A Historian’s Thoughts on the Royal Wedding

I’ll readily admit that I woke up earlier than is my usual habit this morning to watch the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, now the Duchess and Duke of Sussex. Maybe it’s the historian in me, but I find the traditions that accompany royal events to be fascinating. Knowing that much of what’s involved in this affair descends from centuries—CENTURIES—of ritual gives me a little thrill. Watching the performance of these historical customs in real time is one of the ways we can access, even if it’s just in a small way, the experiences of people who came before, similar to how engaging with material culture and historic buildings can help us feel more connected to the past. Those things (often) existed before we did, and thus provide a bridge to ages and people we can’t ever know.

St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle

This isn’t to say that the traditions that unfolded at this morning’s wedding, and the British royal family, for that matter, aren’t steeped in a complex and controversial past. They are. Just like literally everything else in the universe, this particular moment has a history and it’s important to try and understand its historical context so we can better navigate its implications for the present. For example, knowing something of Britain’s long, violent, and racist imperial history provides important context for the Most Reverend Michael Curry’s sermon. Rev. Curry, the first black American to serve as the Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church, stood in St. George’s Chapel, a five-to-six-hundred-year old Anglican sanctuary at Windsor Castle, and talked about the importance of love in the face of poverty and racism, the histories and legacies of slavery and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Jesuit order, among other things, at the wedding of a bi-racial American to a member of a thousand-year-old monarchical tradition responsible for much of the Atlantic Slave Trade and an imperial legacy that’s had a profoundly destabilizing effect on much of the globe. And Rev. Curry did this with hundreds of millions of people tuning in from around the globe and with the leading members of that monarchy IN THE SAME ROOM.  Continue reading “A Historian’s Thoughts on the Royal Wedding”