by Omid Scobie
Through a series of texts, phone calls, and sketches sent back and forth, the women settled into an easy relationship. In February, Meghan arrived in a discreet town car to the South West London property where Clare stored archives of her designs and finished pieces. There, they discussed the final design, before two small teams began creating the gown, which included a small piece of blue fabric snipped from the dress she had worn on her first blind date with Harry sewn inside. On March 27, when Meghan took a commercial flight to LA to spend a few days with Doria ahead of the big day, she brought sketches of the dress among other details about the wedding to show her mom.
In the run-up to the wedding, Clare said that she and Meghan met many times, in a way that never felt official or stately. “We talked about the ceremony, the implications of her coming into the family and what her role was going to be in the future, and what she wanted to represent, what emotions she wanted to portray, how she wanted to carve out a new idea of a way to dress for a royal, and also the magnitude of it. She was so excited about the whole thing.”
Right before the wedding, the dress—which took several fittings all done by Clare herself to ensure secrecy—was moved to a secure room at Cliveden House in the early hours in a cloak-and-dagger operation, devised by Meghan’s personal assistant, Melissa Toubati, and Jason, that involved several protection officers and a man-made tunnel. The pair laughed at the insanity of their scurrying around with the world’s most wanted dress.
Everything about the dress had been shrouded in secrecy—including its designer. Clare’s appearance on the church steps was the first confirmation to the public, and even to her husband and three children, that she had been given the all-important role of dress designer. “Like a doctor’s law in that you don’t talk about your patients, so I just stuck to that principle,” the designer said.
In view of the cameras, Clare took pains to arrange the veil, the tulle-and-silk creation so delicate and of such pure white that workers had to wash their hands every thirty minutes over the five hundred hours it took to complete. “I knew that the dress, as she went up the steps, would make this beautiful line,” the designer said. “With the veil being so long, I wanted to make it absolutely spectacular.”
Meghan looked back at Clare to see if the veil was ready before she moved, stopping to admire the crowd for a brief moment. Clara Loughran, Harry’s trusted Palace aide who had overseen all floral logistics for the special day, waited at the top of the steps in order to hand Meghan her bridal bouquet of lily of the valley, myrtle, and Diana’s favorite forget-me-nots.
Clare handed the veil to the pageboys, who had carefully rehearsed the night before at the church with a stand-in veil of polyester lace. Jessica and Ben’s sons, with their broad, gap-toothed grins, were “just loving the moment” as the trumpets began to play, Clare said. “He’d never heard a trumpet before,” Ben said of Brian’s wide-eyed reaction to the fanfare of their arrival. “And I’m so glad we gave them good haircuts beforehand!”
Glittering in Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau tiara and a pair of custom Givenchy silk duchess satin pumps completing her look, Meghan began the 255-foot walk toward her awestruck, teary-eyed groom, dapper himself in the Household Cavalry Blues and Royals uniform crafted on London’s Savile Row.
Doria also cried a bit as she watched her daughter walk down the aisle. While the public thought the mother of the bride looked alone, Meghan had made sure she was seated with two of her closest friends—Benita and Genevieve—who both know her mom very well. Doria was particularly close with Benita, whose daughters, Rylan and Remi, were not only Meghan’s godchildren but also her bridesmaids.
By the time the bride and groom were eye-to-eye, Harry sending off his father with a grateful “Thank you, Pa,” it was impossible to take in anything but the overwhelming love between them. “You look amazing. I missed you,” Harry told Meghan. “Thank you,” she replied shyly.
Though the hour-long ceremony was filled with requisite pomp and circumstance, the couple managed to make it personal.
“It was a somewhat global wedding, but being able to try and make everybody feel inclusive, it was really, really important to us,” Harry said in recordings he and Meghan made for the Windsor Castle exhibit A Royal Wedding: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “In making choices that were really personal and meaningful, it could make the whole experience feel intimate, even though it was a very big wedding.”
To that end, the couple filled the sunlit medieval chapel, a resplendent mix of stained glass and vaulted ceilings, with those who had shaped their lives. Representatives from many of the charities they had worked with over the years were present. Harry’s former girlfriends Cressida Bonas and Chelsy Davy were also among the witnesses for the moment when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, asked if there was any reason Harry and Meghan could not be wed.
Bishop Michael Curry, the first African American to serve as presiding bishop in the Episcopal Church, delivered the sermon. The bishop, who had never met the couple, was very surprised when he received a call from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office. And he was floored when he learned he was to preach at Harry and Meghan’s service. “Get out!” was his shocked response.
As soon as he met Harry and Meghan for the first time at the altar, Bishop Curry said their love was palpable. “You could see it in how they looked at each other,” he said. “I became really aware that, you know what, the love that they had for each other, is what brought all the various worlds together, that crossed all the boundaries of our differences. That love did it.”
A mixed-race member of the British royal family meant more than just a new chapter—it was a societal shift, kicked off by an African American bishop proclaiming how the couple’s love had the power to change the world.
“The late Dr. Martin Luther King once said, and I quote, ‘We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world. But love, love is the only way,’ ” Bishop Curry preached.
His choice to weave in quotes from the legendary civil rights activist alongside psalms from the New Testament symbolized that Meghan was to be a different type of duchess. Bishop Curry didn’t expect his speech to be accompanied by responsive shouts, but he said he “could see the ‘Amens!’ ” in the crowd’s eyes.
Following Bishop Curry’s sermon, the twenty-member Kingdom Choir launched into the classic “Stand by Me.” (Like Bishop Curry, the Kingdom Choir was also Prince Charles’s suggestion.) A lot of behind-the-scenes work had gone into the three-part harmony gospel arrangement of Ben E. King’s song, which had been used as a rallying cry during the civil rights movement. The couple shot down almost a dozen previous versions of the song that the choir leader, Karen Gibson, had prepared. Then Prince Charles, who recommended much of the musical accompaniment to Harry and Meghan, arranged for Gibson, five choir members, and a keyboardist to play in person at Kensington Palace.
“The version everyone heard was the twelfth version, and even now I don’t know if it was exactly what they wanted since we had simply run out of time,” Karen said after the wedding. “At the time I didn’t understand why they kept saying no, but of course they were right. The version they got was pure. And it absolutely suited the style of the wedding.”
Still, Karen wasn’t sure the performance on the wedding day had inspired excitement. Used to demonstrative audiences, the only response they got that day “was the rustling of people turning their heads around,” she said with a laugh. But when they left the church “we were literally mobbed.” The actor Tom Hardy—a close friend of Harry’s who had flown in from a film set in New Orleans for just twenty-four hours to be at the wedding—gave her a hug. Within days, their performance had been watched several million times on YouTube, the British media was calling Gibson the “godmother of gospel,” and the Queen had invited the choir to a Buckingham Palace garden party the following month.
The emotion of their music co
ntinued to fill the room as both Harry and Meghan vowed to have and to hold—but not to obey. The bride chose to omit the outdated term just as Kate did in her 2011 wedding to William. Once they had exchanged rings (his made of platinum and hers created with rare Welsh gold featuring a Welsh dragon stamp), they were proclaimed, to the glee of the crowd, husband and wife. They were now Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
As the nineteen-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason (the first black musician to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year in the award’s thirty-eight-year history) played three pieces, including Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Harry and Meghan moved to a private room in the chapel with their parents in tow for the Signing of the Register. Charles made sure that a solo Doria was looked after, offering his hand as they walked into the small space to witness Harry and Meghan sign their names. “It was a lovely gesture,” Camilla, who was by Charles’s side, said in the BBC documentary Prince, Son and Heir: Charles at 70. “A lot of people seeing my husband actually take the bride’s mother by the hand to sign the registry, it’s something that moved everybody . . . It’s the things he does behind the scenes that people don’t know about. I don’t think people realize quite how kind he is.”
After the ceremony, the newly wedded couple paused at the top of the chapel steps just after 1:00 p.m. to, at long last, engage in the time-honored tradition of sharing their first kiss as husband and wife. Then, with the voices of the Kingdom Choir singing “This Little Light of Mine” ringing out from inside the church, they climbed into their horse-drawn, open-top Ascot Landau carriage for a twenty-five-minute celebratory ride through the streets of Windsor.
Lifting her hand to her chest, Meghan had just one word when she saw the huge crowds gathered on the grounds of the castle: “Wow!”
Sitting down in the carriage beside his bride, Harry laughed that his trousers were “too tight.”
And just like that, the wedding of the year, or at least the portion they were willing to put on display for the world, had come to an end, the couple literally riding off into their happily ever after as they alternately waved to the cheering fans and stared at each other, marveling at the momentous step they had just taken.
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Presenting the Sussexes
Though the public’s glimpse into the spectacular event had ended, for Harry and Meghan, their wedding day was just getting started.
Having wound through the streets of Windsor and back to the castle grounds, the newlyweds’ carriage brought them to the State Apartments. Their guests were beginning to mingle through St. George’s Hall, peering up at the ceiling, which was studded with the coats of arms and the armored King’s Champion statue on horseback at the hall’s east end and admiring the Californian baker Claire Ptak’s multi-tiered, peony-covered Amalfi lemon and elderflower syrup cake. Harry and Meghan were ferried into the gilded Green Drawing Room, where the photographer Alexi Lubomirski had precisely twenty-five minutes to capture six different portrait setups, including one featuring all four page boys in their miniature uniforms and six bridesmaids in their tiny Givenchy gowns. Alexi was already on first-name terms with the couple, having taken their engagement portraits in December 2017.
Harry had some key business to attend to first. The prince moved from his bride’s side to lavish praise on Clare. “He came straight up to me,” recalled the designer, who was on hand to adjust Meghan’s train and veil so everything would look perfect for their photos.
“Oh my god, thank you,” he told Clare. “She looks absolutely stunning.”
As Daniel, there to touch up Meghan’s makeup, chatted with Doria, who was noticeably relieved to be out of the spotlight, Alexi and his crew set about arranging Harry on the silk damask Morel & Seddon couch he had once shared with his late mom, Princess Diana, after his 1984 christening. Meghan was situated below him on the Axminster carpet, with the pageboys and bridesmaids filling in all around.
Alexi was able to elicit genuine smiles from his small subjects with just one sentence. “Who likes Smarties?” he shouted, as a roomful of hands shot up.
He used the same joke on Doria, William, Kate, Charles, Camilla, the Queen, and Prince Philip, after he carefully arranged the family on the silky side chairs. “I wanted it to feel like a family picture,” he explained. “I didn’t want it to feel too much like a sports team photo or an army photo.” It helped that his Smarties line worked on the adults, too. Even the Queen smirked.
With only a few more minutes to capture the portraits of the couple alone, the photographer quickly made the decision to walk out onto the lawns of the Queen’s rose garden. As the trio strode around the hedges and clusters of flower beds, the sun was starting to dip behind the castle’s turrets. He suggested one last setup on a small staircase. Harry lowered himself on the concrete while Meghan, finally free from her beautiful but encumbering veil, slumped against him, resting comfortably against his chest. It was the snap of the day. They laughed about making it through the gauntlet of their morning, joking about how worn out they were from the emotion. “It was just one of those magical moments,” Alexi said, “when you’re a photographer and everything falls into place.”
The photographer immediately drove to his mother’s home, which happened to be nearby and was a safe place to work without the threat of prying eyes. During the car ride, he scanned through the digital files that he hadn’t had time to look at while working. Instead, he had relied on his assistant to review the images in the moment. So, when he saw the picture he’d taken in a rush during the last three minutes of their session, he breathed a sigh of relief. They were “amazing” and “emotional.”
“Emotional” might as well have been the word of the day. And no one was more skilled at evoking it than the groom when the wedding reception began. As the guests (many having slipped out of their heels in favor of the white cushioned slippers provided for comfort) mingled through the neo-Gothic hall, restored to its full glory following a 1992 fire, Harry stepped up to speak. When he first uttered the words “my wife and I,” he was rewarded with a round of applause from the crowd. For Harry, he had been looking forward to saying that as much as everyone else enjoyed hearing it.
Everyone was in a good mood, aided by the Pol Roger Brut Réserve non-vintage champagne being passed around. For the underage set, including Harry’s cousins Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and Viscount Severn, there were mocktails made with Sandringham Cox’s apple juice and elderflower. Also making the rounds were exquisitely presented canapés of Scottish langoustines wrapped in smoked salmon with citrus crème fraiche, grilled English asparagus wrapped in Cumbrian ham, garden pea panna cotta with quail eggs and lemon verbena, and poached free-range chicken bound with a lightly spiced yogurt with roasted apricot. For lunch, there was fricassee of free-range chicken with morel mushrooms and young leeks; pea and mint risotto with pea shoots, truffle oil, and Parmesan crisps; and ten-hour slow-roasted Windsor pork belly with apple compote and crackling.
The Queen was the official host of the afternoon event, but it was Harry’s best man, William, who introduced the new husband and wife and announced his dad’s toast.
Charles’s dry humor was on full display as he spoke about feeding baby Harry and changing his diapers, before allowing that he turned out all right. Then, in a move that elicited tears from the crowd, he opened up about how moving it was to see his younger son become a husband. “My darling old Harry,” he closed, “I’m so happy for you.”
No one was happier for Harry than Harry, who delivered an off-the-cuff speech about how excited he was to be part of this new team and acknowledging how his bride had navigated the challenge of putting together this event while facing some unwelcome outside hindrances “with such grace.” He also offered some good-natured ribbing like his dear old dad, joking that he hoped the American half of the room wouldn’t make off with the hall’s swords and pleading with everyone to be quiet when they left so as not to disturb the neighbors.
Then, before
the duo could slice into their sponge cake, which was laced with syrup sourced from the elderflower trees at the Queen’s estate in Sandringham, Harry took the microphone once more and slyly inquired if anyone in the crowd knew their way around a piano. Elton John—in his signature pink glasses—picked up the cue. Having long ago agreed to a mini concert, he sat down at the piano.
“What is going on here?” an astonished friend of Meghan’s murmured.
Then Sir Elton launched in.
“My gift is my song, and this one’s for you,” he sang.
After “Your Song,” he performed “Circle of Life” (The Lion King being one of Harry’s favorite movies) and “I’m Still Standing,” which left guests, including Oprah, dabbing at their eyes.
He also belted out “Tiny Dancer” in a nod to Meghan with the opening lyrics, “Blue jean baby, LA lady.” It was the perfect performance for the boy he had watched grow into a man and the son of one of his closest friends. In fact, it was at that very same venue, for Prince Andrew’s twenty-first birthday party, that Elton had first met Diana in 1981.
To support Harry in his mother’s absence were Diana’s two sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes; her brother Charles Spencer; her old roommate and Harry’s godmother Carolyn Bartholomew; and Julia Samuel, Prince George’s godmother and the head of the charity Child Bereavement UK, for which William served as patron. (The charity supported children and families who had lost a loved one and those caring for sick family members with terminal diagnoses.) Lady Jane had read from the Song of Solomon during the service to honor her late sister’s memory.
Buoyed by Diana’s spirit, Harry and Meghan made their way to their temporary Windsor Castle accommodations for a bit of relaxation before prepping for the private evening reception. Harry planned to have a quick nap, but, filled with so much energy and excitement from the day, he couldn’t keep still for a moment.