In short, it was not your average royal wedding. Among the throngs who filled the streets of Windsor on Saturday were black women who had flown in from Houston and Atlanta, moved, sometimes to tears, to see a woman of color so publicly adored.
“One of the children of slaves is marrying a royal whose forerunners sanctioned slavery; the lion is lying down with the lamb,” said Denise Crawford, a court stenographer from Brooklyn.
“I just want to be here to observe the changing of the guard and the changing of the British Empire,” she said. “Today is a day that history will never forget.”
The most startling moments came with the sermon by the Most Rev. Michael Curry, the Chicago-born bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Curry, in the great tradition of black preachers, delivered a loose, improvisational sermon that began as a meandering discourse but built to a passionate, shouting climax, name-checking Martin Luther King Jr. and slave spirituals along the way.
“I’m talking about some power, real power,” he boomed. “Power to change the world. If you don’t believe me, well, there were some old slaves in America’s Antebellum South who explained the dynamic power of love and why it has the power to transform.”
At one point, seemingly sensing the passage of time, he said, “We’re going to sit down; we gotta get y’all married.”
He punctured the hallowed, starchy decorum of the day, visibly shocking some members of the royal family. Some suppressed giggles. Zara Tindall, a granddaughter of the queen, looked as if she might fall off her chair.
The episode delighted viewers on social media.
“A black reverend preaching to British royalty about the resilience of faith during slavery is 10000000% not what I thought I was waking up for, the royal wedding is good,” Elamin Abdelmahmoud, social media editor at Buzzfeed, wrote on Twitter.
When the couple stepped out of the church and into the sunshine, a jolt went through the crowd, which cheered their first kiss as husband and wife.
For Britons, there was a sense of an old heartbreak being mended. Many people here feel a special affection for Harry, who was only 12 when his mother, Princess Diana, died in a car crash. On the day of the funeral, Harry was made to walk behind her coffin, and much of the country watched as his face crumpled.
“He was such a young boy,” said Christine Janetta, 57, one of the charity workers invited to greet the couple from the lawn on the grounds of Windsor Castle. “We’ve all been very protective of Harry, because we saw that little boy with his broken heart.”
Ms. Janetta said she was devoted to Princess Diana, and that she thought it would have given her a sense of deep relief to see her sons happily settled. “He’s just his mum,” she said. “He is a carbon copy of his mum. Just look at the smile.”
Harry’s popularity helped give him the power to stretch the bounds of convention by marrying Ms. Markle, an American of mixed race. The decision may have a lasting effect on British society, which has been swept by a wave of anti-immigrant feeling. But it has not made things easier for the couple.
As the wedding approached, British newspapers swung the klieg lights of their attention to Ms. Markle’s estranged half siblings, who said scathing things about a bride whom few Britons knew. More damaging were insistent approaches to her father, Thomas Markle, a retired Hollywood lighting director who declared bankruptcy years ago and now lives alone in Mexico.
A week before the ceremony, The Daily Mail reported that Mr. Markle had colluded with a photographer to stage seemingly candid pictures. With that, Mr. Markle dropped out of the wedding in disgrace, leaving Ms. Markle with only one blood relative, her mother, to attend the ceremony at her side.