Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Set A Date For The Royal Wedding
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MIAMI (CBSMiami/CNN) -- Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are getting married May 19, 2018!
Friday morning, Kensington Palace released the definite date for the royal nuptials.
The couple will wed at St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.
The royal family will pay for the wedding's core elements including the church service, the music, the flowers and reception.
The couple already undertook their first official engagement in Nottingham back on December 1st.
Markle intends to become a UK citizen. A spokesman said Markle would retain US citizenship through the process of becoming a UK citizen but it was "too early to say" if she would retain dual nationality. The process is expected to take several years.
Markle will also be baptized into the Church of England before the wedding.
Before she met Prince Harry, Markle had already established herself as not only a television star, but a humanitarian committed to gender equality.
High-profile members of the British royal family marrying who they want -- and not who they should -- has been a gradual process.
As Markle's relationship with the prince blossomed, the British tabloids and social media commenters fixated on the fact that she's not British, had been married before and comes from a biracial background. Her ethnicity, in particular, spurred tabloid coverage to the extent that her now-fiancé warned the media to stop harassing her last year.
Markle shrugged it off in her first joint interview with Prince Harry.
"I'm really just proud of who I am and where I come from. And we have never put any focus on that," she said.
Markle, 36, grew up in Los Angeles to a white father, Thomas Markle and an African-American mother, Doria Ragland. Her parents separated when she was two years old, but the family remained close, eating dinners and taking vacations together, she told Vanity Fair.
Markle credited her parents for making her socially conscious and wrote in a 2016 essay that her mother had raised her to be "a global citizen, with eyes open to sometimes harsh realities."
Markle went to Northwestern University and became the first in her family to graduate with a college degree in 2003. She studied theater and international relations.
(© Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
