A royal photographer has opened up about what it was like to take the wedding photos for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
In a recent interview with The Sun, photographer Arthur Edwards explained that six years after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s wedding, he can now admit that the wedding was “miserable” for him.
“The day was a miserable day,” Edwards told the interviewer. “I can tell you now it was the worst royal wedding I ever did. Because Harry was determined to keep the newspapers away from it as much as possible.”
The couple’s wedding took place in 2018 at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where Edwards noted that all of the photos had to be taken at a distance, which didn’t allow for the best conditions to work with.
“Everything was done on long lenses. I had 800 millimeter lens photographing the guests arriving. The photographers they engaged for the job was five feet away. It was just hopeless,” he said.
Even the iconic shot of the couple leaving the wedding in their carriage didn’t work out from a camera and photography perspective. “And then the carriage shot where they went past me in the carriage they looked the other way,” he recalled. “So for me, it was a disaster.”
The interviewer went on to ask Edwards if some of these hindrances were done on purpose, saying: “Was that deliberate? You were made to feel unwelcome?”
“I felt so,” Edwards replied. “It wasn’t just me. It was the whole of the British press, in many ways were badly treated.”
The Independent has contacted a representative for the Sussexes for comment.
Prior to her royal wedding, Meghan was previously married to film producer Trevor Engleson from 2011 to 2014. Leading up to the wedding, many were curious about who would be designing the Suits actress’s dress.
“I had a very clear vision of what I wanted for the day, and what I wanted the dress to look like, and so what was amazing in working with Clare is that sometimes you’ll find designers try to push you in a different direction,” Meghan said about the dress designed by Clare Waight Keller for Givenchy in her Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, released in December 2022. “But she just completely respected what I wanted to see for the day, and she wanted to bring that to life for me.”
“So I knew at the onset I wanted a bateau neckline, I wanted a cropped sleeve, I wanted a very timeless, classic feeling,” she said. “Obviously with respect to the environment we were in and St George’s Chapel, being really modest in what it would look like, I knew that the tailoring was so key, because the dress itself would be so covered up.”
The gown ended up being designed in an off-shoulder style. Recently, it was revealed that the late Queen Elizabeth II didn’t approve of the dress at the time. According to royal biographer Ingrid Seward, the late monarch thought it was “too white” for a woman getting married for the second time.
“In the monarch’s view, it was not appropriate for a divorcée getting remarried in church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal,” Seward wrote in an extract of the book obtained by the Daily Mail.
