HANDOUT VIA GETTY
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are not a typical, stiff royal partnership, and their wedding will symbolize how they intend to do things differently.
On May 19, almost exactly two years after Meghan Markle first laid eyes upon Prince Harry, they will walk down the aisle of St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle and be married in one of most extraordinary fairytale romances of modern times.
After Meghan and Harry’s marriage has been noisily and triumphantly heralded by six gold-jacketed trumpeters from the Household Cavalry brass band, they will walk to an open top horse-drawn carriage (weather permitting) and ride through the streets of Windsor to the cheers of thousands of joyous well wishers.
Saturday 19 May will be the most extraordinary day of an already extraordinary romance that came out of nowhere and rescued a heartbroken and despairing prince who had, sources say, after a string of romantic disasters more or less given up hope of finding a bride altogether, at least in the short or medium term.
After he was dumped by Chelsy Davy, a wild-at-heart free spirit who grew up on a private safari park in Africa, who couldn't bear the prospect of marrying into the royal family after she saw the horrific level of scrutiny that Kate Middleton and her family were subjected to in the run up to and during her wedding, Harry became involved in a relationship with blue-blooded Brit Cressida Bonas.
Harry was actually dating Cressida in secret when he told Sky News, while on a trip to New Zealand in 2015: “I would love to have kids right now but there is a process one has to go through. Hopefully I’m doing all right by myself. It would be great to have someone next to me to share the pressure but the time will come and whatever happens happens.”
Soon after he made those comments, his relationship with Cressida became public.
On paper, she looked like a perfect bride, and it all seemed to be going swimmingly until, quite suddenly, it wasn’t. Just a week after they made their first joint public appearance, Cressida was photographed weeping in a Soho street, the relationship broken asunder by the relentless pressure of media attention and the paparazzi.
The fact that a picture was taken of her in such an intimate moment only proved her point – being involved with Harry has been consistently a horrendous and bruising experience for the women who have had relationships with him.
Although Harry did not "sit at home and weep" as his biographer Penny Junor told the Daily Beast, and it is known that he did see some other women, “he was in despair, because the two women he had really had a lot of fun with had both been seen off.”
“All the chat at all the dinner parties I go to is either about having babies, trying to have babies, or what to do with them once they arrive”
Who could have blamed him if he felt "doomed," as Junor describes it, and incredibly lonely, as he saw his brother start a family, and his gang of old mates break up.
One by one, his wingmen – Tom ‘Skippy’ Inskip (a fellow traveler on the infamous Las Vegas trip), Jake Warren, Tom Van Straubenzee and even his oldest, naughtiest chum Guy Pelly – abandoned the pleasures of bachelor life and slipped off into the calmer waters of marital bliss.
According to a report in the Sun at the time, Harry confided in a friend: “All the chat at all the dinner parties I go to is either about having babies, trying to have babies, or what to do with them once they arrive.”
But Harry was still social. A key haunt became the isolated private members club Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire, where he spent several weekends with groups of male and female friends.
No comments: