queen is said to dislike.” Harry may have been a second son, but his birth occasioned as much jubilation in Britain as his brother’s debut two years earlier. On September 15, 1984, church bells rang, 41-gun salutes cracked from Hyde Park and the Tower of London, and cheers greeted Prince Charles when he emerged from St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. Speaking briefly to the throng, Charles declared the six-pound-14-ounce “Harry” to be “absolutely marvelous.” Five days later, the infant’s mother wrote to retired royal retainer Cyril Dickman, “The reaction to one tiny person’s birthday has totally overwhelmed us, and I can hardly breathe for the mass of flowers that are arriving here . . . William adores his little brother and spends the entire time swamping Harry with an endless supply of hugs and kisses, hardly letting the parents near!” Diana’s sons would always be close: Harry followed William to Mrs. Mynors’ and Wetherby schools in London, to prep school at Ludgrove School in Berkshire, and later to Eton. Together they

learned to adjust to the position of being royals in a world both fascinated and repelled by their privilege. And through the early years, they would be sustained by the love lavished on them by their mother. “It still upsets me now, the fact that we didn’t have as much of a chance as other children to spend time with her,” Harry told a television interviewer in 2007. “But the time we did spend with her was amazing . . . just amazing.” Among his “very, very happy memories,” Prince Harry said, was a 1993 trip to Disney World with his mother and brother (as well as a gaggle of protection officers). “I went on Space Mountain 14 times,” Harry recalled in an interview with Good Morning Robin Roberts. “I was like, ‘This is absolutely fantastic. This is the best thing ever.’” One Soldier, One Scholar Growing up, William and Harry shared a strong bond and an upbringing that few outsiders could comprehend, but they were different characters from the beginning. In a photo taken when he was nearly two, Harry looked very much the warrior-to-be in a miniature regimental uniform. William was known for staying inside the lines. In the classroom, Harry struggled to acquire skills that came more easily to his brother. During a visit to Cape Town, South Africa, in 2015, he confided to youths in a rehabilitation center that he “didn’t enjoy school at all,” and “wanted to be the bad boy.” It seems that he gave it a go: In 1993, when Harry was at Ludgrove School with Prince William, Princess Diana wrote to Cyril Dickman that her youngest was “constantly in trouble.” At that point, the princes had more on their minds than schoolwork: In December 1992, their parents’ separation was announced and Charles and Diana established their individual

households. At holiday times, the boys began bouncing between warring parents—common enough in the outside world, but never in modern history had heirs to the throne been in such a situation. After Diana was killed on August 31, 1997, Harry’s rambunctiousness became an outlet for grief and anger—and was subjected to the scrutiny of a press establishment that he blamed for her death. But the prince found his way in the military. After Eton and gapyear stints farming sheep in Australia and working with orphans in Lesotho, he completed 44 rigorous weeks at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, graduating as a second lieutenant in April 2006. The following year, he left under a press blackout for Helmand Province, Afghanistan, where he pulled patrol duty and helped repel a Taliban attack. When Harry was recalled from Afghanistan after several outlets broke the news that he (a high-value target) was fighting with British forces, the prince set his sights on becoming a pilot. He joined William, who as second in line to the throne was not allowed to enter combat, at the military’s Defence Helicopter Flying School. Eventually he qualified to command Apache gunships. By September 2012, Harry had been promoted to captain and returned to Afghanistan. For four months, he served as an Apache copilot and gunner in Helmand Province, where he saw action during support and rescue missions.

Life as Captain Wales was a perfect fit for a prince who longed to be one of the gang. In Afghanistan, where his presence was no longer secret, he told the Guardian, “My father’s always trying to remind me about who I am and stuff like that. But it’s very easy to forget about who I am [here] . . . everyone’s wearing the same uniform and doing the same kind of thing.”

His Mother’s Son Harry also found stability by seeking counseling to deal with his mother’s death. Last spring, he revealed that he had avoided grieving for Diana until he was in his twenties. When he finally saw a counselor, he said, his distress came tumbling out. “Some of the best people or easiest people to speak to are shrinks or whoever—the Americans call them shrinks—someone you have never met before,” Harry said in a podcast interview with the Daily don’t let it Since

Telegraph. “You sit down on the sofa and say: ‘Listen, I actually need your advice. Can you just listen?’ And you just all rip.” leaving the military in 2015, the prince has edged into the

family business, finding his calling, as Diana did, in humanitarian work. Much of his time is spent working for the causes that she championed—children in need, homeless people, and AIDS patients. He also has devoted himself to the Invictus Games, the international competition for ill and wounded warriors that he launched in 2014. Behind the scenes, Harry enjoys a kind of freedom that his brother, one day to be king, will never have. Based since 2013 in Nottingham Cottage on the Kensington Palace grounds, he dashes into the local grocery for his own corn flakes or to Starbucks for coffee. (As in his youth, plainclothes “minders,” or bodyguards, are perpetually in tow.) He hits the gym in London as often as possible, and he frequently does interval training at his friend Jason de Savary’s Core Collective.

Serial Romances

Before Harry met Meghan Markle, his love life was what one might expect of one of the kingdom’s most eligible bachelors, and he had a number of high-profile romances. From 2004 until 2011, he had an on-again, off-again relationship with lawyer turned jewelry designer Chelsy Davy, a free spirit whose father was a wealthy businessman in Zimbabwe. The two parted amicably, and from 2012 to 2014 he was involved with socialite Cressida Bonas, an aspiring actress and model. By all accounts, the press attention that accompanied both relationships contributed to their respective collapses: in May 2016, Prince Harry told the Sunday Times that he had “massive paranoia” about exposing another girlfriend to the “invasion that is inevitably going to happen into her privacy.” Details of the first encounter between Harry and Meghan, in July 2016, have been kept under wraps—though she allows that it was on a blind date engineered by a mutual female friend. Harry helped the relationship fly under the media radar by pursuing Meghan via text, and when they were ready to go public he went on the offensive again, having the Kensington Palace press office release a statement confirming the relationship and denouncing the “wave of abuse and harassment” that she had suffered. “Prince Harry,” the release said, “is worried about Ms. Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her.” In the following months, Meghan visited her prince at Kensington Palace, and the couple traveled to Africa, to Norway, and to Jamaica to attend the wedding of Harry’s best friend. Last March, the couple made headlines when Harry reportedly took Meghan to London’s Natural History Museum for a “secret late-night visit.” By November, Prince William had given his imprimatur to the relationship with an announcement seconding Harry’s request that the press respect Meghan’s privacy.

With his nuptials now just weeks away, Prince Harry seems to be on the path to “normal,” the place where he has long said he wants to reside. Whether he can achieve any degree of that remains to be seen. But one suspects that, whatever shape his future may take, it will be a happy one. Princess Diana’s son from beginning to end, he shares her priorities. And having a family, he has said, tops the list: “I can’t wait for the day,” he told Good Morning America last March. “So, you know, it will be fantastic. I’ve got a kid inside of me. I want to keep that.” Besides, added Harry, he has a mandate. Of his mother, he said, “I’m sure she’s longing for me to have kids so she can be a grandmother again.”

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A SHOULDER TO SIT ON Princess Diana carried a two-year-old Harry in the garden of the family’s private residence, Highgrove House, where he and his brother liked to play in their tree house.

TIM GRAHAM/GETTY Here, Harry visited the barracks of the Light Dragoons, a cavalry regiment.

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FAMILY BOY Harry was accompanied by his mother and brother on his first day at the Wetherby School.

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The prince fidgeted while watching a parade marking the 50th anniversary of VJ Day, in1995.

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MOURNFUL PROCESSION At Diana’s funeral service on September 6, 1997, Prince Charles, left, Prince Harry, Earl Spencer, Prince William, and Prince Philip followed her coffin into Westminster Abbey.

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A Man of Many Missions In 2006, Harry traveled to Lesotho in southern Africa to launch his charity, Sentebale, which means “forget me not,” in memory of his mother.

TIM GRAHAM/GETTY Captain Wales, as he was known in the British army, at a base in southern Afghanistan.

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Wales. Captain Wales. From September 2012 until January 2013, Harry served as an Apache helicopter pilot with the Army Air Corps.

IAN GAVAN/WPA/GETTY The prince participated in a coaching event at Twickenham Stadium in October 2013.

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Make a Difference Prince William got a hug from his brother during the September 2014 Invictus Games in London.

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Harry competed in a wheelchair rugby exhibition match during the games.

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When Harry took an HIV test live on Facebook in 2016, orders for self-testing kits soared.

CHRIS JACKSON/GETTY CAMERA READY Harry documented a 2014 visit to Lesotho, but admitted he doesn’t typically take a lot of pictures. “The best photos I have are in my head,” he said. The boys here are shepherds who attend a school built by Sentebale.

THE LOOK OF LOVE Mad About Meghan Prince Harry’s bride-to-be, Meghan Markle, is only the second American woman ever to enter the British royal family, and like Wallis Simpson, who came before her, BY PATRICK ROGERS Markle is a divorcée. There’s much, much more: The 36-yearold actress is a compassionate activist for children and is as outspoken as she is glamorous

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MAKING HEADLINES Meghan Markle won praise from the fashion press for the hat, designed by Philip Treacy, that she wore to Christmas Day service at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Sandringham, England.

As dress rehearsals go, it was a modest and decidedly American affair. The year was 1998 and a fresh-faced California teenager donned a strapless gown and rhinestone tiara to stand before her peers, beaming with pride, as she was inducted into the ranks of royalty. Granted, the royalty in question was the homecoming court of all-girls Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles, but the new queen, 17-year-old Meghan Markle, smiled regally as she was crowned and driven around a football field in a classic convertible. Markle will reprise that role on May 19, 2018, when she exchanges wedding vows with Britain’s Prince Harry before a global TV audience of millions. She is only the second Americanborn woman to enter the British royal family in its 950-year history. And like the first, Wallis Simpson, the Baltimore divorcée whose planned marriage to King Edward VIII provoked a scandal that ended with his abdication of the throne in 1936, Markle’s journey from actress and activist to princess can only be characterized with one word: unlikely. Her story begins in 1981, nearly two months before Americans by the millions set their alarms for early in the morning to watch the magnificently pomp-filled wedding of Britain’s Prince Charles and his shy bride, Lady Diana Spencer. Half a world away in Los Angeles, the lighting director of a soap opera, and his wife, who was then working as a makeup artist at the same Hollywood studio, welcomed their daughter: Rachel Meghan Markle. “My

parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot,” Markle wrote on her lifestyle website. Certainly, they lavished their love on their only child together. Markle’s mother is Doria Ragland, 61, who worked as a yoga instructor. She holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Southern California and is the descendant of enslaved Africans from Jonesboro, Georgia, a town that was visited regularly by novelist Margaret Mitchell and is said to be the inspiration for some of the setting of Gone with the Wind. Ragland’s ancestors took their last name from white planters who arrived in America from the English county of Cornwall (of which Markle’s future in-laws are the duke and duchess) and fought against the crown in the American Revolution. Pursuing economic opportunity, in the early 20th century the Raglands found their way to the boomtown of Los Angeles during the Great Migration of African Americans from the South, according to a family tree recently compiled by the Times of London. Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, 73, has two children from a previous marriage—Thomas Markle Jr., 51, and former actress Samantha Markle, 53, who is currently writing a memoir titled The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister. Of Dutch and Irish origin, Thomas senior and Doria Ragland bonded over a shared love of antiques, Meghan has said, and married in 1979. Home during the family’s early, happy years was a modest house in an affordable neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley—on the other side of the mountains from the glitz of Beverly Hills. Still, as Thomas Markle found success professionally—he has won two Daytime Emmys for TV design excellence and lighting direction— his youngest daughter enjoyed the privileges of having a parent in

the entertainment industry: private schools, fashionable clothes, trips overseas. She traveled to Mexico and Jamaica. In a snapshot taken when she was 15, she can be seen posing with a companion in front of Buckingham Palace, the home of her future grandparents-in-law. Meghan attended Hollywood’s selective Little Red School House, followed by middle and high school at Immaculate Heart, a Catholic institution with a strong commitment to social justice issues. Even in a student body of overachievers Meghan stood out, according to her drama teacher of four years, former child star Gigi Perreau. “She was a wonderful student, a lovely girl even then, and very hardworking. She was very dedicated,” Perreau told Britain’s Telegraph. And hooked on acting. Markle starred in high school stagings of A Chorus Line and Damn Yankees; her father chipped in backstage with his professional production skills. “When you saw Meg on stage, even as a kid, it was clear she was going to be a star. She came alive,” her half brother, Thomas, said to a reporter from the Daily Mail. By senior year, she was driving to auditions with the radio blaring in a car with a license plate holder reading CLASSY GIRL.

Not that Meghan’s Southern California upbringing was sunshine all the time. Like Prince Harry, who witnessed the especially ugly divorce of his parents, Meghan suffered through the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. She was two when they separated, and six when they legally divorced. But even if Meghan’s parents lived separately, they remained close. They continued to celebrate holidays together, and Meghan describes spending school-day afternoons with her father, by then director of photography of the bawdy comedy Married with Children, before spending the night at her mother’s. “I grew up on the set [of that show] every day after

school for 10 years,” she told late-night TV host Craig Ferguson in 2013. “It’s a very perverse place for a little girl, who went to Catholic school no less, to grow up.” Another complicating factor of her young life—and one that she must reckon with still today—was race. The freckle-faced daughter of an African American mother with dreadlocks and a fair-skinned Caucasian father, Markle heard racial slurs hurled at her mother on the street. On occasion, she has said, strangers mistook Ragland for her nanny. Early on, Markle didn’t know where she fit in. But her parents helped her realize that it was up to her to decide. When she was in seventh grade her school held a census, asking students to identify their race—black, white, Hispanic, or Asian. “There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race), looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up but not knowing what to do,” Markle later wrote in a 2015 essay in Elle UK. “My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. ‘Because that’s how you look, Meghan,’ she said. I put down my pen. Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-inher-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. So, I didn’t tick a box. I left my identity blank—a question mark, an absolute incomplete—much like how I felt.” Later, her dad told her to make her own box if it ever happened again. Meghan was sensitive to slights and injustices, and precocious in realizing she could make a difference. At age 11, she was tasked in social studies class with watching a series of TV commercials and analyzing their content. Troubled by the sexist stereotyping of women in one ad in particular, for Ivory dishwashing soap, she wrote to its parent company, Procter & Gamble, and asked them to change the script. Sure enough, the company agreed to

substitute the word “people” for “women” in a new version of the ad. And there was more. At her father’s suggestion, Meghan also sent copies of her letter to three powerful women; she chose First Lady Hillary Clinton, attorney Gloria Allred, and journalist Linda Ellerbee, who at the time hosted a news show for kids on Nickelodeon. After Procter & Gamble granted Markle’s request, Ellerbee invited the preteen activist to appear on her show. “I don’t think its right for kids to grow up thinking these things, that just Mom does everything,” Meghan told the audience in a soft but steady voice. It was her first time in front of a TV camera. Career success as an actress, however, was still years away. After graduating from Northwestern University in 2003 with a double degree in theater and international studies, Markle pursued a passion for politics by winning an internship at the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Then, during a trip back to L.A. around Christmastime, a friend introduced Markle to a talent manager at a party. “You’re going to make money,” she remembers him telling her. So began the auditions, almost daily, that led to small parts in pilots and soap operas, then films such as Horrible Bosses and Remember Me. Between roles, Markle worked as a calligrapher, penning correspondence for fashion clients and wedding invites for Robin Thicke and Paula Patton.

Meghan’s own love life followed an uneven path. In 2004, she began a relationship with a film producer named Trevor Engelson. He was tall, blond, and six years older, and, like her, still making his way up the ladder in Hollywood. They spent seven years together before gathering friends and family for a four-day destination wedding in Jamaica, where pictures show Markle radiant in a strapless white shift.

Despite the long prelude, the newlyweds’ bliss didn’t last. Before marrying, Meghan had landed the part that would make her famous, playing Rachel Zane, the brilliant paralegal and romantic lead of USA Network’s tense legal drama Suits. Being the star of a hit series was exhilarating and consuming. The show was filmed in Toronto, a five-hour flight from L.A., and friends of the couple told gossip magazines that the physical distance between Markle and Engelson turned emotional. After nearly two years, the marriage was over. In Toronto, Meghan turned for support to friends including Jessica Mulroney, a fashion stylist and the daughter-in-law of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney; celebrity chef Cory Vitiello, whom Markle dated from 2014 to 2016; and man-abouttown Markus Anderson, a consultant for members-only social club Soho House (and friend of Prince Harry’s). She also had the consolation of being one of the city’s most admired and followed VIPs. Fans learned the secrets of Markle’s diet (green juice during filming, French fries on hiatus), her toned figure (“I love an intense vinyasa class,” she told Women’s and her disarming poise (“I give myself the luxury of downtime,” she said). Like her peers Gwyneth Paltrow and Jessica Alba, the actress launched a lifestyle blog. Called The Tig, after her favorite Italian wine, the fancy “super Tuscan” Tignanello, the blog featured posts about food, travel, fashion, and maintaining a healthy self-image, and was written almost entirely by Markle herself. When she was in L.A., Meghan hung out with Quantico star Priyanka Chopra, whom she met at a dinner sponsored by and in Miami she met British fashion designer Misha Nonoo, whose exhusband is Harry’s best mate from Eton. If it seems in retrospect that fate was pushing Markle toward a meeting with her future

husband, she may actually have had another friend, tennis star Serena Williams, to thank for that. In July of 2016, Meghan traveled to London to watch Williams compete at the prestigious Wimbledon tournament and stayed on to sample the city’s social scene. By most accounts, it was during this fateful trip that the actress met her new love, and not long after that she hosted him back in Toronto, on the set of Suits. Cast members were sworn to secrecy about their distinguished visitor. His accent was British.

SPLASH NEWS

BABE IN ARMS Meghan was about six months old in this 1982 picture with her half sister, Samantha Markle. The two reportedly are estranged, and in 2017 Samantha said she was writing a memoir called The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister.

SPLASH NEWS

FAMILY ALBUM Meghan, five, performed in a play at the Little Red School House.

SPLASH NEWS

Here, Meghan, age five or six, in her bedroom at her mother’s Los Angeles home.

SPLASH NEWS

In 1996, Meghan, 15, traveled to Europe with her family and posed with a friend outside Buckingham Palace.

JOHN DLUGOLECKI/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES LOVELY SMILE Markle graduated in 1999 from all-girls Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles, alma mater of Mary Tyler Moore and Tyra Banks.

SPLASH NEWS The future royal attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she joined sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma Upsilon. Markle’s sorority sisters tweeted their congratulations when her engagement was announced.

WORLD VISION

Woman of the World As global ambassador for the children’s charity World Vision, Markle visited a primary school in Rwanda in January 2016 and celebrated clean water. Students at the school depend on water produced by World Vision wells.

WORLD VISION

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Markle as Rachel Zane in the television drama Suits. The actress has said her last appearance on the show will be April 25, 2018.

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THE LOOK OF LOVE When Harry Met Meghan The first date was low-key—just drinks in London, arranged by a mutual friend. But as soon as Prince Harry laid eyes on Meghan Markle, he knew she was BY PATRICK The One.ROGERS A second date and a flurry of texts turned into a relationship they managed to keep secret for four months. Then he put a ring on it

ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI/GETTY SO HAPPY TOGETHER For one of their official engagement photos released by Kensington Palace, Meghan wore a $75,000 couture

gown designed by Ralph & Russo, while Prince Harry donned a navy Burberry suit that retails for $1,400.

When Harry met Meghan, it was on a blind date in the summer of 2016, but beyond that, little is known of the pair’s first encounter. After they announced their engagement the following year, a BBC interviewer asked who had played matchmaker. Meghan, clearly a pro at parrying the media, answered succinctly, “We should protect her privacy.” Yet no matter how the couple had ended up in the same room at the same time that night in London, the attraction was immediate. As Prince Harry tells the story, the initial meeting over drinks quickly led to a second date, perhaps the next night, and then another. Meghan recalls, “We said, ‘Well what are you doing tomorrow? We should meet again.’” Harry then chimed in, “And it was like, right, diaries. We need to get the diaries out and find out how we’re going to make this work.”

If neither party had anticipated the coup de foudre, it was because neither had given it much thought: Harry confesses he had never heard of Meghan, and she, like most of her compatriots, had only a casual interest in the British royal family. But what the British prince and American TV star did have was experience. Both in their thirties, Harry and Meghan had already enjoyed career success, loyal friends, strong family ties, and respect for their philanthropic efforts. Raised in the royal fishbowl, Harry had nonetheless managed to find that his secondary position in terms of succession had benefits for his love life: To the heir, his brother, William, goes the kingdom, and to the spare —a jolly good time. While William settled down with his college

girlfriend, Harry was a millennial-style serial monogamist, hooking up with pop stars, TV presenters, and socialites. A serious relationship with Zimbabwean-born Chelsy Davy lasted on and off for seven years, and another, with model-actress Cressida Bonas, had fizzled out in 2014. In other words, Harry was available. Half a world away, meanwhile, Markle had recovered from the 2013 break up of her short-lived marriage to film producer Trevor Engelson by immersing herself in the social scene of Toronto, where Suits had been filming for seven seasons. Within a year, she was dating TV chef Cory Vitiello, owner of a chain of roast chicken restaurants called Flock, who appreciated Markle’s interest in cooking and admired her advocacy work. He wrote on Instagram in 2016, “So proud of my lady @meghanmarkle being named Global Ambassador for @worldvision,” a humanitarian aid organization. By that summer, however, when Markle traveled to London and met Prince Harry, she was living alone in a rented house in Toronto’s Seaton Village neighborhood with her two rescue dogs, Bogart and Guy.

For four months, Harry and Meghan managed to keep their relationship secret from all but a few friends and relatives. The prince invited the actress on a holiday to Botswana, the southern African nation with a spectacularly scenic river delta and a bounty of exotic animals, far from home and the media pack assigned to track his every move in London. Botswana holds a special place in the prince’s heart—his father took him and William there after their mother died in 1997 to begin their healing—and serves as a kind of testing ground for his potential soul mates. Both Davy and Bonas made the trip with Harry. Now it was Markle’s turn, and she too fell in love with the place where Harry has said he feels “more like myself than anywhere else in the world.” For five

nights, during which Markle celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday, the couple slept in a tent under a blanket of stars. During breaks in her filming schedule, Markle flew to London, where she and Harry spent quiet evenings secure within the prince’s two-bedroom Nottingham Cottage on the grounds of Kensington Palace, sometimes with their neighbors, William and Kate. Harry knew time was limited before the media discovered he and Meghan were dating, and he worried that the coming firestorm much as firsthand constant

would scare his new love away. “I tried to warn [her] as possible,” the prince told the BBC. Speaking from experience, Davy once described the annoyance of the run-ins with paparazzi. It was “so full-on: crazy and scary

and uncomfortable . . . I couldn’t cope,” she said. Markle’s now discontinued Instagram account, with 1.7 million followers, provided clues about the long-distance romance. She posted pictures taken in London in July and August. Harry, meanwhile, made several secret trips to Toronto before the first report that the “besotted” prince had fallen in love with an American ran in the Daily Express in October. “Meghan is a very confident and intelligent woman and she’s not overawed mixing with royalty. That’s one of the things Harry admires about her,” an unnamed source told the paper. On the same day, another media outlet ran side-by-side photos of Meghan wearing a beaded bracelet that looked identical to one the prince had. If not exactly a smoking gun, it was enough to put the tabloids on war footing across Canada and in the U.K. Harry and his advisors knew the game was up; on November 8, 2016, Kensington Palace announced via Twitter that Meghan Markle was the prince’s girlfriend.

There was nothing joyous about the unusual public declaration, however. The palace complained emphatically of “a wave of abuse

and harassment” against Markle on social media and blasted “the racial undertone of comment pieces” and “outright sexism” of articles in the mainstream press. The anger was justified. In the previous week, headlines such as EXCLUSIVE: HARRY’S GIRL IS (ALMOST) STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON appeared in the Daily Mail. In a sister publication, the Mail on Sunday, a leering commentator wrote that if the couple have children “the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.” Later that month, Prince William issued a similar appeal for the press and public to respect the couple’s privacy and safety. Markle, of course, was used to seeing her name in print. But she told the BBC that the public scrutiny after the news of the relationship broke “hit so hard” that she stopped reading stories about herself in the press. There was certainly a lot not to read. No longer compelled to hide, the couple stepped out into the public. They were spotted attending the hit play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in the West End, buying a Christmas tree in Battersea Park, and jetting off to Nice for New Year’s Eve. They then traveled to the remote town of Tromso, above the Arctic Circle, to see the northern lights, staying at a luxury lodge. Grainy, long lens photos showed them holding hands at the wedding of Harry’s Eton pal Tom Inskip, in Jamaica in March of 2017, and stealing a kiss at a charity polo match that May in Berkshire, where Markle diplomatically wore a dress by a British designer, Antonio Berardi. After the initial nastiness in the press, Britons quickly warmed to the idea of a Hollywood actress inside the House of Windsor. Inevitably, there were comparisons to Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée for whose love Edward VIII renounced the throne in 1936. But so much has changed since then, and Harry

and Meghan are the hopeful young faces of the new Britain. Inside the royal family, the welcome has been warm. The Duchess of Cambridge was “wonderful,” Meghan later said, and the queen graciously invited her to tea. For moral support, Meghan counted on her rock-solid friends back in the States. She asked one of them, Serena Williams, for advice on dealing with the press. “Her personality just shines,” the tennis star was quoted in Vanity Fair. “I told her, ‘You’ve got to be who you are, Meghan. You can’t hide.’” Popping the Question The Engagement Watch began. In the fall of 2017, Markle was seen toting a yoga mat and grocery bags from Whole Foods near Kensington Palace, signs that the couple had of quiet domesticity. But when would he pop Anticipation spiked when the pair returned to Markle’s thirty-sixth birthday in August. Seven

settled into a routine the question? Botswana for years earlier, Prince

William had proposed to Kate Middleton while the pair was on safari in the foothills of Mount Kenya. Might Harry choose a romantic African locale to propose as well?

As it happened, no. Just before leaving on that trip, Meghan had given an interview to Vanity Fair in Toronto (headline: SHE’S JUST WILD ABOUT HARRY!), in which she hinted that she and the prince were savoring the quiet before what would inevitably be a new storm of publicity. “We’re a couple. We’re in love,” she said. “I’m sure there will be a time when we will have to come forward and present ourselves and have stories to tell, but I hope what people will understand is that this is our time.” Besides, there were family matters to attend to before making any big moves. Harry flew once more to Toronto in September for the opening of the Invictus Games, the international sporting event for wounded

warriors he founded in 2014. Markle’s mother flew in from California to see Meghan and Harry. Back in the U.K., Harry also had to ask for the blessing of his grandmother, the queen, as stipulated by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. Meghan and the character she plays on Suits, the paralegal Rachel Zane, have a lot in common. Rachel is Markle’s actual first name (Meghan is her middle name). Both she and her TV doppelgänger are biracial, foodies, and yoga fanatics. As the show began its seventh season last year, Rachel was engaged to the show’s male lead, played by Patrick J. Adams, and eager to take the relationship to a higher level. Last November 13, a trade publication reported big news: Both Adams and Markle had decided to exit the show, leaving fans hoping for a happy ending: a wedding. At roughly the same time in London, Harry and Meghan were roasting a chicken on what they later described as a cozy evening at their cottage when Harry went down on one knee and proposed. Markle said yes before he could even finish the question.

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HAND IN HAND In February 2018 Harry and Meghan waved hellos to well-wishers as they left a café in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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THE BIG DEBUT In their first public appearance together, Prince Harry and Meghan chatted while watching a wheelchair tennis match at the Invictus Games in Toronto, in September 2017. The couple strolled through the stadium.

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PERFECT PAIR Prince Harry and Meghan officially announced their engagement on November 27, 2017.

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Harry designed Meghan’s engagement ring, which incorporates a diamond from Botswana and two smaller stones from Princess Diana’s collection.

BBC

The couple being interviewed by the BBC.

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GOOD JOB In January 2018, Meghan and Prince Harry applauded students in a street-dance class at a recreational center in Cardiff, Wales.

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Markle brought some American charm to the royals’ Christmas in 2017, when she joined Prince Harry, the queen, and the rest of the family for a church service at Sandringham.

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RADIO DAYS In January 2018, Meghan and Harry visited Reprezent 107.3 FM, which has a training program to help young people socialize through the radio.

CHRIS JACKSON/GETTY Meghan signed autographs in Cardiff, Wales.

The Royal Tradition Starting with the spectacular post–World War II nuptials of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, Windsor weddings have been both occasions of state and cultural touchstones

BETTMANN/GETTY CROWD PLEASER On November 20, 1947, the day Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, thousands of well-wishers gathered in front of Buckingham Palace for a glimpse of the newlyweds.

THE ROYAL TRADITION A Defiant Love Match Princess Elizabeth was bedazzled by her handsome cousin Philip Mountbatten, and their nuptials, broadcast to 200 million people around the world, set a new standard for BY COURTNEY MIFSUD the British royal wedding

BARON/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX CLASSIC MUSE Elizabeth and Philip posed for a wedding photo. With World War II recently over, couturier Norman Hartnell sought

to create a gown that symbolized rebirth; he took inspiration from La Primavera, Botticelli’s 15th-century painting about the coming of spring.

“Bad show, we’re a little late,” said Philip Mountbatten, glancing at his watch as he climbed into a limousine with his best man. It was November 20, 1947, and the handsome naval officer was about to marry the future queen of England, Princess Elizabeth, the 21-year-old daughter of King George VI. Were Philip to be offschedule, even slightly, it would be noticed: In addition to the 2,000 guests invited to attend the ceremony at Westminster Abbey, some 200 million around the world were listening live to the radio broadcast. King Henry I had been the first to marry in the Abbey’s halls, in 1100, and another 10 monarchs and their siblings or descendants had followed suit. But the nuptials of Elizabeth and Philip were something quite different. Unlike Elizabeth’s noble predecessors, who almost always wed for reasons of power, political advantage, or obligation to the throne, the young princess was taking as her husband the man she loved, a foreigner no less, from the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. When Elizabeth read her vows, she even pledged to “obey” Mountbatten, distressing royalists firm in their belief that the heiress presumptive should not be obliged to anyone. The union of Philip and Elizabeth stood apart for symbolic reasons as well. In the aftermath of World War II, the festivities provided a joyous distraction from the grim work of recovery, and, more important, served as a celebration of a nation, its rulers, and a triumphant democracy. What millions of listeners around the world would remember most was “the sureness and reality of ‘God Save the King’ when, at the end of the trumpets, the Abbey

organ and chorus hidden in the high arches sang the ancient and truest truth of England,” noted Time in its coverage. The couple’s marriage has endured for more than seven decades, by many years the longest-lasting royal union in British history. As queen, Elizabeth has helped to steer her nation through world crises, even as she has struggled with a modernizing monarchy. Philip, who initially bridled at living in his wife’s shadow, has been the one who has connected the royal family to commoners in an increasingly egalitarian England, a development few foresaw. “Today, Britain’s throne has never been more secure, nor its occupant more firmly rooted in her subjects’ affections,” wrote Time in 1957, on the occasion of the queen’s first visit to the United States after ascending the throne. “The man chiefly responsible for building this new bridge of sympathy and understanding between throne and subject is the vigorous, handsome man Elizabeth married 10 years ago.”

The couple’s love affair was the stuff of a paperback romance novel. Elizabeth and Philip are both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, making them distant cousins. While Elizabeth’s family were monarchs of the British empire, Philip’s family descended from a Danish-German line. He had been born in Greece, where his family ruled until the monarchy was abolished after World War I. Philip and Elizabeth had met a few times at family events when they were quite young without either making much of an impression on the other. But in July 1939, when the princess was 13 and touring the Royal Navy College at Dartmouth with her parents, she could not help but notice the tall, dashing 18-year-old Philip of Greece, who was happy to escort her around campus. Philip was not smitten at first, but soon after that the pair began exchanging letters and the future queen was nestling a

framed photo of Philip beside her bed. During World War II, Philip served at sea, and he became a frequent visitor and ardent suitor of Elizabeth’s at Buckingham Palace. In 1946, he proposed. Elizabeth accepted without hesitation, but there were serious complications to the relationship. Though Philip had first lived in England in the late 1920s and was the nephew of Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten—who became the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma in 1947—he was of German pedigree. What’s more, Philip’s four sisters were married to German princes and three of his brothersin-law had joined the Nazi party. For Britons who had fought Germany in two world wars, the prospect of such a family connected to the House of Windsor was hard to accept. In private, the queen was said to have called her future son-in-law “the Hun.” For Princess Elizabeth, Philip’s foreign heritage and lack of family wealth did not matter. And King George, aware of the responsibilities Elizabeth would inherit with the throne, wanted her to be free to choose a spouse who could be a loving partner in those responsibilities. He approved of Philip, saying, “He is intelligent, has a good sense of humour, and thinks about things in the right way.” The only caveat was that King George thought that Elizabeth at 20 was too young for a serious proposal, and he insisted that the couple wait to announce their engagement until after Elizabeth’s 21st birthday. The princess was dispatched on a royal tour of South Africa and upon her return, Philip of Greece had been rebranded. He had taken the anglicized version of Battenberg, his mother’s surname, and was now Lieutenant Mountbatten, and with his Uncle Dickie’s help had secured British citizenship, steps that somewhat eased the public’s concerns. When Philip formally proposed, it was with a three-carat diamond engagement ring made up of stones that

were originally part of a tiara that belonged to his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg. The king announced the impending nuptials in the Court Circular. “It is with the greatest pleasure,” the message ran, “that the King and Queen announce the betrothal of their beloved daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.” Once the date was set, Buckingham Palace began to plan for the happy ocassion, which was billed as an austerity wedding in acknowledgement of the U.K.’s postwar struggles. The reception would be small and only 150 guests would be invited to a modest wedding breakfast in the palace’s Ball Supper Room, still undergoing repairs after nine direct bombings in the Blitz. The red carpet laid along the Westminster Abbey nave would be secondhand. Of course there were some extravagances. The wedding cake, for one, was a four-tiered, nine-foot-tall affair. And then there was Elizabeth’s wedding dress. Rationing was still in effect, so the gown had to be paid for in clothing coupons. But the government gave the princess some 200 extra, and she had been saving up throughout the war, so funds were more than sufficient to create something special. (Many people sent coupons in to help the princess, but they had to be returned because it was illegal to transfer them.) The gown turned out spectacularly: made from ivory silk, it was decorated with 10,000 seed pearls, and took 350 women seven weeks to make.

The wedding day itself was a flurry of last minute preparations and nerves. Westminster Abbey was readied for the ceremony and the high altar was adorned with vases of roses, white lilies, carnations, chrysanthemums, and ivy. Thousands of onlookers gathered outside in anticipation of catching a glimpse of the bride. Back at the palace, designer Norman Hartnell arrived early

for Elizabeth’s final fitting, which went well, although the diamond tiara snapped and had to be repaired by the court jeweler. By the time the princess entered the church on her father’s arm, her train carried by two five-year old cousins, she appeared quite confident. Her mother, Queen Elizabeth, on the other hand, “seemed less at ease than at any time in her queenly career,” reported Time. Then she rallied, according to the magazine: “Once when Philip looked uncertain and alarmed, she flashed him a warm, reassuring smile.” The service started with a specially composed fanfare and was officiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, and the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett. Vows were exchanged and the Abbey’s bells sounded, and Philip and Elizabeth rode in the Glass Coach—a carriage that would later carry Lady Diana Spencer on her wedding day—back to Buckingham Palace as husband and wife. Crowds cheered at the elaborate procession. The king, who was happier about the match than his wife, raised a glass of champagne in a toast “to the bride.” “When I handed your hand to the Archbishop, I felt that I had lost something very precious,” King George later wrote to his daughter. “You were so calm and composed . . . that I knew everything was all right . . . I can see that you are sublimely happy with Philip.”

After the festivities, Elizabeth and Philip took off in a carriage for Waterloo Station, to begin a three-week honeymoon. Within a year of their wedding, Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, sevenpound-six-ounce Charles, the heir to the throne, in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace. “I knew she’d do it!” rejoiced Commander Richard Colville, the king’s press secretary, over the birth of a male heir. “She’d never let us down.” Elizabeth gave birth to her second child, Anne, in August 1950.

In 1952, King George died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and the halcyon early days of Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage were cut short. As fans of the Netflix hit The Crown know, Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne caused strains in the five-year-old marriage. Philip had to quit his naval career and chafed at the restrictions of his new life, whether having to walk behind the queen or not being able to compel her to take his last name. The latter constraint rankled for years. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba,” Philip told a friend. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.” In time, however, the couple regained their equilibrium. Philip carved out a place at the palace, managing the royal estates and getting involved in charitable causes. He also served as a buffer for his reserved and proper wife, who was not always popular with her subjects. During the 1960s, a turbulent decade for the British government, with three prime ministers, the press and public began to challenge the monarchy as being out-of-date and out of touch. It was Philip, considered down-to-earth and funny by the public, who helped to humanize the queen’s image. In the 1969 documentary Royal Family, which highlighted intimate moments of Palace life, he is seen frying sausages and making small talk.

Life itself also softened the queen’s reputation. The public was enchanted when Elizabeth’s eldest son, Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer. With the birth of Charles’s sons, Prince William, in 1982, and Harry two years later, the queen and Philip settled happily into their roles as grandparents. As a 70th wedding anniversary present, in 2017 Elizabeth bestowed on her husband the added honor of Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order.

“Part of the reason she keeps going so steadily is that she has him there beside her,” an attendee at a reception for their seventieth anniversary told “They’re a great team, and that’s still the case.” Plus, “Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the queen simply as another human being. He’s the only man who can,” said Lord Charteris, the queen’s former private secretary. “Strange as it may seem, I believe she values that.”

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Buckingham via Broadway The royal couple announced their engagement in July 1947. While on leave from the navy, Philip would drive to London to see Elizabeth. During their courtship, she liked to play the song “People Will Say We’re in Love,” from the musical Oklahoma!

FRANK SCHERSCHEL/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION NEXT STEPS King George VI helped Princess Elizabeth out of her coach at Westminster Abbey. Later, the wedding party would feast on such dishes as “filet of sole Mountbatten” and “bombe glacée Princess Elizabeth.”

CENTRAL PRESS/HULTON ROYALS COLLECTION/GETTY DOUBLE TEAM The archbishops of Canterbury and York officiated at Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding where Elizabeth had eight bridesmaids and Philip’s best man was his cousin, David Mountbatten.

WILLIAM SUMITS/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION

The newlyweds waved to their well-wishers at Buckingham Palace.

TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/HULTON/GETTY GIFTS FIT FOR A QUEEN Elizabeth, Philip, and members of the royal family posed for an official portrait on November 20, 1947. The couple received 10,000 congratulatory telegrams, along with 2,500 presents, including a bookcase from Elizabeth’s grandmother Queen Mary, front left, and a picnic case from her sister, Princess Margaret, to Philip’s left.

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TRAVELING IN STYLE Escorted by the Household Cavalry, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip rode from Westminster Abbey in the Glass Coach, a black carriage with gold trim. As they passed through the streets of London, crowds up to 50 feet deep cheered.

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THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES In 2007, on their sixtieth anniversary, Elizabeth and Philip visited Broadlands, where they—along with her corgi Susan—spent their wedding night. The newlyweds passed the rest of the holiday at Balmoral Castle, the family’s estate in Scotland.

THE ROYAL TRADITION The Wedding of the Century On July 29, 1981, as alarm clocks rang in the wee hours in New York City, dessert was served in Los Angeles, and corks were popped in Sydney, televisions across the globe were tuned in to witness the wedding of Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Great Britain, to the shy, doe-eyed Diana Spencer. The day was described, inevitably, as a “fairy tale,” but amid the pomp and circumstance, trouble was already brewing

A FAIRY-TALE DAY Newlyweds Diana and Charles, the Princess and Prince of Wales, at St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981.

In 1977, Prince Charles, first in line of succession to the British throne, was without peer the world’s most eligible bachelor. The Fleet Street press was chronicling and speculating and insinuating

on a daily basis. Who would be “The One”—the one who was sufficiently beautiful and elevated to be the next queen-in-waiting? The English public, voracious newspaper hounds, couldn’t wait for the latest potentially viable scoop. The people thrilled when Charles showed up at a society event with a British woman on his arm, and were dismayed when he was linked to an American actress or any other non-Brit. Charles’s great uncle Lord Mountbatten, his most-trusted adult counselor, had urged Charles to sow his wild oats before settling down, and the young man seemed happy to heed this advice. Charles dated, among many others, Lady Sarah Spencer, whom he formally met at the Royal Ascot House party in the summer of 1977, not long after his discharge from the Royal Navy. She was invited to Windsor and Balmoral castles among other places for a variety of events, and this news of course made the gossip pages of the tabloids. The queen thought well enough of the Spencers, one of Britain’s most prominent noble families, and there was some betting in England, where folks bet on everything, that this might be the real thing—that Sarah might be The One. During their relationship, Charles visited Althorp, the Spencer’s ancestral home, for a pheasant hunt. And on the sidelines was Sarah’s sister, the dreamy romantic Diana, who had loved Prince Charles—the very idea of him—since she was a young girl. Charles, for his part, had been vaguely aware of that young girl; he considered her as one of the children who played with his younger brothers, Andrew and Edward, at times when the royal family was on holiday in the country. Diana was introduced to the prince, and while it wasn’t clear if Charles remembered Diana from earlier, she now made an impression. A family friend later told McCall’s that a spirited, longlegged Diana taught Charles “how to tap-dance on the terrace.”

According to Time magazine, Charles, then age 29, was taken with “what a very amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was.” When it came time for a tour of the Spencers’ gallery of old masters paintings, which included several masterworks by Van Dyck, Charles asked Diana to show him around—this after Sarah had told her kid sister to bug off. Charles, could not, of course, show any kind of attention to a 16year-old girl from an aristocratic family. But he certainly left Althorp on that November day with a memory. The relationship between Charles and Sarah fizzled, and young Diana continued to grow up. When she was 17 and 18, she shared a flat in London with three friends, and this quartet traveled in a society of pretty young things who went to the expected places, danced to the expected music. Diana, as if saving herself for her still-imagined Prince Charming, avoided serious entanglements. She remained a virgin.

The chastity factor would not be insignificant when Prince Charles started paying much closer attention in the summer of 1980, when he met Diana again. By then Diana was 19, and the two reconnected at the country estate of Commander Robert de Pass, a friend of Charles’s father, and De Pass’s wife, Philippa, a lady-inwaiting to Charles’s mother. The De Passes’ son, Philip, had invited Diana for the weekend, knowing Charles would be the guest of honor: “You’re a young blood. You might amuse him,” he told her. Diana watched Charles play polo at Cowdray Park, then all returned to the estate for a barbecue. At one point, Diana found herself sitting next to Charles on a hay bale. The conversation eventually wound around to Earl Mountbatten, who had been assassinated by Irish Republican Army terrorists the previous year, and Diana said to Charles quite earnestly, as she later confided to her chosen biographer, Andrew Morton, “You

looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, ‘It’s wrong. You’re lonely. You should be with somebody to look after you.’” Charles was genuinely moved by Diana’s words, and almost immediately their relationship changed—and raced forward. Diana was dizzied by the prince’s—her prince’s—new attentions. Charles, if not smitten in that sense, almost certainly saw a potential answer to the dilemma of his matrimonial obligation. Charles’s grandmother the Queen Mum and his intimidating father, in particular, were pressing him, asserting that Charles’s position as heir to the throne came with responsibilities, and that this Spencer girl (Church of England, young, seemingly without a troubled past) looked to be the answer. Meanwhile, behind the scenes Charles’s relationships were many—and included several adulterous liaisons with married women of the upper class. The Prince wasn’t ready to forgo any parts of his lifestyle; in fact, given a choice, he may not have wed Diana, and surely not in his relations’ time frame. Diana had certainly angled to become Charles’s love, as many biographers allege, and at the same time she must have been savvy enough to feel some disquiet and perhaps doubt during her betrothal. Just as certain, however, is that she was a relative innocent. And when Charles proposed on February 6, 1981, Diana said yes.

A Wedding Like No Other On July 29, 1981, as dawn came over London, the young and hardy who had camped out in the streets in order to secure good viewing places rubbed their eyes. So did Diana at Clarence House, Charles’s London home. The most dedicated of Diana’s public

would be joined in London on this day by many thousands of her countrymen—3,500 celebrating inside Christopher Wren’s baroque masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and 600,000 outside. Alarm clocks went off in New York City, dessert was served in Los Angeles, corks were popped in Sydney, and televisions were switched on around the world—750 million people would tune in to this event. Diana would make the trip to St. Paul’s (chosen over Westminster Abbey because it was larger and also necessitated a longer, slower, more huzzah-filled parade route) in the Cinderella-esque Glass Coach, which had been used by Charles’s parents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The coach was pulled by two bays, including the legendarily purposeful mare Lady Penelope, who could “take any procession in stride,” as attested by royal coachman Richard Boland. This was not merely pomp and circumstance writ large. This was pomp and circumstance in IMAX 3-D surround sound.

As guests were seated by ushers in black morning coats or in full military dress with spurs, the organ filled the nave with a glorious prelude of music by English composers. The pews were packed, and not just with the usual suspects of blue bloods, elites, and the diplomatic corps, but also with royal household staff, Prince Charles’s schoolteachers, and his shipmates from the HMS Bronington, the minesweeper he once commanded. When Diana emerged from the coach, the crowd oohed and aahed at her hitherto-top-secret silk taffeta gown with billowing sleeves, bows, lace flounces, sequins, pearls, and a 25-foot train that kept spilling out of the coach for what seemed like minutes, as the clapping and cheering continued. The veil was of ivory silk tulle and glittered with 10,000 inlaid mother-of-pearl sequins, the whole of it held in place by the Spencer family diamond tiara. If this is precisely what Diana had dreamed of when she was a little

girl with a headful of impossible wishes, well, this is precisely what she got. Both bride and groom showed jitters during the ceremony, stumbling just a bit. Reciting their vows before the Archbishop of Canterbury, Diana called her betrothed Philip Charles Arthur George instead of Charles Philip Arthur George, and Charles said “with all thy goods I share with thee” instead of “all my worldly goods I share with thee.” No matter (and, in fact, quite charming), the ceremony was officially concluded, the recessional music (yes, Edward Elgar’s Pomp and swelled, the bells rang out, and it was off to Buckingham Palace in the royal family’s 1902 State Landau.

There, they appeared on the balcony at about one o’clock British Standard Time. The crowds pressing in at the gate shouted their only demand. “I am not going to do that caper,” Charles said to Diana. “They are trying to get us to kiss.” “Well, how about it?” asked Diana in return. The prince paused and replied, “Why ever not?” He kissed his wife warmly, and even greater cheers rang out from the crowd. After much toasting at the palace, Charles and Diana made their way to the landau, now decorated with a JUST MARRIED sign and a big bunch of silver and blue heart-shaped balloons that had been attached by Charles’s brothers, Andrew and Edward, and were driven over Westminster Bridge to Waterloo Station, where they would board a train for Hampshire and the beginning of their honeymoon. The Wedding of the Century was concluded, but never to be forgotten.

The Trouble Begins For a time, Camelot reigned: Charles, his beautiful princess, and then their two sterling sons. That would not last.

We now know that there was trouble in paradise almost from the get-go. Blame will be parceled, but a sticking point was the continuing presence of Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s longstanding paramour, in his life. Diana later said, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” And the union went about as badly as marriages can. A clear bright spot was that the prince and princess produced those two sons, William and Harry, and if there was one certainty concerning Lady Di, it was that her sons meant the world to her. The boys inherited much from their mother: her lovely smile, her charisma, her empathy.

In December 1992, after a year of rumors, allegations, and bad luck for the Windsor family, Charles and Diana confirmed what everybody already knew: their union was no more and hadn’t been happy for a goodly while. Their announced separation did nothing to take the spotlight off of them. Paparazzi hounded Diana and her new boyfriend, heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, and doubled up on Charles and Camilla. Charles’s popularity, meanwhile, went into free fall, with the percentage of Britons who thought the prince would make a good king dropping by half. Diana’s trajectory, by contrast, curved in the opposite direction. The public could not get enough of her kindess and incandescent glamour. When the princess began to date Dodi al Fayed, scion of the family that owned, among other properties, Harrods department store in London and the Ritz Hotel in Paris, the media followed them everywhere. Then Diana and Dodi died in an automobile crash in the Place de l’Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997. The couple, chauffeured by the acting security manager of the Ritz, Henri Paul, was traveling way too fast (which was likely caused or exacerbated by the pursuing press), and Paul had been drinking.

It was one of the most unexpected tragedies in the dramatic history of the British royal family and was accompanied by an outpouring of communal grief and visceral emotion. More than a million people lined the route of Diana’s funeral procession, and approximately half the world’s population watched on television. Why? Possibly the princess’s vulnerabilities and her public struggles—with her weight, with her marriage—had served to humanize her. In Britain, it could have been that the monarchy itself was being mourned: the citizenry loved this woman who had been cast aside more than they cared for the royals who had survived. At the end of the day, then prime minister Tony Blair put it simply: Diana had been “the people’s princess,” and the people needed to say their goodbyes.

In many ways, Charles’s post-Diana life can be seen as a dogged burrowing back into public approval. Having lost the respect he never actually earned, he has had to win it back. Over the past two decades, the prince has been able to spend more time being a father, and he has worked at it. Even when Charles’s popularity was at its lowest, polls still showed that the people of Great Britain approved of the job he was doing with his offspring. Charles took care that the press, which intruded so much on his life, was kept out of his sons’. They were allowed to form friendships and make mistakes largely out of the public eye. William and Kate’s marriage was much more sensibly managed than his and Diana’s. The couple had plenty of time to get to know each other, and William appears to have been allowed to choose his partner almost as freely as any other 28-year-old. The same is true for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. After decades of discord within the royal family, it could be that one of Charles’s most important achievements is that he ensured that his sons were permitted marriages of love.

LNS/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX

LONDON CALLING In early 1981, Diana made a splash at her first official public appearance by wearing a strapless black taffeta Emanuel gown to a charity recital at Goldsmiths’ Hall. She delighted the press corps but perturbed the Palace.

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IN THE BEGINNING The couple’s official engagement photo, from February 1981.

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Here, Diana stepped out of her coach after leaving St. Paul’s Cathedral.

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KIND WORDS In the palace after the ceremony, Diana comforted flower girl Clementine Hambro—the five-year-old greatgranddaughter of Winston Churchill—who had tripped and bumped her head.

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RED CARPET TREATMENT Following the wedding, Charles and Diana left St. Paul’s, the 17th-century cathedral near the River Thames, then rode two miles to Buckingham Palace, where they exchanged a much-anticipated balcony kiss.

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MAN AND WIFE Prince Charles escorted his bride from the cathedral as she navigated her sweeping 25-foot train.

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The newlyweds rode in the 1902 State Landau to the palace.

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Five years later, the Waleses posed with sons Harry and William in the wildflower meadow at Highgrove House.

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FAMILY LEGACY Like Charles’s parents, the couple spent their honeymoon at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

THE ROYAL TRADITION The Stars in Their Eyes When Prince William and Catherine Middleton met at university, it was less a bolt of lightning than a slow sizzle. Following a growing friendship of tennis matches and late-night study sessions, the spark ignited. And when the happy couple wed, royals watchers hoped the pair would bring some brightness to the scandal-worn Windsors

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WEDDED BLISS Prince William escorted his bride, Catherine, now Duchess of Cambridge, from Westminster Abbey after their wedding ceremony on April 29, 2011.

It was at a spring 2002 undergraduate charity fashion show at the University of St. Andrews that Prince William famously realized his classmate Kate Middleton might be more than just a classmate. The 19-year-old royal, sitting in the front row, took note when Middleton sauntered down the runway in a diaphanous skirt pulled up to become a bandeau-top dress, revealing a bikini bottom and modest bra underneath. “Kate’s hot,” William reportedly breathed to a friend. By then, the two freshmen were well acquainted. They had shared notes and friends and had met for tennis and swim dates throughout the year. But the romance spark had been lit, and that fall, when they began sharing a four-bedroom apartment with two other students, “it just sort of blossomed, really,” William recalled in an interview. While the other roommates “at first were a bit surprised” when they became a couple, William said, “then they realized it was really nice and it was good fun . . . so we had a good giggle with them as well.” Before long, the British public was on to the relationship as well, when the Sun published a photo of them on the slopes in Klosters, Switzerland, during a school break. The full-court press was on, and like other royal girlfriends, Middleton was badgered in everything she did. The Palace, pleading for privacy, tried to enforce a blackout, and on occasion William personally asked photographers to leave Middleton alone. Back at St. Andrews, the couple tried laying low, never holding hands in public and seldom appearing on campus together. Friends pitched in too, texting the prince and his girlfriend if they saw photographers milling about.

But William’s new companion was simply too juicy a story. She was pretty, well-bred, intelligent, well-educated, sporty, and stylish. She was unpretentious and adventurous: Remarkably, she even had

volunteered in Chile with the Raleigh International program a few months after William had. Kate was also a commoner, the first child of Michael and Carole Middleton, successful entrepreneurs with a party-favors business. But it would be hard to describe the 20-year-old as a Cinderella in distress, waiting to be saved by her prince. While William had suffered—in full public view—the torments of Diana and Charles’s growing apart and divorcing, Middleton was brought up, along with her siblings, in a loving environment. The public, in a word, was enchanted by the couple. Speculation that it was a love match made to last and that a wedding might be in the offing rarely abated, much to the Palace’s chagrin. The rumors even endured the period in 2007 when Middleton, demanding a commitment, and William, wanting breathing room, temporarily split. And once the two reunited as lovebirds, the chattering classes all but demanded an engagement. William and Kate took their time. They found some needed privacy in Wales, where William eventually was stationed for military service, and grew ever closer. Kate continued to work for her family’s party business, sometimes from afar, though she suffered tabloid criticism for not having a “real job.” They’ve both said their protracted courtship was a needed test. Because of the unwanted scrutiny that befalls a royal girlfriend, William wanted to afford Kate “a chance to back out if she needed to before it got all too much.” For her part, Kate has said that the time she spent apart from the prince “made me a stronger person.” Finally, everyone’s waiting was rewarded. In mid-November of 2010, Clarence House, the London home and headquarters of Charles, Prince of Wales, released a succinct announcement that Will and Kate were engaged, that William’s father was “delighted,”

and that a wedding was expected for the following spring or summer. The modern, savvy Will and Kate seemed simply happy. They had been, as William put it, “talking about marriage for a while, so it wasn’t a massively big surprise.” Sweet stories trickled out as the betrothed and their confidants began to talk more freely. Among the stories: the tale of the proposal. William kept his mother Diana’s engagement ring, a distinctive sapphire in a ring of small diamonds, with him for three weeks in his rucksack as he and Kate vacationed in Kenya in October 2010. They were celebrating his completion of the requirements to receive his Royal Air Force wings, and Africa had a special resonance for William. “I’d been planning it for a while, but as every guy out there will know, it takes a certain amount of motivation to get yourself going,” he told journalist Tom Bradby. “So I was planning it and then it just felt really right out in Africa. It was beautiful at the time. I just—I had done a bit of planning to show my romantic side . . . You hear a lot of horror stories about proposing and things going horribly wrong. It went really, really well, and I was really pleased she said yes.” A Glowing Bride

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect—or more apt. At the very moment that Kate Middleton stepped out of the royal family’s glass-topped Rolls-Royce Phantom VI and onto a plush red carpet outside Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011, the sun peeked through a layer of gray London clouds and cast a bright glow on the bride and the thousands who had gathered to catch a glimpse of her. The event that was about to unfold—for all its choreographed pageantry, and despite its massive audience (1,900 in the church, another million gathered outside, and 2 billion

watching on TV)—would go down as one of the warmest occasions in the history of Britain’s royal family. “It felt like being at a family wedding, albeit quite a large one,” said a guest and friend of the Middletons’. “It was very intimate, very comfortable, very friendly—you had to keep pinching yourself to remember that this was the most amazing wedding of the future king and queen.” The crowd of well-wishers outside needed no reminder, rocking the 766-year-old Abbey’s vaulted nave with thunderous cheers after William, 28, and Kate, 29, exchanged their traditional vows. But it was the smaller, personal moments that made the day: the groom’s touch of humor when he reportedly greeted his father-inlaw at the altar with a joking “We were supposed to have just a small family affair”; the couple’s subtle tribute to Princess Diana during the service with the inclusion of her favorite hymn, “Jerusalem” (which, as one guest put it, “sent a real tingle down your spine”); the tender awkwardness of their first public kiss— followed by a delightful do-over—on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Even before the bride walked down the aisle in a lace and satin gazar gown from the British fashion house of the late Alexander McQueen, William and Kate had put their own youthful and distinctive stamp on the momentous occasion. It started with their betrothal announcement via Twitter in November 2010, with Clarence House breaking the anticipated news. The bride and her groom had penned their own prayer for the ceremony and chosen their own music, to be played by the London Chamber Orchestra and others. The 27-year-old stage manager for the U.K. version of X-Factor had been brought in to oversee the 60 cameras inside Westminster Abbey. Royals watchers were filled with anticipation that the dust was about to be shaken off the scandal-worn image

of the Windsors. As Richard Chartres, the Bishop London, proclaimed during his speech, “This is a day of hope.” Adding to the frisson were the A-listers in the pews, including Elton John, Victoria and David Beckham, singer Joss Stone, and director Guy Ritchie. They all waited patiently as the wedding party made its entrance, first William, wearing the uniform of a colonel of the Irish Guards, a scarlet jacket and blue sash, and accompanied by Prince Harry. Then came Carole Middleton, mother of the bride, the queen, and other family members. Finally, the room turned in collective awe as Kate glided down the aisle toward her prince for the hour-long ceremony. The bride did not, as Diana had not, promise to “obey” her husband, but instead, vowed to “love, comfort, honor, and keep” her husband. For his part, Prince William spoke with a clear, steady voice, cracking slightly as he said his initial “I will.” And as much as the couple made the ceremony their own, they were ultimately joined just as spouses for centuries before them have been joined, with the Archbishop of Canterbury bringing their right hands together and declaring: “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” Building a Legacy

In the months after their wedding, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge immersed themselves in domestic tranquility. At their four-bedroom farmhouse on the island of Anglesey, in Wales, Kate took up jam-making and perfected her husband’s favorite roast chicken. The prince spent his workdays as a helicopter pilot with the RAF search-and-rescue force based nearby, and date nights meant watching DVDs or visiting a pub. When guests were on hand, William took pleasure in “pottering around making tea and

toast,” a friend told Vanity Fair. The mood, he said, “was very chilled and relaxed.” Seven years later, the couple’s private life is similarly unpretentious. Duty may take them to Kuala Lumpur and Borneo, but they prize the simple pleasures of hearth and home. Whether they’re at Anmer Hall, their country home at Sandringham, the queen’s estate in Norfolk, or visiting with the duchess’s parents at their home in Bucklebury, Berkshire, the prince and princess enjoy traditional country pursuits. With time, the man who is second in line to the throne and the woman likely to become queen consort have adapted to the public stage and managed to dovetail their roles as spouses and parents with their royal duties. Mentored by the queen, who at 92 is scaling back her official duties, William has stepped in as her emissary. He has taken her place as patron of several charities, parceling out honors and bestowing knighthoods. He has also represented Elizabeth on foreign visits, including an expedition to Bhutan and India in 2016. Vibrant Kate has displayed a talent for connecting with movie stars and sports heroes and sick children and Boy Scouts, just as Princess Diana did.

William has made parenthood a clear priority. “As far as we’re concerned, we’re a normal family,” the duke said in 2016, shortly before the couple’s second child, Charlotte, was born. “There’ll be a time and a place to bring George up [to] understand how he fits in the world.” Right now, he wants to provide his children with “a secure, stable environment” and give them “as much love as I can.” Even if the little royals don’t comprehend their place in “the Firm,” as some Windsors call it, they have their parents’ star power. In September 2016, the family made an eight-day tour of Canada. Looking smart in shorts and knee socks, George smiled

widely and waved as the family deplaned in British Columbia. In her floral frocks and tiny cardigans, Charlotte, then 16 months, proved that she could work a children’s party. At a gathering in Victoria for military families, she plunked herself onto a pony-size therapy dog and cried “Pop!” as she toddled toward an archway of balloons. Having returned to Kensington Palace, William and Kate now are the ones moving to the fore. If they have resisted the royal perks in the past—even shopping at the Gap and flying commercial, upon occasion—they may have a more difficult time of it as their official roles expand. William has hung up his flight helmet, George attends Thomas’s London Day School in Battersea, and Kate is combining managing royal offspring with official engagements. Still, one suspects that the logistical changes are only that. And that the modern couple who are balancing family life with their obligations to the monarchy will continue to make it all work. The prince, surrounded by memories of his childhood, is bound to remember his mother’s lessons, and to carry them into the future. In an interview in 1995, Diana told the BBC’s Martin Bashir how she “put it to William particularly, that if you find someone you love in life you must hang onto it and look after it, and if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you, then you must protect it.” Clearly, her son was listening.

MATRIX PICTURES

A Love Match Made to Last: Will and Kate left a nightclub together in 2007.

JAMIE WISEMAN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Will snuck an embrace on the Swiss ski slopes in 2008.

JAMIE WISEMAN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Officially a couple, the pair attended a wedding of mutual friends in Gloucestershire in 2010.

SUSANNAH IRELAND/EYEVINE/ZUMA RED LETTER DAY After years of will-they-or-won’t-they, the newly engaged Prince William and Kate Middleton appeared on November 16, 2010, before a phalanx of photographers at London’s St. James’s Palace, where they announced their engagement.

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Prince William and Catherine exchanged rings and smiles.

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NUNN SYNDICATION/POLARIS

TRAIN ON Michael Middleton walked his daughter down the aisle of Westminster Abbey.

DAVE THOMPSON/REUTERS THE SHOWSTOPPER During their recessional, William and Kate made their way past some of the 1,900 guests gathered at Westminster Abbey. Their wedding and associated security expenses reportedly cost some $34 million.

CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA

TWICE AS NICE The lovebirds granted the half million subjects crammed against the Buckingham Palace gates not one, but two kisses.

TONY GENTILE/REUTERS

The couple’s trip to Buckingham Palace via the 1902 State Landau, which was built for William’s great-great-great grandfather King Edward VII.

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PERFECT CARRIAGE William held Kate’s hand and bouquet—which appropriately included sweet william, along with lily of the valley, hyacinth, and myrtle—as they made their way to a lunchtime reception for 650 guests.

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Prince George arrived with his father in tow for his first day of school in 2017.

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Catherine and daughter Princess Charlotte during an official visit to Poland and Germany in 2017.

Royal Weddings Grandeur, Romance, and Tradition

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FRONT COVER Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in an official engagement photo, December 2017. ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI/GETTY

BACK COVER Clockwise from top left: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle FACUNDO the Duchess and Duke of Cambridge PAUL Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip BARON/CAMERA Princess Diana and Prince Charles TERRY FINCHER/PRINCESS DIANA ARCHIVE/GETTY For more one-of-a-kind LIFE special editions and keepsakes, go to LIFEspecialeditions.com

JUST ONE MORE

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After dating for more than a year, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement on November 27, 2017. Afterward, they walked through Kensington Palace’s sunken garden.