UK hails new royal couple as country awaits wedding details

In this photo taken from video Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle talk about their engagement during an interview in London, Monday, Nov. 27, 2017. It was announced Monday that Prince Harry, fifth in line for the British throne, will marry American actress Meghan Markle in the spring, confirming months of rumors. (Pool photo via AP)

LONDON — The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle dominated newspaper front pages and morning news shows in Britain on Tuesday, as royal-watchers awaited details of the couple’s spring wedding.

The grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and the American actress have announced they will marry in 2018. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby says they have chosen a church wedding.

Markle’s divorced status would once have barred her from marrying the prince in church. Harry’s father Prince Charles, who is heir to the British throne, married his second wife Camilla in a low-key civil ceremony in 2005 because both bride and groom were divorced.

Newspapers hailed news of the engagement as a breath of fresh air and symbol of a modernizing monarchy.

The Daily Telegraph said in an editorial: “A divorced, mixed-race Hollywood actress who attended a Roman Catholic school is to marry the son of the next king. Such a sentence could simply not have been written a generation ago.”

The Daily Mail, which devoted its first 17 pages to the engagement, said the couple would give the royal family “the injection of vigor and exuberance it so desperately needs.”

In the couple’s first joint interview Monday, 33-year-old Harry said Markle immediately fitted in with his family. He said when she visited Buckingham Palace to meet the queen, “the corgis took to her straight away.”

The ex-soldier prince and the 36-year-old star of TV show “Suits” revealed that Harry proposed over a roast chicken dinner at his London home, after months in which they tried to keep their long-distance relationship out of the public eye.

Clearly happy in each other’s company, the beaming couple recounted how they met on a blind date set up by a mutual friend, and immediately clicked.

“The fact that I fell in love with Meghan so incredibly quickly was sort of confirmation to me that everything, all the stars were aligned, everything was just perfect,” Harry said.

“It was this beautiful woman just sort of literally tripped and fell into my life, I fell into her life.”