- Representatives for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry confirmed that their backyard wedding was not legal.
- Markle told Oprah that the exchange of vows took place three days before the royal wedding in 2018.
- Markle didn’t say the backyard celebration was cool at the time.
- Visit the Insider home page for more stories.
Representatives for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle confirmed to The Daily Beast on Monday that their secret backyard wedding was not a legal ceremony.
“The couple exchanged personal vows a few days before their official / legal wedding on May 19,” representatives of the couple told Royal Beast correspondent Tom Sykes.
Sources familiar with the matter told Insider that the couple exchanged vows in private days before their official ceremony in 2018.
Markle said the same when she and Harry sat with Oprah Winfrey for the interview that aired in the United States on March 7. At the time, Markle never said the ceremony was legal, although she alluded to the wedding and shared that she and Harry enjoyed the privacy of their exchange of vows.
“Three days before our wedding, we got married,” Markle told Winfrey. “Nobody knows that, but we called the archbishop and just said, ‘This thing, this show is for the world, but we want our union between us.'”
“So the votes we cast in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the Archbishop of Canterbury,” she continued.
A Church of England representative previously declined to comment when contacted by Insider stating that “the archbishop does not comment on personal or pastoral matters.”
Experts previously told Insider that the ceremony was probably not legal
Insider’s Monica Humphries spoke earlier with two royal experts who said the ceremony was not legal, citing the location and the apparent lack of witnesses.
Humphries wrote that for a wedding ceremony to be legal according to the Canons of the Church of England, the couple would need two witnesses and the wedding ceremony should take place in an environment with a special license (that a private home or yard would not be). guaranteed).
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at the wedding ceremony on May 19, 2018.
DOMINIC LIPINSKI / AFP / Getty Images
As the Daily Mail reported in early March, the Church of England stepped back from recognizing private homes, lakes and bars as places where people could get married and maintained its position that weddings should take place in registered religious buildings.
Reverend Canon Giles Fraser, rector of St. Mary Newington Church in London, told Insider that “it was probably a blessing. But they were legally married in Windsor”. The couple’s official royal wedding took place in St. George’s Chapel, in Windsor Castle.
Harry Benson, an official at the Marriage Foundation, agreed with Fraser, saying that the exchange of vows from Harry and Markle was probably not a legally binding ceremony.
“Although the archbishop may have been able to grant himself a special license in some circumstances, he may not have been able to overcome the legal need for weddings to be licensed to a building and to have two witnesses present, without whom a wedding will not it would be ‘public’, “said Benson.
In an opinion piece, Insider Samantha Grindell argued that the legality of the ceremony was irrelevant, and that the exchange of votes in the backyard meant more to the couple than the televised wedding attended by 29 million viewers.
“Markle and Harry’s decision to take their vows privately indicates that the public ceremony was not something they really wanted to do; instead, it was a convention that they had no choice but to join, ”wrote Grindell.
“It seems that the royal family’s commitment to mass public weddings is another example of an unnecessary tradition in the monarchy,” she added.