KING OF HEARTS
Harry’s wedding is going to be even more popular than his brother William’s
Alogical person would argue that the upcoming marriage of Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle is a minor event next to the massive 2011 nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Harry, after all, is just fifth in line to the British throne, whereas his brother, William, is a likely future king. Harry’s ceremony won’t take place at the internationally iconic Westminster Abbey, but at the cozy Windsor Castle, which is about 45 minutes outside London. William was 28 when he got hitched, while Harry is a little longer in the tooth, at 33. His fiancée is 36 and divorced.
All of this is undeniably true — and yet people the world over are positively giddy about the next royal wedding, set for May 2018.
The happy news was plastered across front pages around the globe — the media of Britain, Australia, Holland, Germany, Norway, Belgium, Canada and, yes, New York all gave the couple glowing coverage. Bernard Donoghue, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions in the UK, told the Daily Mirror that interest could even eclipse Will and Kate’s big day, which lured 600,000 tourists to London and attracted an estimated global television audience of 2 billion.
He expects even more people to visit Britain on Harry and Meghan’s wedding day, due to a number of factors: “The combination of Prince Harry’s global fame, Meghan Markle’s global fame as an actress, her being American [and] Britain being much more affordable than it was two years ago really makes for a potent mix,” he said.
But there is another, more visceral reason that the public is naturally more invested in Harry’s marriage. As Allison Pearson wrote in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Princess Diana once said: “Harry’s the one I worry about.” After Diana died in a shocking car crash in 1997 and the world watched her two boys grow up without a mother, many of us felt the same.
A surprising number of people truly grieved over Diana. Twenty-six percent of Americans and 50 percent of Britons said they mourned her as though a personal friend had died, according to Gallup. Sixty-six percent of Americans were at least saddened by the tragedy. Ingrained in their minds is the devastating image of a 12-year-old Harry and a 15-year-old William walking behind their mother’s horsedrawn funeral carriage alongside their father, Prince Charles, grandfather, Prince Philip, and Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer.
The boys’ heads were downcast, their cherubic faces shocked and lifeless, clearly in disbelief. It was not unlike the moment when little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluted his father’s hearse as it passed by in procession. Losing a mother at a young age is difficult. Losing a mother at a young age as a member of a famously frosty royal family, in full view of the entire planet, is mountainous.
But, as they grew up, William seemed to flourish. We watched him find success at Eton College and the University of St. Andrews, where he met his future wife, and pursue a military career as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
But poor Harry struggled. He gained a reputation as the “bad boy” of Buckingham Palace and became infamous for excessive drinking and getting into brawls with the paparazzi. In 2005, Harry attended a costume party at the Pangea nightclub in London with a swastika slapped on his arm, a move that drew sharp condemnation from the press.
Then, in 2012, embarrassing nude photos were snapped of the prince during a game of strip poker in Las Vegas.
His life began to settle down somewhat after he joined the Army Air Corps, serving in Afghanistan and eventually rising to the rank of captain. He even went on to devote his life intensely to charities, like the Invictus Games, an annual sporting event for wounded and sick members of the armed services.
Still, he quietly suffered from depression. In a revealing interview this year with the Telegraph, Harry admitted that his mom’s death had continued to affect him years later. “I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well,” he said.
So the sweet news of an engagement, and the image of a beaming Harry seated next to his soon-to-be bride comes as a fulfilling relief to his many admirers, who care for him like a family member.
As Harry cuddled with Meghan during a post-engagement TV interview, he giggled, played around and was openly affectionate. It brought us back to his carefree childhood when he and William acted silly with their loving mom and the weight of the world wasn’t on his shoulders, before one of the 20th century’s defining calamities would change his life forever.