‘Royal Family’: Will Meghan Markle still be Royal if She and Prince Harry Divorced?
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are always in the news. Anything that they do is publicized and criticized. Ever since the start of their whirlwind romance, people have been skeptical about whether the love between them is actually legitimate or not.
Though the couple often looks genuinely happy to be together, there are plenty of naysayers who claim that Markle married into the royal family for alternative reasons.
How did Prince Harry and Markle meet?
The two were set up by a mutual friend on a blind date.
“I didn’t know much about him, so the only thing that I had asked [our mutual friend] when she said that she wanted to set us up, was, ‘Well is he nice?’ Cause if he wasn’t kind, it just didn’t seem like it would make sense,” Markle said of her initial conversation about Prince Harry.
The pair met in July of 2016. By May 2018, they were married and this past May they just welcomed their first child, Archie Harrison Mountbatten Windsor into the world.
Royal marriage protocol
Though it may have seemed like the Duke and Duchess got married quickly, there is actually a lot that goes into a royal marriage.
First of all, Queen Elizabeth II had to approve of their union. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 gave the Queen vetoing power on marriage proposals. After a change in the law in 2013, the Queen now only has that power over the six people closest in line for the throne. So that still means that for people like Prince Harry and William, formal consent from their grandmother is required.
When Prince Harry wanted to marry Markle, it was widely suspected that the Queen would actually use her power to shoot down the union. There were a lot of reasons why the Queen may not have wanted them to get married. Markle had already been married once before and is American. Two strikes that don’t look great for a British royal.
But there are actually no rules that state that a royal cannot marry someone from another country or even that they have to marry someone else of aristocratic status, so the Queen approved their union and the two were wed.
Will Markle still be royal if they get divorced?
Divorces aren’t as uncommon in the royal family as you might think. There have been a number of royals who have been divorced themselves, as well as married people who were divorced.
Edward VIII gave up the throne in order to marry divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson in 1936, which is how Queen Elizabeth’s father George VI became king. Prince Charles famously split from his wife Princess Diana in 1996 and went on to marry his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. And Prince Andrew divorced his wife, Sarah Ferguson, in 1996.
As Diana and Ferguson gave birth to royal heirs, they still remained members of the royal family, even after their divorces.
Now that Markle has given birth to Archie, who is currently seventh in line for the throne, she will remain royal no matter what happens between her and Prince Harry.
