Royal Family’s First Gay Wedding: Queen Elizabeth's Cousin Ivar Will Marry Partner

It’s a first in British royal history…
 
Lord Ivar Mountbatten, Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin, will wed James Coyle at a private chapel on his country estate in Devon, UK, this summer, marking the royal family’s first-ever gay marriage.
 
Ivar, who made headlines when he come out as gay in an article in the Mail on Sunday in September 2016, will wed James Coyle. The two met at Verbier, a resort in Switzerland, according to a lengthy report in the Daily Mail. Lord Ivar’s former wife Penny will give him away, an idea she says their three daughters — Ella, 22, Alix, 20, and Luli, 15 — came up with.
 
“It makes me feel quite emotional. I’m really very touched,” she said, adding that while her role in the wedding might strike some as odd, she and James “have got on from the first 10 seconds of meeting each other.”
 
While describing their engagement, James told the publication “it’s a very modern marriage,” explaining that “there was no proposal, just an acceptance of this great love.”
 
James also remarked that unlike a more traditional royal wedding, “the ceremony itself will be very small. It’s really just for the girls and close family and friends.”
 
“We went to a wedding a couple of weeks ago and said, ‘We’re not doing that. We’re not cutting cakes. We’re not having a first dance,’” he continued.
 
While the pair will be inviting “about 120 friends” to the “party afterwards” — where they’ll have plenty of “lovely food and really good music” — James insisted that “there won’t be two men in tuxedos on a cake, white doves or anything twee or contrived like that.”
 
Agreeing, Ivar added, “We’ll probably have cheese, instead of cake.”
 
Ivar’s happy news comes almost one month after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle walked down the aisle in their own historic royal wedding at Windsor Castle.