The British tabloids have latched onto one comment from Meghan Markle’s Oprah interview in news coverage this week, disputing the legitimacy of the Duchess of Sussex telling Oprah that she and Prince Harry exchanged vows before their royal wedding in a more intimate ceremony for themselves.
“I was thinking about it, you know our wedding—three days before our wedding, we got married. No one knows that,” Meghan told Oprah. “We called the Archbishop and we just said, look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world. But we want our union between us, so the vows that we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
The Sun, a tabloid who hired a private investigator to “get dirt” on Meghan right as news broke she and Harry were dating, obtained and ran the couple’s official wedding certificate on its site this weekend, which had their date of marriage listed as their royal wedding ceremony date, May 19, 2018. They also spoke to a former chief clerk at the Faculty Office, Stephen Borton, who took a jab at Meghan, calling her, “obviously confused and clearly misinformed.”
“The Special License I helped draw up enabled them to marry at St George’s Chapel in Windsor and what happened there on 19 May 2018 and was seen by millions around the world was the official wedding as recognized by the Church of England and the law,” he explained. “What I suspect they did was exchange some simple vows they had perhaps written themselves, and which is fashionable, and said that in front of the Archbishop—or, and more likely, it was a simple rehearsal.”
The Sun’s piece sparked a new narrative picked up by multiple British tabloids, infamous for their years-long racist smear campaign against the Duchess. But, as usual for the British tabloids, framing Meghan’s remarks as untrue doesn’t tell the full story.
In the interview, Meghan never called it an early, secret, backyard wedding; that was media interpretation. And some couples, particularly those who have destination weddings or have different citizenships, may have a vow exchange that is not a legal wedding. Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas’ big French wedding ceremony is one celebrity example; they legally wed in Las Vegas months before it. As a source told E! immediately following the Vegas ceremony, “they had to get married in the States to make it legal, but the wedding is still in Europe.”
For Meghan and Harry, it does not change the fact that symbolically and emotionally, as Meghan said, they felt like they were getting married then (“we want our union between us”). It was a personal vow exchange, with the couple exchanging the words they would’ve said in a more normal, private wedding rather than a televised, public, royal one for all the world to consume, with set, traditional vows to recite.
A spokesperson for Meghan and Harry clarified to outlets that the Duke and Duchess “privately exchanged personal vows a few days before their official/legal wedding on May 19.” That rep first set the record straight on Meghan’s comments on March 8, one day after the interview aired and weeks before The Sun made the story into a bigger controversy.
Источник: www.elle.com
