The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh celebrate their 70th Wedding Anniversary – the longest and most successful marriage in royal history

Nov 20, 2017 by Jill

by Archbishop Cranmer:

Never in the history of royalty has a monarch reached a 70th wedding anniversary. A few have come quite near, but that coveted Platinum milestone is reached today for the first time by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, who were married at Westminster Abbey on the morning of 20th November 1947 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. She has previously paid tribute to him for being her “strength and stay all these years”; he has praised her for possessing “the quality of tolerance in abundance”. And in that model of mutual support and perpetual forgiveness lies the secret of a successful marriage.

They are known to have had their stand-up rows, their times of closed-mouth indignation, stubbornness and resentment. But they have remained steadfast as they promised God and each other that they would – for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health – until death do them part. Their unbreakable covenant of love, symbolic of God’s unbreakable covenant sealed with the blood of Christ, is a remarkable testimony in an age of fickleness, infidelity and quick divorce. ‘Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,’ wrote St Paul to the Ephesians (5:25). It is an impossible human task, of course, but the one-flesh character of marriage is certainly a little easier when there are three in the union, and one of them is God.

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