The Sussex Family Of 3 - Archie's Modern Royal Life!

With An Intimate Christening, Meghan And Harry Rewrite Traditional Royal Rules To Give Their Son A Peaceful Start

- Michelle Tauber

Baby Archie Harrison Mountbatten Windsor has spent the first eight weeks of his life swaddled in the serenity of the English countryside. At home with his parents at Frogmore Cottage, he has been merrily introduced to close friends and family, taken for strolls around the lush Windsor Castle grounds and, like babies around the world, nestled in an infant seat in the kitchen while his parents, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, bustle around him. “They are doing everything,” says a royal source— including the “sleepless” night shift, as Harry recently described it.

The laid-back setting, far from the regal grandeur of London’s Kensington Palace and the paparazzi’s prying lenses, also reflects the couple’s determination to raise their son, who is seventh in line to the throne, as privately as possible. And if that means departing from the way things have been done in the past, Meghan and Harry are comfortable with that. “This is not a couple that will conform if they don’t feel it’s right for them,” says an insider. “It’s that simple.”

So when Meghan, 37, and Harry, 34, observed their 2-month-old son’s christening on July 6, they did so with a celebration that was both sacred and special. That meant limiting the guest list to an inner circle of around 25 people—including Archie’s grandparents, godparents, great-aunts, uncle William and aunt Kate—and holding the ceremony in the Queen’s private chapel at Windsor Castle rather than the larger St. George’s Chapel. “It was just very, very low-key,” a source says of the brief ceremony and luncheon that followed. “You wouldn’t have even known it was going on. It was all very well thought through.”