Photographer Arthur Edwards, who has been photographing the royal family since 1977, had a terrible time at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 wedding at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.
Six years after the couple said “I do,” Edwards spoke out about working the event in a new interview with The Sun — and revealed how Harry allegedly made his job all the more difficult that day.
“The day was a miserable day. I can tell you now — it was the worst royal engagement I ever did. A royal wedding I ever did. Because Harry was determined to keep the newspapers away from it as much as possible,” Edwards alleged to the outlet.
“Everything was done on long lenses. I had 800 millimeter lense photographing the guests arriving. The photographers they engaged for the job was five feet away. It was just hopeless.”
Even more, Edwards was particularly frustrated when he had the opportunity to catch the newlyweds in their carriage as they greeted crowds outside — but couldn’t get the best angle.
“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.”
“Was that deliberate? You were made to feel unwelcome?” The Sun journalist asked.
“I felt so,” Edwards replied. “It wasn’t just me. It was the whole of the British press, in many ways were badly treated.”
Two years after the nuptials, Harry and the “Suits” alum would step down as senior working royals and move to Montecito, Calif. They’d later slam the British press in their Netflix documentary “Harry & Meghan,” which debuted in 2022, and claimed there was “unconscious bias” around race within Buckingham Palace.
“I feel as though being part of this family, it is my duty to uncover this exploitation and bribery that happens within our media,” Harry said in the first episode. “There’s leaking but there’s also planting of stories.”
“If you’re part of the royal rota, you have priority over the story over everybody else,” he continued. “All royal news goes through the filter of all newspapers within the royal rota, most of which, apart from the Telegraph, happen to be tabloids. It all comes down to control, it’s like, ‘This family is ours to exploit. Their trauma is our story and our story and our narrative to control.’”
The Duke of Sussex has often slammed the press, additionally in the BBC documentary, “Diana, 7 Days,” in 2017, when he recalled his mother Princess Diana’s death at age 36 in August 1997.
“I think one of the hardest things to come to terms with is the fact that the people that chased her through into the tunnel were the same people that were taking photographs of her, while she was still dying on the back seat of the car,” Harry said.
“William and I know that. We’ve been told that numerous times by people that know that was the case.”
He continued: “Instead of helping, [they] were taking photographs of her dying on the back seat. And then those photographs …made their way back to news desks in this country. … Our grandmother deliberately removed the newspapers and things like that, so there was nothing in the house at all, so we didn’t know what was going on.”
More recently, Harry has renounced his British residency, listing the US as his “new country.” While briefly visiting the UK for his Invictus Games, he also did not see his cancer-stricken father King Charles.
“By signing this document saying he’s now a resident of the US, he’s probably burnt his bridges but I live in hope. I loved working with him. I thought he was someone really special,” Edwards previously told The Sun. “I’m quite sad about it. But it seems inevitable, his two kids are American, his wife is American, he lives there, but it’s a sad occasion.”
“You could say good riddance because he’s been nothing but a thorn in their side but he is the prodigal son, and the prodigal son did return so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
Harry and Markle are parents of son Prince Archie, 4, and Princess Lilibet, 2.
