But Harry and Meghan were not included in this senior royal group. As ‘junior’ royals they would have to shuffle their way to their seats that afternoon like any other member of the congregation and take their places on the sidelines alongside their fellow ‘juniors’, Edward and Sophie Wessex. Who said that Britain’s class distinctions were dead?
When Harry heard that he and Meghan were to be so graphically shunted aside on this final appearance, he was furious. The subservience of a ‘spare’ – one of the basic reasons for this very sad parting of the ways – could not have been more strikingly illustrated. The phone lines had hummed over the preceding weekend (the service was on a Monday afternoon) – and fortunately Prince William had more sense than his underlings. He and Kate would be quite happy, he declared, to skip the procession and to take their places without ceremony in the congregation alongside Harry and Uncle Edward.
It was a small, but sensitive gesture of peace. Within minutes of each other, the two princes and their wives slipped quietly into their seats, and both couples then sat waiting with everyone else for the Queen and Prince Charles to process in senior splendour down the aisle to open the ceremony.
The only problem was that two thousand orders of service had already been printed and distributed round the abbey, explaining to the congregation that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would enter and process down the aisle with the main royal party – making no mention at all of William’s younger brother and his wife. So there was the snub in black and white – plainly set out for all to see.
Nor could it be said that the two royal brothers made any great personal efforts to ‘chum it up’ together once they found themselves seated close. The longest coherent sentence that TV-viewing lipreaders could work out was a coronavirus comment from William to Kate as he sat down, after his meeting and greeting of the clergy, evidently worried about the risk of infection – ‘This whole handshaking thing is weird. We’re going to have to put a load of hand gel on after this.’ It was still two weeks to Monday 23 March – the fateful date of Britain’s oh-so-tardy lockdown.
The boys’ father, Prince Charles, had already worked out his own approach to the developing COVID-19 dilemma – no rugby club elbow-bumpings for the prince, as then were being recommended by the medical authorities. Instead, Charles had devised himself an elegant hands-together greeting, palms touching and fingers pointing upwards, with a nod of the head and the Hindu greeting ‘Namaste!’ ‘I bow to the divine in you.’
By 2020, every TV commentary team worth its salt featured a specialist in ‘body language’, and as the two brothers ostentatiously failed to talk to each other in the minutes before the service, these experts swung into action.
‘It wasn’t exactly the warm reunion we were hoping for,’ said Judi James to the Press Association. ‘The tension in Harry’s body language especially was palpable.’
Ms James noted how the moment Harry and Meghan took their seats and stopped holding hands, ‘he immediately reached for his wedding ring – which is a self-comfort’. Harry’s face was ‘quite tense and unsmiling’ – and when William arrived with Kate, the elder brother could hardly have been more formal.
‘He literally said: “Hello, Harry”, and that was it,’ Harry reported to Meghan in another remark caught by the lipreaders. ‘And he didn’t say anything more than that!’
The character of the service itself had a remarkably African-Caribbean flavour, with X Factor singer Alexandra Burke belting out the Motown hit ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’.
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‘My name is Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua,’ declared the towering 108-kilo world heavyweight boxing champion, Anthony Joshua, thirty, as he stood in the abbey pulpit to deliver his address.
‘Like many of you here, I’m a child of the Commonwealth. I was born in Watford and my heritage is Nigerian … Like me, so many children of the Commonwealth have two homes, two identities, two cultures and two ways of viewing the world … So here’s to fish and chips, egusi soup and pounded yams,’ he concluded to a torrent of delighted applause across the abbey. ‘To the UK and Nigeria and the children of the Commonwealth!’
Throughout the service, Meghan had been megawatting away in her best Suits TV-style smile – truly, her sparkling teeth and lips exuded a mesmeric quality! ‘Big smiles!’ had been her whispered instruction to her husband as he took his seat, but as the ceremony progressed, Harry actually appeared to grow gloomier.
‘His facial expression looked distant,’ reported Judi James, ‘and his accelerated blinking even suggested he might have been fighting back tears.’
It was not until the service was over, with the other royals out of the church ahead of him and on their respective ways home, that Harry became Harry again, throwing a cheeky thumbs-up signal to Anthony Joshua and congratulating the boxer on his speech that had brought the house down.
Outside, the prince laughed and joked with the crowds, lifting his eyes to the heavens and raising his hands as a symbol of what – thanksgiving or farewell? There was definitely some sense of relief and release from an ordeal accomplished. Meghan gave her husband a kiss, then headed straight for the airport.
In the days that followed came another explanation of why Harry might have seemed especially preoccupied in the abbey on that afternoon of 9 March. In the previous weeks he had been the
