Changing times for royal family

Meghan Markle is going to be a royal bride like no other – and that’s a breath of fresh air.

For starters, the 36-year-old actress, who wed Prince Harry this morning in St. George’s Chapel on the grounds of Windsor Castle, is an American.

That may not sound like a big deal, but it means the more than 23 million people expected to have woken very early this morning to watch the royal wedding on U.S. television will finally have a player in the game.

Markle will be the first American royal bride since Grace Kelly married into Monaco’s house of Grimaldi in 1956 and Rita Hayworth wed Prince Aly Khan in 1949.

While she will not be granted the title of princess – most likely she’ll become Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Sussex – a princess is what she will be in the hearts and minds of royalists on this side of the Atlantic.

It is also significant that this will not be Markle’s first trip down the aisle.

She married film producer Trevor Engelson in 2011 and the pair were divorced in 2013, citing “irreconcilable differences.”

Markle’s acceptance into Britain’s Royal Family stands in stark contrast to the fate that befell King Edward VIII, who in 1936 opted to give up the crown in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

He famously explained his decision to abdicate in a radio broadcast, saying, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”

Oh, how times have changed. Royalty expert Arianne Chernock recently observed, “The fact that Harry and Meghan have been permitted to marry – and that their union has been widely touted both in the U.K. and abroad – shows just how much the monarchy, and the nation, have evolved in theory, at least, if not always in practice. The monarchy has typically been extremely conservative on questions of marriage, divorce and the `suitability’ of certain relationships.”

Perhaps most significant is the fact Markle is poised to become Britain’s first mixedrace royal.

The love of Harry’s life is fiercely proud to be the daughter of a Caucasian father and an African-American mother.

“While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that,” she wrote in 2015 in Elle magazine. “To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman ... I am enough exactly as I am.”

In shattering the prototype of the royal bride, Markle has become a powerful symbol of change in a country where racial tensions appear to be rising.

“Harry marrying a light-skinned black woman won’t undo the pain of the past in Britain, it won’t undo all the negative aspects of our links to colonialism,” British blogger Georgina Lawton told the CBC. “But I think it will go some way in taking steps to repair race relations and promote multiculturalism.”

Much will be said about how Markle’s walk down the aisle is the stuff of fairy tales, but it is the remarkable reality of her life, and the open-arms welcome afforded to her by her soon-to-be in-laws, that offer the greatest hope for a happy ending.