BRIDE AND PREJUDICE: HOW ROYAL STANDARDS CHANGED

IF a bride is a sign of her times, is a royal bride even more so? The wedding today of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – a divorced, American, mixed-race former actress and blogger – is proof that the Royal Family is not as rigid as it once was on the traditions of marriage and duty and who a royal can marry, but some of the traditions are still very much in place.

Mark Smith looks at eight royal weddings over the last 180 years with the historian Dr Harshan Kumarasingham and the author Fiona Macdonald and discovers that who the royals have married reflects how much the monarchy has changed, but also how much it has stayed the same.

VICTORIA AND ALBERT: February 10, 1840

The words of Queen Victoria after her first sight of Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha say it all. His eyes were large and blue, she said, his nose beautiful and his mouth sweet – he was delightful in every way and the man for her. But this was also a marriage with a mission – arranged by Victoria’s German uncle, it linked her with many of the royal families of Europe, and in that sense it was in the tradition of all the royal marriages that had gone before.

Dr Harshan Kumarasingham, political historian and lecturer at Edinburgh University, says Victoria and Albert married when dynastic ties meant something. “Through that marriage and their children,” he says, “Victoria became the grandmother of Royal Europe by being related to all the royal houses.” In other respects they were pioneers, he says – it is through Victoria and Albert that we get our modern perception of what royalty is meant to be: the strong family promoted through art, photographs and engagement with public events.

Fiona Macdonald, author of Royal Weddings: A Very Peculiar History, says Victoria and Albert also helped establish the idea that marriages should be romantic, and based on love, but only within certain limits.

“When it came to choice of husband,” says Macdonald, “Victoria was free to choose (like later royal brides), although from a very limited selection, compared with the freedom royal brides have today. Victoria was introduced to a number of foreign princes, chosen by her advisers and close family members. She was given to understand that she could choose a husband from among them. She was very impressed with Albert’s personality, intelligence and good looks and soon fell in love. Because she outranked him, she had to propose to him – though he knew the proposal was coming.”

The influence of Victoria and Albert’s wedding still lingers in another way – it was Victoria who popularised the choice of white as a colour for a wedding dress. Until that point, most women had worn bright and colourful dresses to their weddings.

ALBERT AND ELIZABETH BOWES-LYON: April 26, 1923

It might seem a strange use of the word “commoner” but the marriage of Prince Albert, second son of King George V, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later the Queen Mother) in 1923 was the first between a royal and a commoner for hundreds of years. In fact, Elizabeth was the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat and spent much of her childhood at Glamis Castle in Angus, but she was not a royal and Kumarasingham believes that, in this respect, the marriage was one of the first to truly break new ground.

“Victoria’s son Edward married the daughter of the King of Denmark,” he says, “and George V married a German countess and it’s only Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon who

breaks that. In some ways it’s revolutionary, but in some ways it’s not because, of course, he was the second son, so freer to do what he wanted.”

In other ways, the wedding proved that the establishment was still resistant to change. It was proposed, for instance, that the wedding might be broadcast on the radio but the plan was vetoed because there was a concern that men might listen to the wedding – God forbid – in public houses.

CHARLES AND DIANA: July 29, 1981

There’s no doubt Princess Diana did more than perhaps any modern royal to popularise and modernise the monarchy, but her marriage to Prince Charles also demonstrated how royal unions had changed. For hundreds of years, royal marriages were in effect arranged with other royals but by the time of Charles’ wedding the idea of marrying foreign aristocrats had died out completely.

However, as Macdonald points out, the marriage still had several traditional features. “As late as the 1980s,” she says, “the choice of Diana as a bride for Charles was still out of step in several ways with how ordinary people behaved. Diana was much younger than the typical 1980s bride; she had little experience of the adult world and no expectations of a career other than marriage. There was a fairly big age gap and gulf in experience between her and Charles.

“And she hardly knew Charles (compared with many other young women of the 1980s, who lived with their boyfriends before marriage).”

Diana did, however, break with royal tradition in one way, says MacDonald. Like most other young women of the 1980s,

Diana broke with royal tradition by refusing to include the word ‘obey’ in her marriage vows. She was the first royal bride to do this