Archbishop denies Harry and Meghan were married early

FILE PHOTO: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave after their wedding ceremony at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle in Windsor, near London, England, Saturday, May 19, 2018. (Ben Birchhall/pool photo via AP)

ROME — The archbishop of Canterbury appeared to contradict a claim by Prince Harry’s wife Meghan that he married them before their televised wedding, in an interview published in an Italian newspaper Wednesday.

Harry, a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and the youngest son of her heir Prince Charles, married the US actress in a star-studded wedding on May 19, 2018.

But in an interview with Oprah Winfrey broadcast earlier this month, Meghan revealed that they swapped vows in private before Archbishop Justin Welby three days before the public event.

“I had a number of private and pastoral meetings with the duke and duchess before the wedding,” Welby told La Repubblica daily.

“The legal wedding was on the Saturday (May 19). I signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document, and I would have committed a serious criminal offense if I signed it knowing it was false.”

“So you can make what you like about it. But the legal wedding was on the Saturday. But I won’t say what happened at any other meetings.”

In the Oprah interview, Meghan said that “three days before our wedding, we got married.”

“No one knows that. But we called the archbishop, and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us’,” she said.