Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Confirm They Did Not Marry in Secret Ceremony: They ‘Privately Exchanged Vows’

Clearing the air. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle did not marry in secret three days before their televised May 2018 ceremony.

A spokesperson for the couple told The Sun they had simply “privately exchanged personal vows a few days before their official/legal wedding on May 19.” 

Markle, 39, made the remarks about their nuptials during a tell-all interview with Harry, 36, that aired on March 7. “You know, three days before our wedding, we got married. No one knows that,” the former Duchess of Sussex said in the CBS primetime special.

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“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,” Stephen Borton, former chief clerk at the Faculty Office, told The Sun about the couple’s private vow exchange in their backyard. 

“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,” Borton explained, before further detailing the process. 

“In order for them to be married, a special license was drawn up and the wording from Her Majesty the Queen authorizing the wedding and the official venue was recorded,” he said about the difference to their private ceremony officiated by the Archbishop. 

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An official copy of the wedding certificate obtained by The Sun shows the actual ceremony occurred in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle and followed the “rites and ceremonies of the Established Church.” The witnesses are listed as Prince Charles, Harry’s father, and Doria Ragland, Markle’s mother. 

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Markle and Harry, who share 22-month-old Archie and have baby No. 2 on the way, spoke out about the hardships they have faced after stepping back from their senior royal duties in the interview. “What does it mean to be a working royal?” she pondered in the tell-all. 

Markle said in hindsight, it was a lot different than she originally expected, adding, “I knew that he and I were very aligned on all of our cause-driven work, that was part of it our initial connection and we talked about in the beginning of our courtship, but I think there was no way to understand what the day-to-day going to be like and it’s so different because I didn’t romanticize any element of it but I think as Americans especially what you know about the royals? It’s just what you read in fairytales.”