Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

2018event / reaction imageclassic

Published September 26, 2026

The May 19th, 2018 wedding of Prince Harry and American actor Meghan Markle at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle drew more than 29 million U.S. television viewers. The pageantry, the guest list and a few standout facial expressions gave Twitter a full afternoon of raw material and spawned a run of reaction images built around Prince George, Chelsy Davy and the couple's car ride out of the ceremony.

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Overview

The Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle produced a cluster of Twitter reaction images pulled straight from the live BBC and CNN broadcasts. The most-shared frames were Prince George in his page-boy uniform looking pale and skeptical, Meghan grinning in the carriage as she left Windsor, Harry's ex Chelsy Davy watching from the pews, and a wide crowd shot of Windsor's streets3.

The jokes leaned on pop-culture callbacks rather than political ones. Prince George's costume got compared to My Chemical Romance and to Draco Malfoy, Meghan's carriage grin was captioned as a scheming villain finally winning, and Davy's expression got framed as the world's most awkward wedding invite3. Alongside the image macros, the event also fed a darker conspiracy strand on Reddit about Queen Elizabeth II 'plotting' against Meghan, which pulled in unrelated theories about Princess Diana's death7.

Coverage of the reaction memes ran in parallel with straight news coverage from BBC, Harper's Bazaar and The New York Times, so the joke posts and the ceremony recaps hit the same feeds within hours8910.

Origin & Background

Platform
Live TV broadcast / Twitter (viral spread)
Date
2018

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle became engaged on November 27th, 2017, and were married on May 19th, 2018 at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. CNN reported that more than 29 million people in the United States watched the broadcast, giving the ceremony an audience big enough to guarantee live-tweet momentum1. Vanity Fair covered the follow-on Frogmore House reception hosted by Prince Charles, where James Corden emceed and George Clooney, Elton John, Serena Williams and Priyanka Chopra were on the guest list2.

The meme run started while the broadcast was still on air. The earliest widely-shared post is a screengrab of Meghan in the car leaving the chapel, tweeted by @justsaynotojoe on May 19th with the caption 'Me when one of my zany schemes finally pays off', which pulled roughly 13,500 retweets and 104,000 likes in two days4.

How It Spread

Twitter did most of the work. On the day of the ceremony, @Eve_Barlow posted a photo of Prince George captioned 'i see prince george has discovered my chemical romance', which cleared 3,200 retweets and 15,000 likes in two days6. A parallel thread of Chelsy Davy reaction shots ran under hashtags like #ChelsyDavy and #ItShouldHaveBeenMeee, with @Ndle_Nkosi joking about a fake Davy memoir titled 'It Could Have Been Me'3.

The crowd-size jab was the day's biggest single post. On May 19th, @MrDetailed put a wide shot of the Windsor crowd next to a photo of the 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump with the caption 'just saying', crediting the framing to BBC 3, and the tweet cleared 77,000 retweets and 239,000 likes in two days5. A day later, r/OutOfTheLoop user NotASilver asked why memes were suggesting the Queen wanted to stage a car crash to kill Meghan, and the top reply walked through the Princess Diana conspiracy theories the format was recycling; the thread hit 4,200 points and 720 comments in 24 hours7.

Mainstream outlets picked the jokes up almost immediately. Harper's Bazaar rounded up the Prince George reactions the same weekend8, BBC News published the couple's official portraits on May 21st9, and The New York Times wrote about the wedding's cultural weight around Meghan's biracial identity10. YouTube channel BlendTV also posted a joke re-edit of the ceremony that made the priest look like he kept flubbing the vows, drawing over 94,000 views in two days11.

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