Wallis Simpson???

She's all right.

Well, Edward the VIII did so he must seen something in her--what a misfortune you weren't born about a hundred years ago and been around "his majesty" to convince him of the error of his ways when others like Winston Churchill couldn't.

Because 'anyone' didn't want the throne and she was a convenient excuse.

why didn't he want it r3?

He was pro Hitler.

He was a massive doormat.

Yawn ...

She never had children so even if he had been allowed to marry her Elizabeth would still have eventually become queen.

R8 Even though she was over 30 when they got together, "no children" might have been a request to avoid pretenders.

Rather than asking DL, educate yourself on the subject, about which there are many interesting books.

He said in his abdication speech, r4, that he couldn't discharge his duties as king without the help and support of the woman he loved. To each his own I guess. I have heard that he liked Wallis to spank him and piss on him--does that sound like someone we hear about in this day and age? His abdication speech is probably online somewhere if you're that interested. 1936 is known as the year of the 3 kings: Edward VIII succeeded his father George V in January, abdicated in favor of his brother George VI in December, who, of course is Elizabeth II's father. It seems George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, made far better leaders in World War II that shortly followed than Edward VIII ever would have, especially considering how he cosied up to Adolf Hitler.

She did freaky things in bed.

You're so stealth, R11. Your intent to turn this into one of your political turd threads goes completely unnoticed.

Hitler was an elected leader, just like someone else I know.

Did you forget to take your meds or something r13, what the hell are you talking about? Stating the historically obvious isn't being stealthy, it's called being knowledgeable, maybe something you lack.

Hate to break it to you OP - but if you think that pic is bad - you realise it’s retouched version? All those studio portraits had been thoroughly seen to be a sympathetic retoucher (think of it as an early form of photoshop!) - and those in the profession were trained like artists to discreetly remove wrinkles and give photographic facelifts....

The unretouched realty - is much, much worse. Saw a pic in a book about them years ago that had the studio portrait we were used to seeing - next to the un-retouched original. We’re talking Dorian Gray territory here! Unbelievable.

She had a huge dick.

Drama much, R16. There are thousands of candid snapshots of them taken by all sorts of people, not just professional photographers. We all know what they looked like---un-retouched.

By all accounts, Simpson was much more attractive in motion than in still photographs.

But in any case, the reasons for the attraction are a mix of what's already been mentioned here: Edward was emotionally fragile and highly neurotic, probably because of 1) fantastic amounts of inbreeding and 2) a nanny who physically and sexually abused him (and probably his brother Bertie as well). Add cold and distant parents to that and the pressures of what he called "Princing,", and you get someone just aching for a stern nanny to whip his bottom and tell him he's a good boy. Wallis was happy to do that in exchange for staggering amounts of jewelry (hundreds of thousands of pounds worth: she favored emeralds). By all accounts, she was one of the few women who could keep David sexually and emotionally happy, AND marrying her meant he didn't have to be king, which he never really wanted, either.

His brother Bertie, the future George VI, was equally if not more fucked up. He only lasted as king for as long as he did due to the combined efforts of his wife and the British government, most notably Winston Churchill, who almost literally propped up that poor, stuttering, binge-drinking, noodly wreck of a man. Happily, his daughter Elizabeth took after her mother and her grandmother, the formidable Queen Mary, wife of George V. Which is why Lilibet's still thriving at 90-something.

Princess Margaret DIDN'T get those genes: She was exactly like her father, and drank and smoked herself into an early grave, just as he did.

Having a bully like George V for a father probably didn't help his sons' self-esteem. Stern Mary and disapproving George. Parents of the century.

R19 nailed it.

She was part of the scene of life between the wars.

OP Why don't you post a picture of yourself and we'll judge you.

They were miserable sychophants by many accounts. Without the throne to anchor them to England, they spent their lives as "permanent houseguests" who had no purpose in life other than to travel endlessly and aimlessly. Shallow, vain and superficial people. Of course, that is dramatic and damning and they must have had some "redeeming qualities" but there have just been too much unflattering exposes written about their vapid personalities (including racism) to be devoid of any truth.

Oh, c'mon R24. It's the life dream of many, many people to be able to "travel endlessly and aimlessly". Sure wish I could. It beats having the "purpose" of a shitty job.

His nanny sexually abused him?

Where are you getting this shit from R19?

Ugly old slag

R25: even they tired of it (and people certainly tired of them) because it was all a scam, mostly financed by [italic]nouveau-riche[/italic] Americans to the extent that Edward and Wallis were known as "Commerce and Industry." Everything - the Cadillacs courtesy of GM's chairman, the suite at the Waldorf Towers comped by Conrad Hilton, the crossings on the SS United States with their 40 pieces of luggage and dogs (because Cunard said "No more freebies" after a while: they were too much trouble to carry for free), their extended and boring visits to the estates of people who wanted the glamour of royalty and to hotels like the Greenbriar owned by people they knew was free and their post-abdication lives were endlessly the same and boring, boring, boring as were they.

There's something to be said for having a reason to live. Neither of them did - his usefulness ended the day he left and she never had much.

Only R12 alludes to it, but no one has mentioned the Shanghai Surprise. In the 1920's (before she was Mrs. Simpson) she was married to an American naval officer and living - though not with him - in Shanghai where she was reputed to have learned a number of exotic sexual tricks with which she was alleged to have enslaved the Prince by means of vaginal muscle control. Or so the Brits worried - they had it and her investigated, no doubt in an effort to derail the marriage.

Google "Edward VIII Nanny" or read any biography and they will talk about the abusive nanny. Though the sexual abuse can never be definitively proven, the impotence that both brothers suffered from, as well as Edward VIII's taste for masochism, would certainly be explained by it. That Nanny Green was physically and mentally abusive has absolutely been proven.

R28. They didn't need to "investigate" to devise and carry out a smear campaign. All they had to do was 'say' unflattering things to the right people, and those things would be repeated endlessly to eventually become cold, hard fact.

He actually seems to have been into her because she was dominant and he was submissive.

Recently it’s been asserted that she didn’t actually want to be with him, which is interesting.

Duke of Windsor did have a dodgy nanny. well known in uk. It is unclear if sexual abuse went on but she is known to have been obsessed with blonde duke of Windsor as a child. so who knows. Their upbringing was fierce and cruel, His brother Bertie King George V stuttering and stomach digestive problems are said to have been a result of this nanny. who knows what goes on behind closed doors. Wallis was alleged to have sexual skills learnt in Hong Kong.

R31 I saw a doc recently that said her mother basically pimped her for social climbing purposes, then her husband did the same thing to get in with the aristocracy. Hence Edward.

R29 & R32- the only things I've read about the nanny was that she would pinch Bertie (the Queen's father) as a baby to make him cry every time he was presented to his parents. George and Mary would order the nanny back to the nursery. She would also feed him and then bounce him around in his pram (that would cause digestive problems in a developing child).

He was always a shy child but many historians believe that Bertie's stutter was probably caused by his parents' insistence that his natural left handedness should be changed to right handedness. I guess back then if you were left handed you were a bit of a freak.

[quote]Without the throne to anchor them to England, they spent their lives as "permanent houseguests" who had no purpose in life other than to travel endlessly and aimlessly.

After 1952, they had a home in the Bois de Boulogne, essentially a gift from the City of Paris.

Hitler promised them that when he won over Europe he would establish them as King and Queen of England. The idiots believed him. They gave Hitler British military secrets. Absolute traitors. When Churchill banished them to the Bahamas, they laundered money for Hitler. She wanted to be Queen!

I wish someone would banish me to the Bahamas to live in the lap of luxury.

Now, seriously, was she a hermaphrodite?

She was a freak

Why are there so many ignorant jerks who keep saying that Hitler was elected?

Hitler lost the election, to the incumbent, Paul von Hindenburg, who then APPOINTED Hitler to the chancellery.

What's the difference? It takes millions to elect you (as president of Germany, in this case). It takes only one person to appoint you.

Kitty Kelley's marvelously bitchy family bio The Royals alleges that Bertie had such a problem with impotency that Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were both conceived via an early form of artificial insemination. The official reason that they only had the two girls (instead of the male heir everyone wanted) was that the Queen Mum had difficulty bearing children. Perhaps that's true, but it doesn't mean the impotency thing isn't also true. The artificial insemination story was supposedly well-known in Royal circles of the time.

Add David's impotence in the mix, and you have to wonder what was up with that particular family of royals. That's not even taking into account their younger brother George's drug addiction and their other younger brother John's epilepsy and mental health issues. Bad idea when cousins marry, I guess.

Their official biographer spills the beans:

It is said she gave such a great blow job, that when she was done, you had to pull the bedsheets out of your ass.

Wallis was considered to be one of the best-dressed women in the world--"Wallis blue"--was even a color. So, she had a straight, narrow figure, but she knew how to dress it and I assume she looked better in color than b/w. She was also supposed to be an excellent house guest (the duke was not), knew how to entertain when needed, but also be self-maintaining and a "wit" at dinner parties, though not one like Oscar Wilde, more like someone who could do a nice quip in the moment to help keep the conversation flowing.

Their lives were particularly aimless post-abdication because the Duke was really not welcome in England, so he was cut off from his London circle and the country that was a deep part of his identity. He'd grown up, of course, in great wealth, so being simply rich and, thus, on a sort of budget, never sat well with him.

He was used to being important and thought he should be given some sort of authority somewhere, but, of course, even when he was given authority--as in the governor of Bahamas position--he was feckless and a bit irresponsible. So, he was unhappy and an ongoing headache to the Crown.

Of the two, she was the brighter bulb, I don't wonder that she got bored with him. No great depth to her, but she would have made, say, a good fashion editor.

Anyone cosying up to Trump should take notice - your biographies and legacies will be tarnished forever.

he was a nazi and she was an ugly VERY used whore. Only retards and Madonna think this was some historical romance. They were probably two nasty drunks who partied together.

There's a fascinating portrayal of her in the British TV series Edward and Mrs. Simpson, by the various writers and the actress who plays her, Cynthia Harris. You see her in social settings, blithely purring out epigrams as if they were witty when they are in fact vapid and silly. The idea was to present her as an "imitation" celeb rather than the real thing, someone who got away with it because the prince was such a social magnet.

I don't know if this was simply the way they wanted to present her or if that was what she was like, but it's fun to watch. The series is first-class, too.

Harris was an all but unknown actress who got this plumb because she was the spit and image of Wallis.

I never heard that the Duke of Windsor's nanny was sexually abusive, but I did read that his nanny was besotted with him and was extremely jealous of his parents when they came to visit him (which she saw as a challenge to her love). So she would severely pinch him so he was would be screaming and squalling when they'd come visit, and they came to think of him as spoiled and disagreeable. Eventually the nanny's tricks were found out, but George and Mary's dislike for him had already begun.

They weren't good parents to their sons, George V especially. George would always tell the Duke of Windsor he would make a horrible king and didn't deserve to succeed him--apparently it's very common for British kings to dislike their direct heirs since they know they will replace them and can undo their wishes (thus George III disliked George IV, Victoria disliked Edward VII, and Elizabeth was very distant to Charles). George V also constantly mocked and berated his second son Albert (later George VI) for his stammer, which only made it worse.

Queen Mary was a very strange woman--she had been arranged to marry George V's elder brother, the heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor ("Eddy"), and when he died suddenly the royal family arranged for her immediately to marry the next in line to the throne (because they thought she would make the perfect queen). One of her youngest sons, john, was mentally retarded, and kept mostly out of sight--he died quite young. That seemed to have an enormous effect on her.

Oddly, both George and Mary seemed to have really liked their only daughter, the Princess Mary. She got along with them very well, and they were sad to see her marry and leave them.

My father was crossing the Atlantic on the SS United States in the early 1960s when he encountered them on deck. He said that they were both very short and slender, tiny like children.

Where are they buried? I remember pictures of the family cooly greeting Wallis when Edward/David died.

R49 did he also pinch their rosy cheeks and give them a quarter to go have an ice cream?

R33 I wish my parents had cared enough to pimp me out to the rich and famous

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

They are buried at Windsor.

The Saxe-coburg-gothe family are German. No surprise here. They keep reinventing themselves to hold onto power. Tgars why they now have a half breed onto her third marriage in their ranks. Anything to fool the serfs.

George V disinherited his eldest son not long before his death. Up to that time, the newly-christened Windsors left the biggest share of the private money to the heir, and of course the Sovereign Grant funds and all the lovely jewelry and houses would come under his/her control as well. George V broke tradition because he thought if David was dependent upon the Crown funds, it might keep him on the throne and make him give up Mrs. Simpson. He didn't like David, but he saw his son as a sort of place holder until Elizabeth, his favorite grandchild, could inherit. (Perhaps they all knew that David was incapable of fathering children? Rumor has it he did have shrunken testicles due to a bout of mumps as a boy.) George V left a nice chunk of change to all of his children except David, who got nothing.

The gambit didn't work, David abdicated, and Elizabeth's own father became the placeholder instead. David spent the rest of his life floating about various fashionable watering holes, sponging off rich social climbers. Apparently he had a reputation for never, ever, ever picking up a check: He'd sit at the table and make faces until somebody else inevitably did.

R53 Thanks for that link. He really was a Nazi. Queen Mum doesn't look too great in that scenario. Surprising.

Was it Queen Mary or The Queen Mum who refused ever to say her name and only referred to her as "that woman"?

It was the Queen Mum.

I think the Queen Mum did it for years, but eventually she softened. The royal family had to deal with her hospitably and kindly when the Duke died in 1972, or they would have come across as monsters, so apparently the Queen Mum was gracious to Wallis when she came over for the funeral at Frogmore. Of course by that time Wallis was already beginning to go senile.

It will be interesting to see how they handle it for the mini-series "The Crown" this season--I'm sure it will form the basis for an entire episode. It would be too juicy not to film.

By some accounts she was a prostitute during her time in Shanghai but other rumors say she was the madame of a brothel which catered to men with fetishes.

What type of “actress” was she?

Wallis' nine inch penis was the King's favorite.

She has the face of an abusive nanny. Hard, angular, dried up and mannish.

Wasn’t Eddie 8 supposed to also be beyond lazy as well. That if he had to lift a finger beyond sipping cocktails and shoving his flaccid dick into Replacement Nanny’s ass, he’d raise hell and whine about all his “obligations”? Is it also true that Prince Charles has inherited his prize winning levels of sloth?

Wallis once said that the Duke "was not heir-conditioned" when asked about not having children. Of course, she'd already been married twice and hadn't had kids, so . . . all in all, a good thing, they would have been terrible parents and the position of any kids would have been awkward,, though Wallis is said to have been open to a morganatic marriage--i.e. no offspring would be heirs--but the British bureaucracy wasn't in favor of it.

Really interesting thread. Lets keep it going!

Are there any other movies about her besides Madonna's dreadful film?

Were those bitchy letters David wrote to Wallis in The Crown for real? She seemed more like his hag and confidante than the love he couldn't live without. Plus the Scotty Bowers doc shows that he procured men for him, women for her.

I think this is one of the most bogus stories in the Scotty Bowers book. Totally unbelievable that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would procure men through Bowers. And he says he was in a threesome with the two and he referred to the duke as Eddie.

I'm guessing the Duke and Duchess started driving about 11:00 and were completely sloshed by the end or the day.

"drinking"

[quote]I think this is one of the most bogus stories in the Scotty Bowers book.

Then maybe you should ask Charlie to post again the stories Walter Chrysler Jnr told him about he and Duke's marathon sailor suck-off sessions.

Thanks Charlie!

Well - I've never seen any stories about the Duke having gay sex I think is credible. Im not familiar with the stories you mention but I'm inclined to believe after all these years there isn't a lot new to add.

I Googled and the quote below is taken from a previous DL thread. Seems a little dubious to me. If there were all these guys why hasn't anyone else said anything? Anyway - something to think about.

"Walter Chrysler Jr told a story about him and the duke of Windsor (the former king of England) throwing a party on a Navy ship docked at Jacksonville, Florida, during World War II, I think.

"He said there were more than 1,000 sailors, and Walter and "David" hired 200 hookers, but Walter and David "sucked so much cock our lips were chapped for a week."

The Duke was as bisexual as his brother Prince George, and that terrible scumbag Mountbatten. Charles Higham gives a funny account in his book 'In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer’s Memoir' of going to interview the elderly Sir Dudley and Lady Forwood. He had been the Duke's equerry for several years. He finds himself having to gently remove a gnarled hand from his knee when Sir Dudley picks him up in his car.

The article at R42 explains a lot.

r42 is interesting but doesn't say a word about the Duke being gay or bi.

The Duke wasn't gay or bi, he was an absolute Queen. Well documented over the years.

r75 some people have great assurance that the Duke of Windsor had homosexual sex. I know this subject has been discussed and analyzed at length on DL but I'm just not buying it. I would love to believe the Duke was a cock-sucking debauch, but a couple of rumors and third-hand quotes just don't convince me. (Especially Scotty Bowers - half his book is crap)

[quote] ...absolute Queen. Well documented over the years

r78 I would love to see this documentation.

[quote]he was an absolute Queen.

No he wasn't. He had huge mummy issues, and absolutely needed women. But the men were there too. But in the psychology of the time, they didn't count. But you have to remember, these people had absolutely empty lives that they had to fill up with diversion. They certainly didn't read books.

In many ways the Duke and Duchesses life was an open book. As a former king who abdicated with an amazing back story , his life was intensely scrutinized. Almost minute by minute. He had major enemies in the UK establishment who would have loved to have dirt on him. They would gladly have paid huge sums of money to have credible evidence the duke was a sexual pervert. As it was they started endless rumors about the two and some - like the Duchesses Shanghai sex training - are still around.

R75 Mountbatten's nickname was Mountbottom...

He wasn't a sexual pervert, you wack. Mummy issues are common.

As for fucking women, he screwed one in the garden of a mansion that used to exist up the street from where I type. I know, because one of the old bachelor brothers who lived there took great delight in showing me the spot, and saying how he'd been an eyewitness to it when they held a ball for him in his honour in the 1920s. The family even built the ballroom especially for that one night. It was gorgeous.

I never said he was a pervert you wack ...

r84 did they say if he screwed standing up or lying down ??

The Royals didn't want Wallis to be buried at Frogmore with E8, so when he was making his pre-need arrangements, he said fine, he'd be buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Baltimore with her family.

The idea of an English King being buried in Baltimore was enough to make the Royals relent, although her grave is next to the fence.

Petty to the very end, those Windsors.

These people we're toxic waste. Good riddance to them.

R87 Not even close. In 1972, on an official visit to France, the Queen met privately with her uncle the Duke of Windsor, who was dying. It was made known that the Queen would accept the presence of the Duchess of Windsor at the meeting, the first time the Queen had met with Wallis. The Queen met with her uncle privately for a few minutes before the Duchess was escorted in. At that meeting, the Duke requested from the Queen that Wallis be buried next to him. Despite decades of listening to the Queen Mum's bitterness and bile against Wallis, the Queen granted her uncle's dying request. The Duke died a week later.

At the Duke's burial at Frogmore, Wallis had a first-hand look at her eternal resting place next to the Duke and began to complain loudly that "she was a small woman, but not THAT small". Several hedges were subsequently removed to enlarge the area next to the Duke's grave.

I read that they gave her the HRH on her grave but not in life. So petty was the Queen Mother. Time has shown how wrong they were against the Windsors. The next queen consort will be an adulteress and divorcee as is the future king. Defender of the Faith indeed. It’s really full circle because Henry VIII, the original Defender of the Faith was an adulterer and divorced.

I was about to ask you what you meant by adulteress and divorcee, since AFAIK Kate Middleton and Prince William are neither of those things. Then I realized you were talking about Camilla and Charles! Amazing how one sort of skips C&C in one's mind, isn't it?

I don't care about the adultery. I do care that they were Nazi supporters and Edward was a traitor. They should have been buried at sea.

"Time has shown how wrong they were against the Windsors"

r91 I think it's hard to make a good case for Edward 8 . Per r42

His self-indulgence, rudeness, vindictiveness and utter irresponsibility as king tarnished his hollow charm. His stinginess was pathological. The Windsor servants were paid 20 percent below the going rate, never thanked, and dismissed after years without notice. With friends and ex-mistresses he was even more shamefully inconsiderate and ungrateful. Generosity, noblesse, dignity, ordinary decency were missing from his makeup, and when he died in 1972 there was embarrassed relief.

Yes, I'd agree that Edward was a pathetic figure but not a sympathetic one.

Nicely put - I've read character analysis that said he was stunted emotionally. Always a willful child ...

He was a product of his environment. He wanted his birthright back and if Hitler could give it back to him so be it. Maybe they thought. He spilled the beans that it was Queen Mary who was responsible for the eventual murders of the Romanovs. She was a nasty piece of work and as Princess Margaret said “She wasn’t Royal”.

Regarding the feud between the Queen Mother and Wallis Simpson - to the victor goes the spoils of war. Wally was incorrigible to the then Duchess of York. She talked a lot of shit which got back to Elizabeth. Elizabeth even walked in on a few conversations where Wally was speaking very poorly of her. Wally was betting on becoming Queen - no matter what you read or what you're told, that woman WANTED to be Queen! Elizabeth even told Wally about some trees Bertie had planted at Royal Lodge - he took the greatest of care to enhance the view and landscape with this undertaking. Later that day, Wally suggested to David that he cut the trees down while in the presence of both Bertie and Elizabeth. Wally did and said a hell of a lot of shit which just wasn't cool. Again, she was betting on becoming Queen. Elizabeth watched and she waited. And the rest is history.

To the victor come the spoils.

So where did their $$$$$ come from? They sure led a very jet-set lifestyle for two people who never worked a day in their lives.

So who financed them?

R100 they were guests. When you are that high up the social ladder, the lesser titled yet rich love to have you around. Or at least that's the way it was.

R100 - First of all, David, upon his accession, inherited both Sandringham and Balmoral, as well as other possessions which were private property and handed down from monarch to monarch. Bertie had the buy those properties and possessions back from David after he abdicated. Also, their notoriety pretty much secured their future living arrangement by way of being guests of the very wealthy on a continuous basis, as R101 asserts. He had already hidden substantial holdings from his time as Prince of Wales, having access to the income of the Duchy of Cornwall. She had fabulous jewels worth plenty of money. There were lots of ways for them to get their hands on money.

My Scottish grandmother despised Wallis. It amounted to an invasion of the country in her eyes. You didn't bring the subject up, even when Edward and Wallis made the nightly news. That and France. You didn't bring up France in any conversation either...

Hitler didn't lose the election in 1932, his party won a large percentage of the vote. Hindenburg made a deal to form a coalition government with Hitler's party. Hindenburg thought they could control Hitler. Then, once in power the Nazis took over the judiciary and rewrote the laws. The election in 1933 was a rubber stamp.

Back to Wallis. She was homely as hell in my opinion. Her personality wasn't all that great either. She seemed like a gold digger for sure.

I think they were given an allowance.

R3 -Too right. He was lazy and was bored by all the serious stuff attached to his role; he only liked the perks.

R4 - In addition, he was notoriously "under-endowed" and the extremely savvy and experienced Wallis was able to get him off; lastly, like many of the Windsor boys (discussed in another thread), he was a sucker for domineering women. One of his servants allegedly walked in on them whilst the future King of Great Britain and Emperor of India painted his love's toenails. The servant quit.

As one wag at the time put it at the time of Edward's ascension to the throne, "Edward the Eighth and Mrs Simpson the Seven-Eighths" (also mentioned in another thread).

He was an idiot and she was the Prequel Meghan Markle. When David (as they called him in the family), plaintively asked his mother why she wouldn't "receive" his "friend", Queen Mary replied coldly, "Because she is an adventuress.." End of conversation.

Queen Mary would have spotted Markle at 100 metres.

Britain was lucky, on the brink of another world war, to get the Yorks instead.

It just says "WALLIS DUCHESS OF WINDSOR" and the dates on her gravestone. There's no HRH.

Wasn't David furious with Bertie for not granting Wallis HRH status and required servants and friends to address her as such anyway?

R108 - Furious doesn't even cover it. David is alleged to have shouted, "What a DAMNABLE wedding present!!!" when he got the letter stating that Wallis would not share the rank and title of her husband, and be a mere ordinary duchess - i.e., addressed as "Your Grace" rather than the "Your Royal Highness" accorded to a royal duchess.

The resentment lasted their entire lives, and both David and Wallis blamed the new Queen Empress, the former Duchess of York, and Bertie's mother, Queen Mary. David insisted his brother would never have had the spine to put that through on his own, and he was probably right about that.

The thing about HRH was that, once granted, the title is for life and royal marriages were presumed (then) to be for life. She already had two divorces under her belt, so the prospect of an unattached HRH racketing around the world, bringing the royal family into disrepute was unthinkable.

It's not changed so much now, both Diana and Fergie lost their HRH status, though still had the capacity to create scandal.

Say what you will about Waity Katie, she seems to be in it for the long run.

R110 - That was the rationale at the time: they didn't want Wallis swanning around the globe presenting herself as an HRH if the marriage went south.

Meghan Markle, whose title, unlike Kate's, is still completely courtesy-based because she is still an American citizen, should watch her Ps and Qs. Should her marriage to Harry go south before her UK citizenship goes through, she would not only lose the HRH but the Duchess of Sussex, as well.

She has allegedly agreed to go the usual citizenship route, which takes something like 3-5 years, as they didn't want to grandfather her in, as they do in Denmark when royals marry foreigners, to avoid any more of the Royal Privilege Again One Rule For Us Another For Them talk. Perhaps everyone thought it a good idea, just in case things didn't work out - MM could go "home" again without any difficulties re taxes and residence visas, etc.

Can you imagine what it would have been like to be at Balmoral that Sunday when the toe-sucking photos came out, with Fergie and the kids staying there? Can you imagine the staff looking out the windows as Fergie was hustled back to London with Yuge and Bea?

If the HRH is for life how is it that both Diana and Fergie were stripped of it. If Wallis divorced David they could have stripped it from her as well. I think they were just petty about denying her. In the end she won and had his devotion till the end. Not bad for a girl from Baltimore.

R112 - I think if the Windsor marriage had gone south, the BRF probably wouldn't have had any say over the terms; in fact, it's not even likely the divorce would have been heard in a British court. The BRF would have looked a bit foolish revoking a title of a woman who'd already fled the coop and could go on calling herself whatever she liked. I'm guessing the thinking was the only way to prevent that was not to let her have the title in the first place; only the Sovereign can either bestow or retract an HRH, and does so by Letters Patent. The Letters Patent were done in George VI's name, not the government's name.

When Diana and Fergie got divorced, 1) their husbands were still functional members of the BRF and 2) my guess is that both women were presented with dropping their HRHs as a condition of their divorce settlements. So what actually happened is that they were seen to "surrender" those titles rather than being stripped of them. I don't remember Letters Patent being issued by the Sovereign stating that henceforth, the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York would no longer be known by the Style and Title of Royal Highness. I wonder though, if they were. Need to look it up, but I didn't hear anything of it at the time.

If as I suspect the surrender of the HRHs were conditions of their divorce settlements, it was a good strategy, and let the Queen off the hook, as she is the only one who can bestowed or retracted those titles without the consent of the holders. Otherwise, she would have appeared as the Vengeful Mother-in-Law.

If that's the line the BRF took, then the Sovereign in some way was party to the terms of the divorces.

R112 - I doubt they would have stripped the "nonroyal Duchess" title from her. By then, it would have made no odds and as an ordinary ducal title would be pretty meaningless. It was really the HRH they were concerned about.

The other problem they were anxious to avoid was the prospect of a Wallis-David divorce, David remarrying, and two HRH Duchesses of Windsor floating around. The same dilemma applied to the Diana-Charles divorce. Diana retained the title "Princess of Wales"; Camilla, rightfully upon marrying Charles, also became Princess of Wales - but even with Diana raptured, Camilla didn't dare assume the title because of the "optics" and instead goes by Duchess of Cornwall.

I was most amused at being called a fantasist when I suggested that however ghastly Diana's death might have impacted the family in the short-term, it didn't occur that over the long term it was one of the best pieces of news they could have gotten. Can one imagine the fracas that would have erupted if Charles had insisted upon marrying Camilla while Diana still lived, and the two boys still young?!

Andrew is in the same position. If he had wanted to marry, they would have had two Duchesses of York - one an HRH and one not.

So however it goes with Sparkle and Henry Charles Albert David, discretion and awareness of pitfalls should be MM's watchword.

I'm guessing if the Harry/Meghan marriage goes south before she's a citizen, she'll give up the HRH and the title in exchange for a nice chunk of cash.

Given that she's a 37-year-old washed up actress, though, I think she'll hang onto him like grim death.

A little off-topic: Can someone in Great Britain tell me why the law change to absolute primogeniture only affected the line of succession for the throne and not for other peerage titles and inheritances like those of Dukes and Barons?

I know a so-called Downton Abbey act was proposed in 2013 or 14 but as far as I can tell it didn't pass. Why not?

R98 Daily Mail published series of articles of the issue. Wallis indeed was thinking UK would approve her. She was mad when Edward decided other way. In fact Wallis tried to change her mind the last minute. I have no other sources for this, just DM.

It is the English way with male royals ... they marry, the wife is STYLED after him, HRH if he is, THE PRINCESS his name, THE Duchess of, Countess of, etc. If there is a divorce, the woman looses a "title" as such, is always STYLED as Name, position ..... Prince Andrew's ex-wife is now Sarah, Duchess of York. THE Duchess of York does not exist, would be Andrew's present wife. Look up Ethel Margaret Campbell, running about being Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, after her divorce from the Duke. I've a hunch/feeling the Meghan/Harry marriage will work. IF not, no matter any children, IF there is any divorce, Ms. Markle will be styled as Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. In 1936 with David turning his back on his country, they could not sanction "that woman" being styled and addressed as an HRH so they did the royal papers denying the use. Books say in his own household the former king demanded such an address. To get a real picture of what went on, read the books written first, not these later tomes, full of much made-up speculation just so to have something new to say .... paste-pot books with a few incendiary thoughtstossed in to help sales..

R116 - Because the Act of Succession is a more globally visible aspect of discrimination against women; it wasn't difficult to get Parliament to change it. But the law still stands among the aristocracy for a variety of reasons. And you have to remember, it is not only daughters who are short-changed, but younger sons. The eldest male offspring gets everything. In 1925, Parliament outlawed the use of primogeniture as a governing rule in the absence of a will for the transfer and inheritance of tenant lands, but progress stopped there.

Re the BRF: while a male would naturally inherit Harry's title of Duke of Sussex in the event of Harry's untimely death, no daughter of theirs would. In the event of the Sovereign having no male heir to inherit the Duchy of Cornwall, all revenues would revert to the Crown.

R116 - Oh, one more thing: anyone can disinherit whom he pleases. If you remember in "Brideshead Revisited", Lord Marchmain at the end of his life disinherits his eldest and youngest sons, and leaves everything to the two daughters, Julia and Cordelia.

Had he died before he changed his will, however, Bridey would have gotten everything.

Unless the state is entailed, of course: I know that from reading Jane Austen.

Do they still do entails?

Edward VIII was mentally challenged. You could tell by looking at him that something was not right about him. He was called "the golden haired Prince Charming" but he looked inbred, what with his pinched, drawn face. An acquaintance said that his maturity stopped dead at adolescence. He became besotted with Wallace Simpson because she treated him like shit. NOBODY had ever treated him like shit before; he was the Prince of Wales! And then later King of England. She treated him like shit and he loved it, craved it, which is why she had him completely under her control. It was a very sick relationship.

R121 - I had to look this one up:

"In English common law, fee tail or entail is a form of trust established by deed or settlement which restricts the sale or inheritance of an estate in real property and prevents the property from being sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the tenant-in-possession, and instead causes it to pass automatically by operation of law to an heir pre-determined by the settlement deed. The term fee tail is from Medieval Latin feodum talliatum, which means "cut(-short) fee", and is in contrast to "fee simple" where no such restriction exists and where the possessor has an absolute title (although subject to the allodial title of the monarch) in the property which he can bequeath or otherwise dispose of as he wishes. Equivalent legal concepts exist or formerly existed in many other European countries and elsewhere."

HowEVAH: "Fee tail as a legal estate in England was abolished by the Law of Property Act 1925."

The date of 1925 means that Lord Marchmain could have disinherited Bridey and Sebastian without worrying about the very entailments that men of his class in earlier times would have used to ensure continued high station through a single patriarch, concentrating as family's wealth in one pair of hands. But, "Brideshead Revisited" is listed in Wikipedia as one of the novels in which entailment featured as an issue. It may be that the estate was entailed initially, and Lord Marchmain, who died in the book in the 1930s, took advantage of its demise in 1925 to disinherit his sons.

The other novels where entailment featured as an issue, besides Waugh and Austen: Middlemarch-George Eliot The Master of Ballantrae-RL Stevenson (paging Errol Flynn) The Belton Estate and The Heir-Trollope And several more historical tales by modern authors, including Downton Abbey.

Scotland in 2000 outlawed it all in the Abolition of Feudal Tenure.

R122 - All the sons of Queen Mary and King George V were damaged. Only the daughter, the Princess Royal, seemed reasonably well-adjusted, and that was probably because she had the least pressure and expectations placed on her. Bertie stammered and was highly strung, the youngest, George, Duke of Kent was into drugs and other questionable activities (and reputedly bisexual), the middle son, later Duke of Gloucester, was an inarticulate nonentity, and the son that died when he was about 12, John, was also, as they say, "not quite right".

I don't know that Wallis treated Edward like shit, but that she dominated him was beyond argument. However, the late Queen Mother also dominated Prince Albert (only sweetly and smelling all the time of lilac and heather), Camilla most certainly dominates Charles (one biographer said that Charles was the kind of man who wanted to be mastered, not to lead, in a relationship, and poor Diana was totally out of her depth in that respect), and it's a safe bet that Meghan dominates Harry. Kate and William look like they have a more normalised partnership, and I think Philip whatever else you may think of him, dominated the Queen.

R124 I believe Kate calls the shots in that relationship too. Most powerful men seek submission psychologically. That's why they have whores to humiliate them.

R125 - But William isn't a powerful man. He's a rich, socially prominent one, but he isn't powerful. The CEO of a major City or Wall Street investment firm, or CEO of an industry giant, are powerful men. Part of William's and Harry's frustration is that they have the name without the game, and feel inadequate and inferior underneath it all. Their bits of patronage are infantile next to the careers of men who built companies and run banks.

So I disagree where William is concerned. I think he's just a bit better balanced than Harry, and his wife has a less extreme temperament than MM. I think Kate defers to William - she had to be very careful in the long years she waited for him to make it legal. She probably rules the home, but not William per se.

She had a magic vajayjay.

[quote]I think Philip whatever else you may think of him, dominated the Queen.

---from R124

Yes, I think it's been well-established that, in their private lives, Philip is very much the head of the household and The Queen defers to him. It was the Queen who lobbied to use the name to 'Windsor-Mountbatten'.

[quote]Royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith has said that the Queen was reduced to teats by Philip’s “brutal” reaction.

[quote]n 1960, while she was pregnant with the Duke of York, the Queen is said to have visited Prime Minister Howard Macmillan to “revisit the issue of her family name, which had been irritating her husband since 1952”.

[quote]Bedell Smith cited Macmillan’s diary, in which he wrote: “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband - with whom she is desperately in love. “What upsets me … is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.”

[quote]That year, the Queen declared that while the Royal Family would continue to be known as the House of Windsor, descendants without the style of HRH and the title of Prince or Princess would bear the surname Mountbatten-Windsor.

Sorry, forgot my link.

R128

R128 - Interesting about the "descendants without the style of HRH or Prince or Princess would bear the name Mountbatten-Windsor" because Princess Anne when she married (the first time) signed the marriage register "Mountbatten-Windsor" and was absolutely an HRH. And by rights, then, shouldn't Anne's children be Mountbatten-Windsor rather than Phillips? And if the Queen doesn't designate Harry's and Meghan's kids as HRHs (they won't be automatically, as they are great-grandchildren of the Sovereign, they will have subsidiary titles like 'Lady and Lord"), won't they be Mountbatten-Windsor? I haven't seen it used anywnere.

Wow, R123. Great post! I've read a lot of Austen but didn't know about the 1925 property act.

Doesn't matter about Harry's kids. They'll be with elevated to princes when Charles assumed the throne.

[quote]the Queen was reduced to teats by Philip’s “brutal” reaction.

I don’t feel right talking about Her Majesty’s teats.

This morning from the DM we have: Prince Harry's Audi RS6 available for 72,000 quid; a story that journalists are being kept a certain distance from MM at royal events so they can't hear what she's saying (it's being called a "settling in" measure; translation, the new Duchess still doesn't know how to keep her big mouth shut and moreover, she doesn't want to), and Kate and William are on their way back from a brief vacay in Mustique where they had a swingin' dancin' date night at the local bar where everyone knows and loves them.

Kate, I have to say, looks happier and more relaxed since the birth of that third baby and H&M's wedding than she has in years.

Breeding duties finally done - check Harry and the Grifter pushed another notch down the line - check Three healthy and very attractive children under 5 at home - check MM fucking it up regularly with silly clothes by foreign designers - check Long hols stretching to October - check

I think Kate and William know things about Harry and Meghan and their relationship that we don't know - there's something suggestive about how very happy and relaxed HRH the Duchess of Cambridge is looking these days.

[quote] I don’t feel right talking about Her Majesty’s teats.

HM's bra maker did that recently in her autobiography and her business had its Royal Warrant revoked.

Who would want to be a King or Queen that has no real power, but a bunch of obligations?

He got to abdicate but still live a life of luxury, did he ever work a real job?

Ignorant jackass at R104: You either win your election or you lose it. Hitler lost it.

And Hindenburg didn't "think" Hitler could be controlled. Hindenburg was gaga by then; it was the camarilla of plotters around him who thought that.

This lie about Hitler being elected started with idiots like you when Bush Jr. was president. One moron makes up a lie and all the other morons repeat it. That's how "truthers" got going. Every brainless conspiracy theory starts with someone so stupid he'll believe anything. Then all the stupids pass it around.

R136 - No, he never worked a real job in his life. They gave the Windsors some window dressing position in the Bahamas during the war, transparently to keep the former Hitler apologists as far from Europe as possible, and that was it for the rest of their lives. Ironically, David was pissed off that he wasn't allowed to be closer to the war and do more, forgetting completely that before the war his Duchess was photographed smiling up at Der Fuhrer as he bent over and kissed her hand.

After the war, the Duke was quoted as having said at a dinner party, "I don't know, I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap."

Say what you will about the attitudes of the Queen Mum, but she and Bertie basically saved the monarchy after the Abdication, and presented a front of calm and hope during the war years, refusing to send the two kids to Canada for safety, and generally making themselves loved by the public in a way that David and Wallis never could have.

And the corollary to your query - Who wants to be King or Queen with all the duties but none of the power . . . is, is it even worth keeping on Kings and Queens with no real power but keeping them in style so they can smile, wave, accept flowers from kids, put their names at the top of charities?

Personally, I'd rather have the Plantagenets back.

[quote]Ignorant jackass at ... You either win your election or you lose it. Hitler lost it.

Actually r137 I think calling a stranger a "Jackass" is what's ignorant. You seem to lack effective communication skills.

Constitutional monarchy gives nations some sort of stability.

As a member of the Royal Family, you get to live a fabulously luxurious lifestyle in exchange for a lack of privacy and rather tedious official duties. However, when you are not being bored at ribbon cuttings or stalked by the paparazzi, you are partying in Mustique or the South of France, and you never once in your life have to worry about where your rent is coming from. All for doing nothing more than being a member of the Lucky Sperm Club.

Nope, I don't feel sorry for any of the Windsors.

RR140 - To a point, yes. But when those populations change and are composed of a great many more people with no attachment to the history that undergirds that stability, the game changes. Hence, the BRF's willingness to see if they can use Harry's manifestly unsuitable bride to provide them with some cover as being appropriate to the New Britain, without surrendering the timelessness that their traditions are supposed to represent.

There are some political advantages, also, to separating the Head of Government from the Head of State. As Churchill once explained, the monarchy is a great institution: "If you lose a battle, you fire the generals. If you win, you head to Buckingham Palace to cheer the King."

But that, too, can be accommodated without a monarchy - many European countries have a Prime Minister who is the head of government, and a President who fills the ceremonial role as Head of State.

I still think the Windsors stand on an increasingly shaky limb in this game, and Meghan Markle isn't going to save them, only dilute their very essence. Other monarchies in Europe are on the same path, but the Danes, e.g., are much farther back from the cliff edge. That's partly due to their determination not to go the full multicultural route, and partly due to their monarchy's much less grand persona, despite being the oldest one in Europe.

The monarchy won't be the same after Elizabeth dies. Charles will muck things up as he always does, they'll hustle him off the throne and put William in his place, but the damage will already be done. As the 21st Century wears on, the Windsors will fade further and further into irrelevancy.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the last King of England has already been born.

Charles might surprise everyone. He's 70 and he's a little strange around the edges but he's not awful. IMO he will be an okay caretaker for the 10 years anyway. I think the future of the throne falls squarely on William. He's the make or break guy. If he gets it right and finds a way to make the monarchy seem relevant things may just sail along for a few more generations. I think that most people WANT to like the monarchy whether they are a new immigrant or have lived in UK for many generations. People just don't want to feel pissed on. The Spanish monarchy almost went on life support but Felipe seems to be getting things back on track.

R134. Exactly what I think too check lol. Kate is not called miss perfect for nothing. MM makes her look more royal than the born royals.

R143 R144 - fair points in both posts.

R144 I'm a brit and if anything happens to the Queen we all know we've had it. Charles has very strange friendships with outrageous pervs, Jimmy Saville, Kevin spacey, dodgy disgraced Vicars to name but a few. Prince William was in the news saying its his life's work to sort out Israel and Palestine. So he's not all he's cracked up to be because that could cause WW3. God save the Queen the alternative is too scary.

R147 - I must have been visiting Jupiter when William said it's his life's work to sort out Israel and Palestine. He couldn't possibly have been stupid enough to say anything of the kind - let alone after his father got into trouble for interfering in British politics. Oh, dodgy relationships amongst the royals are an old story: it's just that they were easier to hush up when Prince Eddie, Edward and Alexandra's Heir, was getting into trouble in London's brothels.

The only "life's work" William has, and he bloody well should know it, is saving the monarchy from at last falling off the cliff of modernity, a plunge way overdue at this point.

So - who quoted him as saying this and is it an accurate quote from someone reliable?

I agree with your other points: when the Queen goes, the monarchy will be closer to collapse than it has been since 1936.

And if this benighted country ever gets a written constitution (which likely would not happen until the Queen goes), the inherited peerage system will go, and once the inherited peerage system goes, the monarchy will be all by its lonesome on a very, very thin and shaky branch. In that case, it would be just a matter of time.

The question is, in that case: what happens to all the art, real estate, jewels, race horses, antique cars, the priceless stamp collection . . .? Do they get out with it all, or does the Comentariat seize it, sell it at Christie's in Geneva, and limit the family to some rooms at Balmoral (including in the Scottish winter?

Ideas? Thoughts?

'MY LIFE'S WORK' Prince William says bringing peace to the Middle East is his life’s mission Last week the father-of-three described his 'profoundly moving' visit to the tomb of his great-grandmother Princess Alice in Jerusalem

Wallis had a Willy and she wasn't afraid to use it!

[quote]Once the inherited peerage system goes, the monarchy will be all by its lonesome on a very, very thin and shaky branch. In that case, it would be just a matter of time. The question is, in that case: what happens to all the art, real estate, jewels, race horses, antique cars, the priceless stamp collection . . .?

I think the monarchy has so much money stashed away. They have money in every Swiss bank in Geneva. They've had over a thousand years to take what that could.

r149 Harry seems like a decent guy - William and Kate too I'm sure. But none of them seem like they're oozing with intelligence - in spite of having some of the best education money can buy. I can only assume William would do miserably in a quest for peace in the Mideast. But I would take him a lot more seriously if if he also toured some refugee camps in Gaza and spoke to to press from there.

But no worries. I do understand that William was caught up in moment at his Aunt's Tomb. I'm sure cooler heads will prevail and we won't hear anymore about that. ... Anyway - isn't this meddling in politics?

has press opportunity form there like he's done in Jerusalem.

Oops - leftover text ...

Ffs, get back on topic.

Why the hell would anyone want be Royalty? Give me $1 Billion dollars in the bank and a jet-set lifestyle world wide fame a life of luxury and the ability to do as I please and I'm happy.

Royalty comes with way to many restrictions to be enjoyable for me.

Let's be honest. It wouldn't be fun at all. Paris and Kim both have the wealth and the lifestyle. But Kate and William both have a strict way of life they must live by. And I know they have to hate that. To me pippa is lucky because she has that wealthy billionaire husband and the lifestyle. But not the obligations her sister has.

It must suck being a Royal. I would never want that life. Being just a wealthy socialite is a whole lot better in my opinion.

They can keep the Royalty thing.

If you have a few hours, this woman has put a lot of effort into explaining their whole relationship.

Harry was widely criticized a few months ago when he said that nobody in the family wants the job of Monarch except Charles. He said everyone else dreads the possibility of it happening. No one thought it wasn't true, just that it was in poor taste to say it publicly.

Oh, peace in the Middle East is his life's "mission" not his life's work. I'm sure they'll invite him to the next round of peace talks.

FFS, all these people are stupider than shit.

R155 - the problem is, no one was about give you or Sparkle or Kate Middleton $1 billion with which to joint the jet-set. The only "in" they were offered was marriage at the top of the social and economic pyramid. There's a lot of tinsel attached to the whole royal thing. The woman with the right temperament and appreciation for being part of history could have loved exactly the restraints that others see as so tiresome.

But the Windsor boys never pick women like that.

All right, back on topic to oblige R154: any predictions on what Sparkle will wear to the Von Straubenzee wedding on Friday (which just happens to be her 37th birthday)? Harry is Best Man, but it is rumoured that Sparkle instead of clinging to his arm throughout the service will spend her birthday with Doria in L.A. Now, how disappointing would that be?

Given that it's already August, will Sparkle pull out another autumnal suit whilst the other female guests are flirty florals?

Bets, predictions?

R156 - Aha! Wallis is wearing spectator pumps! How long have I been urging Sparkle to get a pair? Impeccable, Wallis, even if you were a totally unsuitable adventuress.

R159 I’m your friend who has been on the lookout for a pair of spectators. I found some that are perfect and for sale at an online vintage replica shoe store, but alas, they are currently sold out! I’m hoping they get more in stock.

I just googled spectator pumps and.... no, just no.

R160 - But do we have her shoe size?

R161 - Oh, come now, don't be wet: you're looking at some low-heeled boring imposters. Google spectator pumps - images, you'll find a pinterest site with the 21 best spectator pumps ever - stilettos, T-straps, open-toed, closed, navy red black brown and white. Look at the high-heeled Damien Darkos and the high-heeled T-strap by Brooks Brothers.

I'm particularly envious of the high-heeled T-straps. Picture me, draped in furs, wafting Chanel #5, in a cloche hat and those T-strap specs, boarding the Orient Express, trunks being carried down the corridor after me . . . sigh.

Speaking of cloche hats and specs and #5 - perhaps MM should turn to the 1920s - the look then works well for a petite woman with no waist (ties at the hip, loose around the waist, lots of silk and satin) . . . instead of trying to make herself over into the 1950s Audrey Hepburn, which is all wrong for her body type. She could be a sensation, bringing back the cloche hat, the specs, the loose flapper look . . .

No? Della?

Back to the Orient Express . . .

From the Wikipedia entry Spectator Shoe, to which Spectator Pump redirects:

"In the 1920s and 1930s in England, this style was considered too flamboyant for a gentleman, and therefore was called a tasteless style. Because the style was popular among lounge lizards and cads, who were sometimes associated with divorce cases, a nickname for the style was co-respondent shoe, a pun on the colour arrangement on the shoe, and the legal description of a third party caught in flagrante delicto with the guilty party in a case of adultery. Wallis Simpson was famed for wearing this style, although it was said that she was an adulteress and that it was Edward VIII who acted the part of co-respondent.[5] "

The perfect show for Meghan!

R158 It was based on theory. Duh!

But luckily for me I have money and a great life already. I've had real $$$$ since I was 19 for you're information.

Just saying.

Sorry, but I obviously meant "The perfect shoe for Meghan," not show, at r164. I was still giggling at that WP article,

[quote]I know a so-called Downton Abbey act was proposed in 2013 or 14 but as far as I can tell it didn't pass. Why not?

It got tied up in the British Parliament version of Hollywood developmental hell.

There's now another attempt to get a bill through in the next twelve months.

R143 the last King of England has already been born, reigned & died - it was James II. There has been no such thing as a king or queen of England since 1707.

^I always thought that technically speaking it was Elizabeth I who was the last ruler of England - after her death, the Scottish King James I joined the two lands together into Great Britain - perhaps it didn't occur officially/legally for a hundred years, but James I brought the two combatant lands together into one

Thanks for sharing R156!

R169 yes, James I & VI was Scottish but the Act Of Union was 1707 and until then the crowns of Scotland and England remained separate. That’s why he was James I & VI - first of England and sixth of Scotland. The land mass has always been Great Britain, that’s a geographical name. The political entity is the United Kingdom. Whether there is a monarchy or not the archipelago of islands is named Great Britain.

^Thanks for that!

R170, that blogger is a Wallis sympathizer, but history has not been kind to these two and sometimes it's refreshing to read something that isn't tearing them into shreds. That blogger doesn't cite anything so who knows.

Here is a historical fiction novel that was a good beach read, if nothing else.

Edward VIII (David) was entirely unsuitable to assume the role to which he had been born. There are too many supporting examples to cite. Search out some of his personal letters to his mistresses in order to gauge his character, or lack thereof. In one filmed documentary/biography about him (available on YouTube), he is shown as a younger man standing in front of a huge crowd with cameras rolling as he visibly, undeniably, publicly, crudely MASTURBATES through his pocket as his sycophants laugh and snicker behind him. He was a bad seed. I have to hand it to him, though. He was cunning, and he recognized an advantage when he saw one. He saw an advantage in Wallis SImpson. He USED her much to her chagrin. She WAS expecting to be Queen at some point, but even he knew from the beginning that it would NEVER happen. He KNEW that his government would demand that he not marry her, "forcing" him to abdicate. And he played his cards expertly. Not only did he fool his government, people, and his family, but he also fooled Wallis Simpson. Again, he USED her for his own ends because he NEVER wanted to be King. And so as the story goes, romanticism at it's most heart-breaking, he gave up his throne for the woman he loved. BULL.........SHIT!!

R174 - I have never seen that footage but his distaste for his royal duties is a matter of record. Both the government and Edward were probably relieved to be shet of each other. Only Wallis was disappointed - odd how, as savvy as she was (and she WAS!) she missed that bit.

Perhaps Harry is using Meghan similarly. He has expressed that he had doubts about remaining a working royal; I doubt the work makes him particularly happy and Meghan was probably as skillfully aggressive in attaching Harry as Wallis was David.

I imagine her like the 50-foot woman in the 1950s science-fiction film, pulling off the roof of Kensington Cottage, intoning, "Haarrry! Haarrry!"

Fish sticks and tater tots for harry

This is a fascinating documentary.

Wish the tedious anti Meghan trolls would stick to their own (many) threads. GO AWAY this one is for Wallis.

R178 - The comparisons are inevitable.

And may become ever more so over time.

R178 I agree. Go bash Meghan somewhere else. Although she doesn't deserve it, neither did Wallis. And having a king abdicate for you is hardly comparable to some run of the mill fifth in line to the throne marry you. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Wallis was impeccably stylish but there is that little matter of being a Nazi that does take the shine off somewhat.

Many thanks R149 I'm 147 and R148 go back to Jupiter......don't diss when u don't know.

R180 - Wallis doesn't deserve it?

She lifted Edward from his then mistress's arms whilst said mistress was away. She was a Nazi sympathiser and a racist. If Hitler had won the war, she'd have kissed his feet in Fortnum's windows on a busy Monday morning if he'd agreed to make her Queen of England. She was rude to her lover's sister-in-law, despised and completely misunderstood the country whose Queen she planned to become, and whilst her fashion sense was impeccable, she was by all accounts brash, greedy, and hard as nails - she spent most of her adult life engaged in social climbing, and when she got her prize, spent the remainder of her life partying, turning herself out immaculately, and dissing the people she'd left to clean up the mess she and Edward had made of the monarchy as World War II edged over the horizon.

Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor deserves every last bit of bashing aimed at her.

Meghan Markle is a social climbing grifter with, so far, few principles except ones that enhance her public profile. She was lucky to snag Harry. The rest remains to be seen.

That would be the lovely Miss Allison Hayes, r175.

R98 the feud between Simpson and Princess Elizabeth-as-then-was, was based on more than Simpson's repulsive behaviour. Elizabeth never wanted to be part of the Royal Family - she turned Albert (the future George VI) down at least twice on this basis, although from the diaries of her friends and confidantes at the time it is clear that she was least 'very fond' of him. The fondness grew into love after their marriage, and they were devoted to each other. Albert was never very robust and Elizabeth became very protective of him, even standing up to George V when he bullied her husband.

THen Edward VIII abdicated, and Elizabeth was faced with her two nightmares coming true at the same time. Firstly, she was thrust into a position that she hated (she respected her mother-in-law, but didn't particularly like her, and certainly didn't want to emulate her), but even worse, her beloved Bertie was thrust into a spotlight that he was never prepared for, didn't want, and was terrified by. There are some stories that he almost went into hysterics when it became clear to him that he was about to become King. Elizabeth never forgave Simpson for this - and also blamed her for his early death - and the only 'softening' of her stance came from the fact that Edward loved Simpson, and Bertie loved Edward, and so she felt that it was what Bertie would have wanted.

If I wanted to read 'em I'd go to your thread.

She was hung as fuck...if george couldn't be queen...at least he got fucked like one...well....a castro queen

What a needs to get laid Frau R183 is.....sounds jealous of both Wallis & Meghan.....ha ha ha probably too fat to snag a Freezer Queen much less British Royalty

R188 - Right, right, Wallis Simpson wasn't any of those things, just a real nice gal from Baltimore ill done by by history.

I read that the British public was kept mostly in the dark about events leading up to the abdication while the American press went to town entertaining the US with all the details

[quote]My father was crossing the Atlantic on the SS United States in the early 1960s when he encountered them on deck. He said that they were both very short and slender, tiny like children.

Years ago, the Met Costume Exhibit had some of the Duke and Duchesses' clothing on display, and I was shocked at how small the clothes were. The clothes would be unwearable by most modern adults, only adolescents who were VERY skinny would be able to fit into them these days.

r53 that photo was taken in 1933. In 1933, no one knew what that gesture would come to mean.

It's my understanding that Queen Mary was like the Bar Bush of the Royal Family. A fire-breathing harpie with an iron fist who everybody was terrified of.

That would be “of whom everyone was terrified”.

R192 - First of all, that meeting between Hitler and the Windsors took place in October 1937, after the Abdication and their marriage, not in 1933. Wallis and Edward were not out and about in Europe acting like British royalty in 1933. The Abdication didn't take place until December 1936. She was already the Duchess of Windsor when that photo was taken. Under no circumstances would the pair have been out meeting the Chancellor of Germany formally in 1933.

Second, even if it had been 1933, 1933 was the real beginning of the Third Reich.

Germany, 1933: February: Hitler gives his "Proclamation to the German People"; the Reichstag Fire Decree is issued, cancelling many basic civil liberties; March: the Nazis begin their first roundup of political opponents, Hindenburg orders the flag of the German Republic taken down and the Nazi flag flown in its place, and Hitler proclaims the Third Reich - and Dachau, the first of the concentration camps, is opened on March 20, while at the same time, Herman Goering insists that Germany's Jews are not in danger. On March 22nd, the Reichstag issues the Enabling Act, making Hitler dictator of Germany. April: laws were passed forcing all "non-Aryans" out of the legal profession and civil service. May: the first book burnings are held. Before the end of 1933, Germany voted to leave the League of Nations, and laws allowing eugenic sterilisation have been passed.

Everyone in Europe knew by spring of 1933 who Hitler was and what was happening in Germany. By 1937, when Hitler welcomed the Duke and Duchess, everyone also knew that another world war was shaping up. Wallis and Edward shouldn't even have been there.

The only benefit Wallis brought with her is that she rid of a functional moron as a future King during a dangerous time in its history. If Edward had been on the throne instead of George VI at Dunkirk, Edward would eagerly have told Churchill to "make terms" with Hitler to save the British Expeditionary Forces trapped on the beaches. Churchill wouldn't have had to obey but he would have encountered even more pressure from the half of the war cabinet that wanted to make terms, who would have had more ammunition.

In that sense, Wallis was the best thing that could have happened to Britain. But they are utterly morally culpable for even meeting him by late 1937.

But do not kid yourself about 1933 - all of Europe was aware by then of the danger shaping up in Germany.

R195 the pic referred to was of the queen as a young child giving the Nazi salute. The point being made was that this was long before it had a sinister meaning.

$196 Oh.

Never mind.

R196 (not $196). Still stand by my views on the Windsors visiting Hitler in 1937.

For what it's worth, the swastika is a much older symbol, as well. You can still find it in some older southwestern Navajo jewelry, when it was known as a "sun" or "whirling log" symbol. The Navajo voted to stop using it after WWII because of the use it had been put to.

The Queen and members of her family were given a private showing of The King's Speech not long after its release. Of course she didn't say anything publicly but privately she told friends she enjoyed it very much and that it was about 75 percent accurate.

Half of Europe's ruling classes, both religious and secular, sympathized with the Nazis and the Fascists (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc.). They were anti-Semitic, hated Democracy, or at best supported the Nazis and the Fascists as being the lesser of two evils (the other evil being Soviet Communism). Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson were not unique.

It's still an interesting story to people today, the man who gave up the throne for "the woman he loved." I think part of the interest is "WTF did he ever see in her? She was homely AF and already middle-aged." It really was a strange relationship.

R200 - I think that's more or less true, and it probably still is today. But the casual in-bred antisemitism (and racialism) of Europe's upper classes is a bit different from support for Auschwitz and world domination by a screeching sociopath. That's why Edward's remark after the war, when the full scope of the apex of Europe's long history with the Jews was exposed, that he never thought Hitler such a bad chap, was so indicative of why Britain and Europe were fortunate that Wallis came along and eased him out of the way for the far more reliable, if uninspiring Yorks. I think the ruling classes responded somewhat to fascistic rhetoric because it suggests support for rigid hierarchy, and such support is interpreted as protection for their status.

George V is said to have sized up his eldest son accurately and stated glumly that "the boy will ruin himself in 12 months after I'm gone" and that George hoped "nothing would come between Bertie and Lilibet and the Throne".

There are also those who think that Queen Mary had sized up her eldest even earlier, and interfered in Bertie's pursuit of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon because on behalf of Bertie's suit because she knew EBL would make him the perfect wife (which she did) and Bertie needed the perfect wife as one day Queen Mary suspected Bertie, not Edward, would end up on the throne. Edward was by the time Bertie married already showing signs of distaste for the job and a penchant for married women and nightclubs.

Churchill initially supported Edward's cause for marriage to Wallis, but after the war broke out, as he watched the stolid quiet Yorks do their jobs so well, told his wife he saw he'd been wrong, particularly where Queen Elizabeth was concerned, and that Wallis would never have done.

You could do quite a bit of fiction on what would have happened if Edward had gotten his way and he and Wallis were on the Throne during WWII.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (Queen Mother) did an impeccable job during WWII. They really helped to hold the country together and give people hope. Edward would've been a disaster. It's just as well that things turned out the way they did and he abdicated.

R149

Comprehension please, people. Nowhere in the linked story from the SUN (referencing a story in the SUNDAY MIRROR, so second-hand at that) is William quoted as saying what you are saying he said. It's "a Palace source" doing the talking. Even the headline says only that "Prince William says bringing 'just and lasting peace' to the Middle East is his life's mission." It doesn't say "Prince William said 'Bringing just and lasting peace to the Middle East is my life's mission' because nowhere is HE quoted as saying that.

That (not) said, I love his suit and the surprisingly good shape he appears to be in. He might want to consider the yarmulke more often, too: it covers the worst of the balding.

R163

"Picture me, draped in furs, wafting Chanel #5, in a cloche hat and those T-strap specs, boarding the Orient Express"

Erm, I suspect you'd be laughed off the train before it left the station. The Orient Express is not the one bringing Marilyn and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and the all-girl band to Florida. It went to Istanbul. You wouldn't be wearing summer shoes with a fur piece, would you?

R204 - Spoilsport.

Oh, all right, I'll swap the T-strap spectator pumps for chunky-heeled dark suede T-straps.

R163

Did the Duke and Dutchess ever mingle with movie stars or people like the Kennedy's? or other highly prominent people outside of royal society?

Curious.

I don't believe the Kennedys would have anything to do with them. They did socialize with movie stars, though.

R206 - They spent the rest of their lives hobnobbing with the jet set of the era. Homes on the Riviera and the Right Bank in Paris - parties, balls, horse races, with those pugs following everywhere in their wake . . .

Who did they hang out with in Hollywood?

R209 - I don't think Hollywood was their milieu, it was much more Newport and Palm Beach and they had an apartment at the Waldorf in New York. Marjorie Post, the Dodges, the Youngs - the millionaire golfing set, not the Hollywood set. I never heard that they had a particular tie to Hollywood - doesn't mean they never ventured there, but if so, I never heard it.

I guess politicians avoided socializing with the Windsors for obvious reasons - besides being sort of disgusting they are also had the Nazi thing. Did they travel in first class circles or just second tier and climbers? I'm sure they had lots of invitations.

r199, where did you hear or read this? I have wondered if Liz saw the movie The Queen and what she thought of it and the actress who portrayed her. Best line in that movie was when the Queen was interrupted while having tea with Prince Philip when called to the phone which he wants her to ignore but she takes the call and when she comes back Phil says, "now your tea's gone cold!!".

The Crown devoted a whole episode to Edward and Wallis and they were truly awful people.

An interesting character to throw into the Wallis / Edward mix is American Jimmy Donahue.

Grandson of F. W. Woolworth and one of his heirs, along with his first cousin "The Poor Little Rich Girl" Barbara Hutton.

(If you saw the mini-series with Farrah as Barbara, you would have frequently seen her with her cousin Jimmy, played by Bruce Davison.

As profligate as Barbara, JImmy was gay.

Despite that he had an affair with Wallis for about 4 years.

I don't think people who continued to feel Hitler wasn't such a bad guy would be welcome in Hollywood

By the mid-1930s it was clear to the political class that Britain was facing a second war against Germany. The general public was unwilling to countenance that fact yet, but it was clear that Germany was a fascist and expansionist threat to neighbouring countries with whom Britain was bound by treaty. Even figures like Baldwin or Chamberlain, who were committed to appeasement and who were willing to sacrifice a lot of national prestige for peace, knew that they were likely only buying time to allow Britain to re-arm for a war it was not yet in a position to fight.

Against that background, there was never the slightest chance that Wallis Simpson would be allowed to be Queen. Indeed, even given a choice between allowing a morganatic marriage or having the king abdicate, the government opted for the latter. The fact that they did so, in the full knowledge that the foundations of the monarchy would be rocked, show just how much they wanted rid of her. A lot is talked of her unsuitability as a divorcee, but the much bigger issue was her closeness to Nazi figures such as von Ribbentrop, the ambassador to the UK. He sent her flowers daily, and she happily accepted them. She may have just thought of this as a flattering approach by a powerful man, but to British eyes she was close to (and rumoured to be sleeping with) this man, who was likely to be a leading adversary in the war they saw on the horrizon.

By getting rid of her, the government also got rid of Edward (who admired the Nazi strongmen and compared them favourably to democratically elected politicians), and in their place they got George, a weak man in many ways, but one who had an acute sense of duty, a loyalty to Britain’s democratic institutions, and a sincere commitment to the men and women who were about to be sent to war in his name. And in his wife they got a known quantity, a strong Scots noblewoman, who adored and strengthened her husband, and who (having lost a beloved brother in the First World War) despised the Germans.

[quote] I don't care about the adultery. I do care that they were Nazi supporters and Edward was a traitor. They should have been buried at sea.

Oh blahblahblah...Hitler had plenty of supporters amongst the rich and famous, including that poster child for venality, the infinitely bribable Winston Churchill. What was his price? 275,000 pounds? What is with the continued reverence towards this despicable human (scarcely) being? The bulldog who hid well away from the bombings only to emerge to strut along the streets in the smoldering aftermath? Never mind Gallipoli-when that animated tumor John McCain finally snuffs it, he can trade war stories with Churchill in hell.

Enough already-the Good Side won. Half of Europe was handed over to the Bolsheviks and the banking families that controlled them. The result of this "victory" is the continued decay and destruction of the West. Yippie.

As someone once put it, it was too bad that Hitler didn't snag one of the Mitford girls (pinko Jessica excepted). An Anglo-Germanic alliance would have settled the Commies hash for good. Now, as things continue to deteriorate, you can look forward to the possibility of of a post-Merkel alliance between Germany and Russia. Couldn't happen? Don't bet against it.

R217 an Anglo-German alliance was unthinkable at the time. If the fact the Kaiser, King and Tsar were cousins couldn't prevent WWI you think Hitler marrying a Mitford would have prevented WWII?!

R211 They had invitations from both first tier and climbers. This doesn’t include the first tier of British society. Most of them were completely finished with the Windsor’s. None of David’s family attended his marriage to Wallis, however, the couple stayed with the Earl and Countess of Dudley on their first trip back to England after the abdication around 1946 (Wallis’ jewels were stolen during this trip.) and they grew friendly with the Mosleys who were their neighbors in France (Oswald and Diana nee Mitford, who weren’t a very welcome couple in England either. Diana later wrote a sympathetic book on Wallis.) Rarely, but still worth noting, David would travel back to England and visit his family. Usually these visits coincided with something else that required he be in England, such as a surgery, etc. Visits were tense, to say the least.

At the beginning they were more selective about who they chose to be around, but towards the end many people started talking about how the Windsors would go out to wherever they were invited and would be wined and dined for free. There are rumors out there about how the Duke was terrible about paying his bills, but I’ve seen a documentary where his butler (or private secretary or someone close to them) swore otherwise. Either way, they received a lot of things for free. After her death, the auction house that sold Wallis’ jewels discovered that some of them were purchased from Cartier by Jimmy Donahue and his mother Jessie. When they stayed at the Waldorf Astoria while they were in NYC some of their friends would loan them fine paintings to decorate their suite with for the duration of their trip. Other friends would provide flowers for their suite.

The Suzy Menkes book is one of the best sources I’ve found to learn about the minutiae of their life. I’ll attach an old NYT article about the book and then try to copy and paste the whole thing for those who hate to click.

'You know what my day was today? I got up late and then I went with the Duchess and watched her buy a hat.' So spoke the former King of England, Edward VIII, in conversation with a friend, in a line from Suzy Menkes's diligently researched book, 'The Windsor Style.' It is a line that sums up better than any biography ever could the utter nothingness of the once-monarch's post-abdication life as the Duke of Windsor, living out his so-called great love story in an atmosphere of rarefied exquisiteness with Wallis Warfield Simpson, for whom, as the world knows, he gave up his throne.

The Duke, Ms. Menkes tells us, was a man with time on his hands. He had ways to fill up his days other than golf or gardening. He liked dressing in kilts and playing the bagpipes. He knew the lyrics to the show tunes from Broadway musicals and liked listening to Cole Porter, a frequent visitor, play and sing at their parties. He liked to dance. He liked to design jewelry for his wife, whom he never called Wallis when he talked about her, only the Duchess. The Duchess, more industrious than her husband, was a shopper.

'I would rather shop than eat,' she said, and her days were taken up with couture fittings, sometimes as many as six a day, where she often, democratically, shared the chicken sandwiches her chef prepared for her with her fitters and vendeuse. In addition, she spent a great deal of her life being photographed for fashion magazines, always careful to have her deep scowl mark erased before publication. The photographer Horst tells of arriving at her hotel suite and seeing all the mountains of her luggage, but not a single book except a catalogue of Revillon furs. Part of every day she spent with her hairdresser, Alexandre, whom she made famous, preparing for the evening.

The Windsors dined out every night, all dressed up, or dined at home, all dressed up, with the people who came to be known as the Windsor circle. Some of whom, like Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, and Grace, Countess Dudley, and the Vicomtesse de Ribes, have been interviewed by Ms. Menkes for this very swell book, swell meaning high class. Ms. Menkes, a fashion editor and fashion historian, formerly at The Times of London and now at The Independent, is the best-selling author of 'The Royal Jewels,' and has established herself as an authority on royal matters. This book contains 196 photographs, many never published before, in color and black and white, which give an extraordinary insight into these privileged lives. In addition, Ms. Menkes has relied heavily on most of the biographies and diaries of the society people whose lives overlapped - Sir Henry (Chips) Channon, Lady Diana Cooper and on and on -much of which will be familiar to the ever-expanding Windsor cognoscenti.

For some reason that is not clear to me, Ms. Menkes tells her story in the present tense, in a sort of you-are-there style. It is effective in the first chapter, when the reader is taken to the house in the Bois de Boulogne as a guest at a Windsor dinner party, but the use of the present tense becomes strained and unnatural as the book progresses.

The Windsors, Ms. Menkes tells us, were a couple incapable of deep and coherent expression of their emotions, but both relished the minor arts of exquisite living - dressing, cooking, entertaining - and the book takes the reader through these minor arts in fascinating detail. Their toilet paper was unrolled and cut into prepared squares for them by their staff. Their toothpaste was squeezed onto their toothbrushes for them. Their table linen was hand-embroidered to match the priceless porcelain that was placed on it. Their freshly ironed sheets were carried to their beds by maids so they would not be creased. Their kitchen boy sorted their salad leaves to match them for size. Their pug dogs were served their meals in silver bowls by a footman wearing navy with a green collar.

These details of a pampered life are delivered without editorial comment by the author. But the sheer bulk of the information with which she inundates the reader ultimately presents the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as two absurd and useless people, being stylish endlessly stylish, because that was all they had, their style. 'After a while I longed to escape,' said Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, to the author. 'I didn't want any more flowers and perfumes and jewels. It was too claustrophobic.' 'What do you and the Windsors talk about?' an American hostess was asked. 'Where they've just been and who they've just seen,' was the reply.

For all the Duchess's smartness and chic, her great friend Cecil Beaton, that arbiter of taste, pronounced The Mill, her country home near Paris, 'overdone and chichi,' 'simply not good enough,' while the famed interior decorator Billy Baldwin, also her friend, called the country house 'awfully tacky, but that's what Wallis had - tacky Southern taste; much too overdone, much too elaborate and no real charm.' The Duke also had his detractors. 'All the charm in the world and nothing whatever to back it up,' said Noel Coward. And the same Cecil Beaton went on to say, 'His face now begins to show the emptiness of life.'

There are indications of fascinating scenes from their lives, but they are too brief in the telling and cry for expansion and comment. None is more riveting than the description of a night in a Paris nightclub when the Duchess dunked her white fan made of Prince of Wales feathers into an enormous bowl of red roses sent to her by Jimmy Donahue, the gay ten-cent store heir who was rumored to have cuckolded the Duke. 'Look, the Prince of Wales feathers and Jimmy Donahue's roses,' squealed the Duchess to her embarrassed guests. Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, adds to this story these two brief sentences: 'The Duke said, 'Laura, get me out of this,' and I took him home to the Bois . . . In the car on the way back he just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.'

Almost sad are the pictures and descriptions of them in old age. Billy Baldwin said, 'In the end the Windsors didn't care whom they saw, and they would finally go any place if anyone asked them to come for a meal; they just had no discrimination whatsoever.' One of their servants, Sydney Johnson, who had been with them since their days in the Bahamas, described their declining years spending quarrelsome evenings over a bottle of whisky: 'They had nothing and no one. They were just two lonely old people.' Old age concerned them. The Duke put iodine in his hair to keep it yellow. The Duchess had three face lifts. 'By the third one, the skin was drawn up and her eyes looked odd,' said Jacqueline de Ribes. Cecil Beaton went even further. 'Her face so pulled up that the mouth stretches from ear to ear.'

Finally, the omnipresent Duchess of Marlborough says, 'I went to look at the flowers at [ the Duchess's ] funeral. It was tragic. They were all from dressmakers, jewelers, Dior, Van Cleef, Alexandre. Those people were her life.' So much for style.

Thanks, everyone, for the very interesting and expansive discussion. Re Churchill - like Lincoln in America, he was certainly flawed and not a saint, but his value to the country remains, I think, inarguable.

I'd forgotten about the Jimmy Donahue era.

Re Cecil Beaton - it's worth noting that he adored the Queen Mother, as well (Beaton was never one to be too picky about connections) and took the first formal photos of Elizabeth after she became Queen. The photos formed the basis of the image of her as Queen that she would craft. Beaton was overwhelmed by her charm and how much prettier she was in person with her beautiful skin, large blue eyes, and tiny frame. The photos are in black and white and remain iconic.

There is a quote I remember about the Duke: "He was at his best when the going was easy."

One member of the Royal Family remained close to Edward and that was his sister Mary, who was made The Princess Royal by her father George V in 1932, after the death of her aunt.

Allegedly, she refused to attend the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip because Edward had not been invited.

R224 - Princess Mary looks remarkably like her two brothers, Edward and George, and like her nephew, George Duke of Kent, who married Princess Marina of Greece.

The Duke and Duchess did entertain JFK, before he was President. The Duchess said, "Out of a litter of 9, there's bound to be one good pup".

Princess Anne looks a lot like Princess Mary, who was her great aunt. She even has the same "I smell shit" expression.

One of the reasons for the Queen Mother's hatred of Wallis is that she had her eye on him for herself. Of course, he had no interest. He liked petite and chic, with a decent set of teeth.

R217, yes! Forget the democratic values and norms of Western political institutions.

You are right. Champion a Russian propaganda talking point that says:A country put on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide and a union with Great Britain would have been great.

Btw

Churchill, the man who wrote "the history of the English-speaking people" And read Mein Kampf in 1924, spent years in the political wilderness warning about Hitler.

So, stop with this bullshit. Hitler was not a good guy and his political ideology created hell on earth.

The Duke of Kent married to Marina was Princess Mary, the Princess Royal's brother also. He was the bisexual jazz lover/drug addict. Edward VIII (David), George VI (Bertie), Mary, Henry, Duke of Gloucester (Glossy Pops), George, Duke of Kent, and Prince John were all siblings.

They sound like trash. And Wallis was one homely bitch. Was she intersex?

It's because they we're trash. Trash with money and really nice things.

But trash none the less!

R228 - The bit about Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon having her eye on Edward is bogus; the newspapers at the time kept hinting, when rumours of a royal engagement emerged, that it was Edward, when in fact it was Bertie. Bertie is said to have shouted, "If they are going to print their damnable lies, they might at least pick on the right man!" Elizabeth ran with a different crowd than Edward - the clean, country, landed gentry.

That said, she did her have her eye on another man for awhile, and that was Bertie's Equerry, James Stuart. A braw, well set up man he was, and Elizabeth was deeply attracted to him. When Queen Mary realised he was standing in the way of Bertie's pursuit of Elizabeth, she had him sent out of the country, reassigned to a post in Canada, but he didn't stay long and took an advantageous position in the American oil business. It was shortly after this that Elizabeth gave up and gave in to Bertie's proposal. Stuart eventually married Lady Rachel Cavendish, daughter of 9th Duke of Devonshire.

And by the way, Elizabeth was notably petite. As Norman Hartnell remarked to his assistant before a fitting, "A very little lady, dear boy."

R228 - And, P.S., by the time Wallis got her hooks into Edward, the Yorks had been married for a decade or more and had two lovely daughters. It's absurd to say that Elizabeth hated Wallis because she hooked Edward. Wallis behaved absymally, made fun of the Duchess of York where she could be heard, was brash and aggressive and ignored protocol. The Duchess of York had plenty of reasons to despise Wallis: Edward wasn't one of them.

The Queen Mother was hideous, a drunk and had a body for shit. Even the teeth looked worse than a coal miner's wife.

R235 Not at twenty she wasn't. She was receiving proposals from every eligible man in her circle by the time she was twenty. She was very small, had gorgeous skin, huge blue eyes, and dark hair that contrasted with the fair skin and blue eyes. Everyone thought she was adorable. She didn't snag a King's son being hideous. And diarist Chips Channon in the early 1920s called her "More gentle lovely and exquisite than any woman alive," as he noted a friend's passionate attachment to her, "Poor Gage is quite desperate, but he is far too heavy and squireachal for anyone as patrician as Elizabeth."

You're looking at her from 1) the vantage point of another century, 2) her long old age which is our real memory of her, and 3) your own vicious hatred of her because of attitudes common to her circle at the time.

But whether you like it or not, n hier youth, she was considered a lovely English rose, and early photos show a very appealing looking woman. She was a huge hit as the Duchess of York and the public adored her.

Live with it.

R235 - *in her youth

R236

Even though she was Scottish r236?

Why didn't the Queen Mother do something about those hideous teeth? She could certainly have afforded cosmetic dental work.

R238 - Are you serious? She was an Earl's daughter, and the Scottish seat was none other than Glamis Castle (yes, THAT Glamis Castle). The family had an English country home at St. Paul's Walden Bury, and a town home in London, where Elizabeth was born. Do you think she spoke like Jamie Fraser in "Outlander"? She was a member of one of the great families of the landed gentry.

Yeah: even though she was Scottish.

Didn't the old hag have some relatives committed?

R236, who knew there was a Queen Mother stan!

R241, are you confusing Queen Mum with her mother-in-law Queen Mary, who sent her severely disabled son Prince John off to live in obscurity with servants in a cottage on one of the royal estates until he died during adolescence?

If not, spill.

R239 - I don't think people focused on teeth that way in the earl 20th century. It was quite common for a long time in European royal circles to ignore the teeth. The term "toilet teeth" came into use to describe them. That changed later in the 20th century. People didn't base ideas of beauty, either, on perfect teeth. Take a look at the teeth on Queen Margrethe of Denmark and her younger sister, Princess Benedikte. (The Queen is a heavy smoker all her life.)

Of course, in that photo she is already a very old woman. In her youth they weren't all yellow, just crooked. She also didn't tweeze her eyebrows, which were quite toothbrushy, and she had think ankles.

And yet, nevertheless, she was described as having "a blend of kindness and dignity" and "a radiant vitality".

Today we judge beauty by its adherence to a rather cold perfection, a great deal of which is supported by cosmetic surgery and excessive exercise. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon would hardly qualify today on those terms, but in the framework of her time, she was judged very differently.

R242 - well, after seen this very interesting woman called hideous, an old hag, a body of shit, etc., etc., I thought some balance was called for.

She also saved the British monarchy. Whether that's a Good Things or Bad Thing is a matter of opinion.

She wasn't born "an old hag" you know. She was once a charming pretty young girl.

Which is why she ended up Queen of Great Britain and the last Empress of India.

I know exactly where she was born and how she spoke r242 I’m just questioning your use of “English rose” because she was known to be Scottish.

R243 - R241 is right, as it happens. Two mentally challenged nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, were committed to an asylum in 1941. They were the children of the Queen Mother's older brother, John. In fact, it was quite common to dispose of "defective" children in this way at the time. They were children of the shadows. It was not the Queen Mother who committed them, but the family, but neither she nor anyone else in the family visited them or took any interest in their welfare. They simply disappeared from view. That's the way it was done then.

[Quote]They simply disappeared from view. That's the way it was done then.

Sounds like my kind of people!

R245 - It's a generic type, as you well know. "She stood out as a true English rose that night, fresh and sweet as with the dew still on her" was the way one admirer put it after seeing her at a London costume ball. Her upbringing as a child of the landed gentry would have blurred any such division. And her mother wasn't Scottish: she was descended from minor English aristocracy, including a former PM, William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland.

I mean, she wasn't quite "Scottish" the way you are implying, you know? She was a Scottish-English aristocrat.

Back to Wallis. Apparently she wouldn't have had qualms about becoming Queen after Germany conquered the UK. Please give some serious thought to this idea.

I have no idea what you people are talking about. I just can't remember.

Thanks, r246. I remember now reading about them years ago but had totally forgotten.

IT’s rather interesting that, having grown up with very remote parents, Edward and George both fell for women who can be regarded to some extent as mother figures to them. Wallis was a rather dominating woman, who was in her own way as hard to please as Queen Mary. Indeed, it’s possible to look at Edward’s life as having been spent in a desperate attempt to please her and gain the approval he never got from his parents.

Conversely, George married a rather mumsy figure, pretty rather than beautiful, but with a great deal of emotional intelligence and with an ability to get on with people. She was able to sooth him and strengthen him. It is also telling that George’s relationship with his parents improved markedly after his marriage. There is a sense that his parents reassessed him when they saw their no-hoper stammering second son land such a dazzling bride. Indeed, George V came to adore Elizabeth, and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Elizabeth was the source of a rapprochement between her husband and his parents: he finally got their approval and esteem after decades of feeling their open contempt.

On a more superficial note: on the subject of Elizabeth’s teeth(!), I can say that I met her once when she was well into her eighties, and they really didn’t look too bad. They were crooked old lady teeth, but their colour wasn’t as appalling as they look in the picture posted above. I suspect that they became really bad in her nineties, by which time I doubt she much felt like enduring the pain or inconvenience of cosmetic dentistry.

Indeed, when I met her, she looked remarkably well for her age, and gave the impression of being interested in all around her. At what was a rather dull event, she gave the impression that she would rather have been there than anywhere else in the world. She was rather charming and charismatic, and I can quite understand that, as a young girl, she would have had a dazzling effect on a diffident young man who was used to being dismissed as “slow” (which was how stammerers were regarded at that time).

The Queen Mother lived the life of an Edwardian Lady until the day she died. She never really left the 1920s.

And why should she?

[quote]she wasn't quite "Scottish" the way you are implying, you know? She was a Scottish-English aristocrat.

Yes, we see. She wasn’t one of those filthy commoners.

Most of us get stuck with the values of the decade we were young in when we were at our most impressionable.

Queen Mum as young woman around 1920

Edward wanted to marry a twice-divorced American; divorce was not unheard of but was a shocking thing back in thirties’ Britain. He was king and therefore also head of the Church of England. Remember that even as late as the sixties it wasn’t considered proper; cross-reference Princess Margaret being unable to marry a divorcé herself, a generation later.

Edward was hugely popular both as Prince of Wales and as King. He was indeed a layabout playboy who loved exotic holidays and women, but then so had his grandfather, Edward VII been. He was also anti-semitic, but then so was his father, George V. He tried to interfere in government, but so did his predecessors, especially Queen Victoria. He didn’t want the job as king, but neither did his brother George VI. He had many things going for him - he was handsome and charming, and very glamorous.

When Edward was king he was feted everywhere he went, the people absolutely adored him. It was the cabinet of the time that had a problem with Edward’s marrying a twice-divorced American - when he announced his intention to marry her, they threatened to resign, which would have been a constitutional crisis.

Edward was no angel, he was a spoiled brat even, but his reputation has been deliberately tarnished by his relatives, the press and historians alike. If he had married the twice-divorced American, it would have put a question mark over the whole concept of monarchy and his role as head of the Church of England, changing its image drastically. Remember also that Mrs Simpson was not only a foreigner but also had no royal or noble birth - marrying a true commoner in this sense was unheard of in the royal family, who had always married at least into noble families. She was also obviously not a virgin - something important for royal brides up until the time of Diana.

The cabinet were probably concerned that such a change of image and style would be too great and might even contribute to the monarchy’s downfall - many monarchies had fallen only two decades before, during and in the aftermath of the First World War. The cabinet felt that the nation would not accept Mrs Simpson as queen - although this is debatable, since Edward’s popularity might have overridden any questions about her suitability.

When Edward abdicated, his reputation was blackened - such a thing as abdication undermines the concept of monarchy, because the idea is that someone is born into a particular role and there is no choice for them or the people. Once you introduce the element of choice, you start to move away from traditionally what monarchy is all about, and what it thrives on - which is tradition and continuity. Many think Edward would have made an excellent king - the job is not hard and he was already beloved. Abdication does not sit well with monarchists, however, so they try to highlight all the bad things about him and suggest he would have been a nightmare. If his womanizing, pleasure-seeking, workshy grandfather Edward VII did his job successfully, for Edward VIII it would have been a piece of cake - especially since he was so successful as Prince of Wales. In the aftermath of the abdication he was forced to live abroad and his negative attributes have been highlighted ever since, while conversely, his brother George VI has been bigged up and hailed as a hero - something which was transferred also onto his daughter, the current queen of the UK.

Most people who knew Edward VIII felt that he had neither the character nor the inclination to accept the duties of the monarch. Having read through a few dozen of Edward’s letters sent to a former aide during an extended trip through colonial Africa in the mid 1930s, I was struck by their stultifying dullness and self-absorption and complete lack of curiosity and observation. A very dim bulb. His best turn was as the wildly popular Playboy Prince, for which he didn’t have to do anything except turn up and look good, but it was exactly that sort of international white trash party crowd that saw the Nazis as stylishly ultra-modern and chic, while confirming class superiority over the common herd.

In this context, his devotion to Wallis Simpson looks increasingly like a get-out-of jail card for a job he never wanted just as much as a clear psychological dependence. Stupid people are capable of low cunning. As to public perception of the monarchy, Edward received great public sympathy on his abdication (but this at a time when his weak-minded views on the Nazis were far from well-known), but that same sympathy was quickly extended to his dull, shy but intensely dutiful brother forced to shoulder the burden. Such is the nature of the deadly serious royal soap opera—there’s always a new plot development.

However, because the monarch in the UK reigns but does not rule, the individual monarch’s political views are unimportant. On the other hand, had Edward as king attempted to take on an active, public pro-German political role in the face of the gathering Nazi threat there would have been a huge constitutional crisis as well as widespread political and social unrest. The political class was perfectly aware of this. Under the circumstances, Abdication was in everybody’s interests, and the monarchy was preserved.

It has been alleged that the government of the day had decided that Edward was unacceptable and had to go. His love for Wallis Simpson was just the excuse that they got hold of to persuade him to go. So if he had agreed to drop her, they would just have found another reason to get rid of him, with an even bigger constitutional crisis. So I think that it is entirely plausible that there were no circumstances where he could have remained King. The only question is how much damage he did to the monarchy on the way out. In the worst case, he could have destroyed the monarchy.

Muriel, why the red troll mark of shame?

Do you have any dick pics?

The Duke of Windsor was a Jew hater who often spent entire evenings publicly spewing about "negotiated settlements with Hitler" and how "Jewish bankers were responsible for WWII". Attempts to trivialize or rationalize his vicious bigotry illustrates just how prevalent that bigotry remains.

R258 nobody stopped Margaret from marrying. That has been known for a long time. She didn’t want to give up the perks of royalty so she chose not to marry him but letters from the time show that there was no question of trying to stop her. She made the decision herself.

Your defending Edward as being some sort of tragic hero is laughable. He was a fool.

[quote]Attempts to trivialize or rationalize Edward VIII's vicious bigotry illustrates just how prevalent that bigotry remains.

Totally agree r262

[quote]Defending Edward as being some sort of tragic hero is laughable. He was a fool.

Totally agree R263

And you think George was any better? They are all briefed within an inch of their lives on every person they meet and every situation.

George was even more stupid than his brother, with none of the charm.

R266, you are right in saying that Edward and George were both rather dim, but the difference was that Edward thought that he was exceptionally bright. He thought he, rather than any intenational statesman or diplomat, had the correct insight into international affairs. Unfortunately, his plan was to hand over half of Europe to a violent fascist dictatorship.

In addition to vastly overestimating his own intelligence, he also fatally overestimated the extent to which parliament would allow him to step beyond his constitutional boundaries. He openly told German diplomats that he intended to take control of politics into his own hands. Although Victoria had at times caused havoc by doing the same, her reign had been followed by three decades of reform, during which the privileges of the crown (and of the House of Lords) had been defined and restricted. The prospect of a pro-German king who was determined to wield real political influence alarmed politicians across party lines. He was beloved by the public, but their elected officials saw him as a threat to the hard-won rights of the House of Commons.

He was lazy as well as dim, ignoring the briefing papers sent to him by the government. He showed no willingness to gain knowledge, but thought he knew better than everyone else.

George was also dim, and insecure, and bad-tempered. He hated being king. However, he was also determined to do his duty by his country and and to abide by democratic and constitutional norms. He stuck by his people, and gained their loyalty as a result.

R262 - I totally agree, as well.

R257 - thanks for posting the photo of that "hideous old bag body of shit" - it conveys her picturesque charm, and the poster upthread who described her as pretty but not beautiful nailed it, as well as mentioning her gift for carrying out her duties as if they were exactly what she wanted to do that day.

R266 - no one would ever suggest Bertie/George VI was one of the world's great intellects, but he did have a few qualities his brother didn't: he was decent, infused with a sense of duty, unassuming rather than narcissistic, and however dumb he may have been generally, he was smart enough to recognise in Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon the right wife who could give him the warm family life his miserable childhood had not given him, and that he craved.

Bertie was left-handed and knock-kneed. As many left-handed children at the time were, he was forced to try to write with his right hand, and his legs were put into painful braces to try to straighten out his knees, the child wept in pain as he did his lessons. His parents were so oblivious to their childrens' actual emotional conditions, that a sociopathic nursery maid who developed an attachment to the child would surreptiously pinch him to make him cry in brief visits to his parents, so that he would be sent back to the nursery earlier and she could have him to herself again. It's hardly a wonder that he developed the stammer that caused him such excruciating embarrassment in public speaking.

Given all this, stupid or not, Bertie grew up into an honourable man with decent values who acquitted himself well when the chips were down, whilst his brother for all his shallow charm, let everyone down - including those Welsh miners he wept crocodile tears over.

Which rather brings us full circle to discussions on several of these BRF threads, and that is, the danger of charisma and celebrity to royalty when overvalued their own sake and not allied to an aura of self-sacrifice, duty, and patriotism.

The current generation, including its newest member, look like Marie Antoinette compared to George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and their daughter, QEII.

R25, at that level, and with those resources, there is so much more one could do with one's life. They didn't have your shitty job.

R267 - Exactly - you've reiterated several of my points before I hit POST. This is what makes the Wallis Simpson episode so fascinating and why events shaping in Europe could have been so differently affected.

I watched the recent remake of "And Then There Were None", Christie's 1939 iconic thriller, which at the time was considered shocking for its bloody violence. But as the woman who adapted it for this television presentation pointed out in the "extra materials", the story perfectly captured the foreboding of the gathering clouds over Europe, a connection I hadn't made when reading the original. One can only imagine, by 1939, what the mood in Britain would have been with Wallis and Edward on the throne, rather than the already much liked dutiful Yorks.

The remake is also notable for the Aidan Turner In An Artfully Draped Towel scene. Full disclosure: he's why I re-watched it.

R255 - Well, yes, exactly. At her level, an issue such as not being seen as a lovely "English Rose" because of her Scottish father's peerage is moot. She spoke like an upper-class Englishwoman, her mother was from a distinguished English family, she was educated like an upper-class Englishwoman of her day . . . the Scottish roots were more a charming bit of colour. To all intents and purposes, yes, precisely: she was a rich, well-born, beautifully brought up arista indistinguishable from her counterparts on the other side of the Tweed.

Most (unfortunately not all) of the British TV series Edward and Mrs. Simpson is on YouTube, and it makes for fascinating viewing. The attitude is neutral, it would seem, and while Edward Fox is much handsomer and more masculine than the real "David" (as they called him) and thus gives him too much weight, Cynthia Harris as Wallis is endlessly fascinating because she's so empty. She keeps acting as though what she says is witty when every sentence is banal.

There's skin from Fox, so if you like 'em slender and tight, he's your boy.

I can't figure out whether this was the creatives' intention or not, but it's worth a detour.

On the shallowest of notes, the Duchess was one of the best-dressed women in the world. Other than a few bad choices, for 40 years she was impeccably turned out. Well before meeting the Duke, she was known as one of the best hostesses in London- which is how she came into his orbit.

As an American, that was not an easy task. Of course, after the abdication many of her "friends" claimed to not know her in order to suck up to the new King and Queen. A few managed to stay friends with both.

R272 Duchess the best dress woman in the world ? I beg to differ bitches

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Circa 1950's

Another thing that hadn’t changed was the Duke's Antisemitism and continuing sympathy for Hitler. ‘My parents were horrified by their dinner-table talk, where they made it perfectly clear that the world would have been a better place if Jews were exterminated,’ recalled Dr Leinhardt. At one dinner party, the Duke told an English friend: ‘I have never thought Hitler was such a bad chap.’ At another party, he took hold of the hands of a lady guest, intertwining his fingers in hers to illustrate his view that the Jews had their tentacles around German society. ‘All Hitler tried to do was free the tentacles,’ he told her as the other guests looked on in horrified silence. Finally, New York advertising executive Milton Biow interjected. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘with all due respect, I never believed I would ever hear, at a civilized dinner table, a defense of Adolf Hitler.’ The Duke had the grace to blush.

Please - the BRF is reeking of confirmed Nazis. More about Prince Philip's aunties! All but one married to officers. But only speculation about Wallis?

^They were is sisters, and not his aunts. That will be all.

R276, none of Philip’s sisters were sharing a bed with the King while at the same time maintaining a close friendship (at the very least) with the Nazi ambassador to London. Indeed, neither Philip nor his sisters were members of the British Royal family at the time of the abdication. Philip became a member after his matriage to Elizabeth, after having distinguished himself in service in the Royal Navy.

His sisters were considered persona non grata to such an extent that they were not even invited to his wedding. The sole member of his immediate family to be present was his mother, who is an interesting and decent person in her own right, having saved a jewish family in occupied Greece from deportation and death.

Wallis was a uniquely dangerous figure in the eyes of the British establishment, because King Edward was besotted with her and infantilised by her. He told her everything, was influenced by her, and her friendship with von Ribbentrop was therefore hugely problematic. Edward could have stayed on the throne if he had gotten rid of her, but in the end his unwillingness to give her up was a blessing because it meant that the nation could be rid of him too.

^Apologies, the preceding comment was an intended reply to r277.

Some of you may not have read or know (at the time, I'm sure) that even Joseph Kennedy was for appeasement as the American Ambassador- and that was 1940.

I'm thrilled you we're all so happy with snaggletooth cunt Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. Who insisted on Queen twice in her title.

R281 - she had two queens in her title because you 1) she didn't get a demotion when her husband died, so remained an anointed Queen, and 2) having two Queen Elizabeth's without the differentiation between the two would have been ridiculous. It's a common practice - i.e., The Dowager Queen X or the Dowager Duchess of . . .

It's hard to gauge which stands out more: your ignorance of history or your absurd accusations or your irrational hatred.

[quote] Please - the BRF is reeking of confirmed Nazis .. more about Prince Philip's aunties!

r277 Well supposedly this thread is about Wallis as OP has mentioned several time ... and Wallis and the Duke's were almost unique in that they were still singing Hitler's praises in the 1950's. I guess they were so used to people agreeing with them that they felt comfortable saying any ugly thing that popped into their heads.

So yeah - the Windsor Nazi connection still very interesting. And it's possible Edward VIII is the last King to really make a difference on the world stage. If Charles were to abdicate (when he becomes king) it would be on the same level of the King of Spain abdicating - it would be in the news for a few days ... but people wouldn't still be talking about it 90 years from now.

Actually I think Nazi connection is the MOST interesting thing about the Windsors. They were poster children for self-obsessed entitlement but lots of people have done this. Other than the Nazi connection Wallis's main claim was that she was a fashionista. But she spent enormous amounts of money on clothes and had the best people advising her. Of course she looked nice.

I've enjoyed this tread -I'm surprised it's still getting comments after 281 replies. There have been so many Windsor threads on DL one would think nothing left to say but here we are !!

R277 - there's no "speculation" about Wallis. Her close friendship with von Ribbentrop was well known in London, her smiling up at Hitler in 1937, and her marriage to an on the record dyed in the wool antisemitic admirer of Der Fuhrer speak for themselves.

Wallis didn't have a moral bone in her body and neither did that slack, infantile, lazy, borderline tard she married.

The tard was the stuttering King. How easy history is rewritten.

But yet Winston Churchill did everything he could to keep Edward on the throne. As did many other influential people.

R285 - I'll just assume you're trolling and baiting. The "tard" saved the monarchy. The Nazi sympathiser was a drifting aimless clown for the rest of his life.

I think "everything he could" is stretching it. ...

R281 - so was half of Churchill's war cabinet.

The "tard" was the one who changed his mind and threw his support behind Churchill's view.

R288, that was after the fact. He famously said Why shouldn't he be allowed to marry his cutie? to Noel Coward, who replied England doesn't want a Queen Cutie (paraphrase). Rich coming from Noel, of course.

R290 - I was speaking of Churchill's resistance to "making terms" with Hitler to save the British Expeditionary Forces trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk, not about whether or not Edward should make Wallis his Queen. It was 1940 - the Abdication was four years in the past. George VI had been King for four years and at first considered it paramount to save the men on the beaches; then he realised Churchill was right, and threw his support behind Churchill. Whilst the King had no power to make such decisions, his influence and partisanship were powerful instruments in the debate.

Edward would have been crawling on his knees to Hitler in a heartbeat - he would have sold Britain out before you could say, "Bob's young uncle."

Edward was a disgusting waste of space on this planet and so was Wallis.

It bears repeating that few people today do not understand what a narrow squeak the victory in WWII was. Germany was that close to pulling it off.

Maybe with Edward's help at Dunkirk they would have come closer.

R290 - *Bob's YOUR uncle" damn this autocorrect function, it has no sense of context.

When Wallis jewelry collection went on auction in 1987, it brought in over $50 million dollars- a record at the time for a personal collection. Friend Elizabeth Taylor bought the famous Prince of Wales brooch, which she had long admired.

R291, your comments on Edward are mere speculation.

R294 - Based on well documented remarks after the war and behaviour in 1937.

It's not "mere" speculation: it's a very good guess. Defending Wallis and Edward is inexcusable. They were horrible.

Speculation and guesses are the same thing. But this is a Wallis Simpson thread. Go start a WW2 thread, and give us your personal anecdotes as well. Which army were you in?

R291 makes excellent points based on a keen understanding of history. R296 I’m sure you know that you don’t have to be present at any historical event to read and analyze. Pick up a book or two.

R296 - oh, don't go simples on us, will you? Speculation based on nothing and speculation based on historical facts of record aren't the same thing. Wallis and Edward were antisemites, racists, and admired Hitler - that comes right out of Edward's mouth. What's absurd is asserting that it's not possible to calculate that Edward the Hitler admirer and antisemite wouldn't have added his support to a war cabinet in 1940, half of whom already wanted to "make terms" with Hitler to get the BEF off that fucking beach. In case you forgot, by June 1940, Britain was the last man standing in Europe.

If Hitler had listened to his advisors, who told him to send his panzers in to finish them off, Edward and Wallis would have found themselves Hitler's paper crowned puppets till the end of the chapter. Hitler thought he could finish them off with the Luftwaffe - why waste expensive materiel doing the job?

Fortunately for Britain and Europe, Edward was far away in the Bahamas, Hitler didn't listen to his advisors and so lost the opportunity to wipe out the BEF in short order, Churchill didn't listen to the Chamberlain section in the war cabinet, and George VI listened to Churchill about the idiocy of making terms with a sociopath bent on world domination.

[quote]It bears repeating that few people today do not understand what a narrow squeak the victory in WWII was. Germany was that close to pulling it off.

True. A lot of people today don't realize how thin of a margin Germany was defeated by. They could've won the war if they hadn't invaded Russia so soon. If the Russian invasion had happened later than it did, there was a very good chance that Germany would've won.

R298, I agree with almost everything you say, but just wanted to add one correction. At the time of Dunkirk, Edward wasn’t in the Bahamas, he was on his way to Portugal, via Spain.

I’d ask those who think he was maligned by history and that he would have been a decent king, to look at his behaviour from the time of Dunkirk until the time of the attack on Pearl Harbour.

At the time of the German invasion of France, Edward was a commissioned officer in the British army. However, he didn’t fight with the troops or make his way to the channel ports for evacuation with the troops. Instead he ran away with his wife and headed to the South of France. Once it became clear that the Germans were going to take over the country, Edward and Wallis didn’t head for Bordeau, where thousands of other Brits were waiting to embark on ships to take them home to the UK. Instead, he and Wallis headed for fascist Spain. His whereabouts remained completely unknown until he sent the government a telegram to announce his arrival in Madrid.

Churchill asked him to head back to the UK at once. Instead, he travelled on to Portugal and stayed there. He refused to head back to the UK unless the Royal Family agreed to meet his demands regarding the treatment of his wife. In other circumstances this may have been understandable, but when your country is in dire peril, it seems a little petty.

In Portugal, Edward and Wallis associated with men who were close to the nazi party. Churchill tried again and again to get Edward to return to the UK and each time he refused. At this point, when the kingdom faced disaster, he demanded that he should be financially compensated if he was liable for higher taxes in Britain than he had been paying in France. It was only when Churchill reminded him that he was a British army officer (and could therefore be court-martialled if he refused an order to return) that Edward began slowly plan to leave his friends in Portugal. By this time however, The government was so furious and suspicious of his behaviour that it was agreed to send him to The Bahamas to keep him out of the way.

While all this was happening, Wallis had worries of her own. She had left some linens and household goods in her homes in France, and she wanted them back. To get these, she (and the duke) contacted the German ambassador (while Britain was being bombed by The Luftwaffe) and asked for his assistance to get their goods from France. The ambassador duly contacted the German foreign minister (Wallis’s old pal von Ribbentrop) and he was only to glad to assist them with this vital issue.

God, r300! What a couple of selfish, shallow assholes.

Yup...no matter how you cut it, they acted horrifically and selfishly. And that's being generous.

If the Duke had been anyone else he would have been accused of desertion in 1940, and his behaviour was no better when he arrived in the Bahamas.

Wallis herself had helpfully announced that France had lost the war because it was “internally diseased” and the duke was equally helpful to the allies when he gave an interview to a US magazine at the end of 1940. At the time when Churchill was under immense pressure, when Coventry was reduced to ashes, Britain was truly alone in Europe, and was trying to get every iota of assistance from the US. At this time, in this interview with Liberty magazine, Edward condemned Lend-Lease, said the US should certainly not give anything to the UK war effort, and that there would be a New Order (i.e. German domination) in Europe.

At the same time as George was being bombed in Buckingham Palace, and Churchill was desperate for every boat, bomb and gun he could get, and the British people were behaving more heroically than at any other time in their history, Edward was announcing to the US that helping the UK was a waste of time.

I’m not even much of a royalist, but my parents lived through the war as children, and I thank God that George was their king instead of a traitor and his vapid wife.

Add to that the American ambassador at that time r303 who said that Britain was finished--none other than Joseph P. Kennedy. I've never read it but his son, JFK, wrote the book Why England Slept in 1940. I wonder how much of it was ghost written by his father. From Wikipedia:

Why England Slept is the published version of a thesis written by John F. Kennedy while in his senior year at Harvard College. Its title is an allusion to Winston Churchill's 1938 book While England Slept, which also examined the buildup of German power. Published in 1940, Kennedy's book examines the failures of the British government to take steps to prevent World War II, and its initial lack of response to Adolf Hitler's threats of war.

^^^did he have a chapter on why the US did nothing until 1942?

This may sound like a small thing, but its worth noting: when the Windsors decided to flee France, his equerry (or whatever his assistant was called) happened to be off on an errand. The Windsors didn't wait for him, though it was a matter of a few hours at most. They simply took the car and left, leaving him to get to safety as best he might.

I don't know r305, I've never actually read the book, just a synopsis of it. There was a strong political movement in the United States prior to Pearl Harbor to stay out of European wars and remain neutral. Charles Lindbergh was part of that. Roosevelt had to subtly overcome that in order to give some kind of aid to Britain, mainly in the form of Lend-Lease. Even the American Communist party at that time urged Americans to stay out of European affairs until Russia was attacked by Germany in June of 1941. The American Communist Party was a little more influential then and garnered more votes during the Great Depression. I'm not even sure they exist today, may be wrong about that.

There are a lot of Americans of German ancestry--during WWI, Germans were portrayed pretty villainously in pro-war propaganda--as a result, many Americans (such as my half-German grandfather) were skeptical about the horror stories coming out of Europe about the Nazis and wary of being pulled into another war in Europe. For my grandfather, at least, discovering that, yes, the Nazis were truly horrific was a brutal shock.

More on Lend Lease from Wikipedia: The Lend-Lease policy, formally titled An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, (Pub.L. 77–11, H.R. 1776, 55 Stat. 31, enacted March 11, 1941)[1] was an American program to defeat Germany, Japan and Italy by distributing food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and August 1945. The aid went to the United Kingdom, China, and later the Soviet Union, Free France, and other Allied nations. It included warships and warplanes, along with other weaponry. The policy was signed into law on March 11, 1941, and ended overnight without prior warning when the war against Japan ended. The aid was free for all countries, although goods in transit when the program ended were charged for. Some transport ships were returned to the US after the war, but practically all the items sent out were used up or worthless in peacetime. In Reverse Lend Lease, the U.S. was given no-cost leases on army and naval bases in Allied territory during the war, as well as local supplies

I want to hear about jewels, gowns and parties.

r310 = OP

OP has been identified as [ troll 5227 ]

R300 - Appreciate the expanded narrative!

R298

Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times during the war. That "hideous body of shit snaggle-toothed old bag cunt" said, "I'm glad we've been bombed, now I can look the East End in the face."

There are many photos of the Queen calmly greeting people amid the rubble mornings after a night with the Blitz, always dressed in soft colours that didn't show the dust, with her trademark pearls and highwayman style hats, ordinary folk talking animatedly to her. Eleanor Roosevelt was a guest during the war years and reported eating "saw dust on gold plate" due to war rationing.

Wallis and Edward were despicable, traitorous, shallow, and self-absorbed to a nearly pathological degree. Whatever the Queen Mother's flaws, and she was hardly without any, her behaviour during the war was something Wallis never had within her to start with.

It's really an extraordinary story, an extraordinary fall of the cards in an extraordinary time.

The Duchess started a canteen in the Bahamas, where she would frequently cook as well as a hospital for black children during the war.

So much bullshit propaganda in these posts.

[quote]It's really an extraordinary story, an extraordinary fall of the cards in an extraordinary time.

It really is an extraordinary story. The war as the backdrop and the drama of the royals. It perfect dramaturgy - good guys rising to the occasion - the bad guys slinking around colluding with the enemy. And the good guys win !! Good stuff !!

r314 - who are you? I think you must be the OP trying to keep the thread going by being "provocative "

Here's the episode of The Crown that deals with the Duke of Windsor. Worth watching.

Yes, R306, when the Windsors fled, they took ALL the cars. Pretty despicable pair.

r318 = troll 5227

Were there any stamps printed or coins minted in 1936 with Edward VIII's portrait on them? If there were I would think they would be somewhat sought after as so few would have been produced in a reign that lasted less than a year.

Yes, many stamps, coins and china. I have a huge collection. As well as their Karsh portrait, and a "jumping" photo by Phillipe Halsman.

Just watched the season one episode of The Crown showing the Duke lying shirtless in bed saying to Wallis, "Let's fuck!" Why do I think that never happened? Either him not wearing pajamas or the two of them actually fucking?

BTW, lots of coronation things were produced. They aren't that rare. I did buy one extraordinary mug from the gift shop that Princess Diana's mother owned.

Coins were designed, but not ever released into circulation. The Royal Mint Museum has some.

r322, I'm sure you've heard the stories about how the Duke of Windsor liked to be spanked and pissed on by his wife. He supposedly got a sexual charge out of that.

"Ohhhhh, Wally, I've been verrrry naughty--what are we going to do about it?!"

American here and I love all the Royal Family DL threads. We have some great posters here who are so well-versed in Royal history and lots of gossipy bits. These threads are always very interesting and educational.

r325 - yeah I've heard it but how would this ever be verified? I just assume it was apocryphal like the Shanghai stuff ..

But he liked to be publicly humiliated and plenty of witnesses for this ...

A lot being made of the callous, selfish, self-absorbed behavior of the Windsors. It's to be expected, and it's how he was raised. Note the following true scenario: The Duke's brother, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was sitting in front of a roaring fire reading when one of the large embers popped out of the fireplace, landing on an expensive (maybe even priceless) rug. He immediately rang for a servant to tend to the matter, instead of lifting a finger in such an emergency. The servant didn't come, so he rang again. Then he began shouting for the servant, and finally the servant showed after several minutes to find that the ember had caused considerable damage to the rug, nearly catching fire. Prince Henry only stated in an extremely frustrated tone "WHERE THE DEVIL HAVE YOU BEEN? I'VE BEEN CALLING FOR YOU FOR FIVE MINUTES - YOU ALMOST LET THE BUILDING BURN DOWN!" Get it? That's just how they were raised.

r328 = troll 5227

Your obsession has become tedious r329.

^You said it! There is a major discrepancy here. The one calling others "troll" is the troll, and he called me a troll AND the OP "troll 5227" but we are not one and the same. Nevertheless, I find this interesting....

R316 - oh, spare us the Duchess cooking in photo ops for black kids in the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, British children were being bombed nightly and her husband was going around saying Britain was beyond help.

You really need to straighten out you skewed perceptions.

The conduct of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in WWII is a matter of public record, not propaganda. And Edward's and Wallis's behaviour and beliefs are also a matter of public record, not propaganda.

It was soldiers in a canteen, not black children. And it wasn't just a photo op. Read up on it yourself.

R333 - Yes, they did a bit of work after the Duchess declared the official residence "uninhabitable". They really had to, didn't they, but they nearly bagged it:

"The question of where the royal couple would live during the renovations created controversy. The Duke favoured an extended visit to his ranch in Alberta but the British government did not favour this solution. Departure for Canada would create the appearance that the royal couple were abandoning the Bahamas within weeks of accepting the post [sic]. The Duke and Duchess ultimately accepted the hospitality of Canadian expatriate industrialist Harry Oakes, who hosted the royal couple at his mansion, Westbourne, in Nassau.

The Duchess of Windsor devoted her energies to the renovation of Government House. She wrote to her Aunt, Bessie Merryman in September, 1940, “[T]ogether we are going to dish this shack up so that at least one isn’t ashamed of asking the local horrors [sic] here. Improvements included modern decor with regency accents, wallpapers imported from New York and a fresh coat of paint, including a room painted the colour of the Duchess’s favourite face powder. [that's the real Wallis Simpson]”

While the Duke of Windsor had good intentions toward the inhabitants of the Out Islands, he displayed poor judgement during the investigation of the murder of Harry Oakes. On July 8, 1943, Oakes was found beaten to death at Westbourne. The Duke of Windsor suspected Oakes’s son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, and called in two detectives from Miami to take over the investigation from the Bahamanian authorities [nothing like using your rank to interfere in the course of justice]. Despite the absence of clear evidence linking de Marigny to the murder of his father-in-law, the Duke of Windsor was convinced of his guilt, describing him as “an unscrupulous adventurer [with] an evil reputation for immoral conduct with young girls.”

These people had no judgement and history's verdict on them, as opposed to the one on King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, is well founded.

You neglect to mention that the place was falling down, and most of the renovations (other than an amount approved by the local government) was paid for out of their own pockets.

Philip de Marigny, son of the aforementioned Alfred, was the roommate of an old friend's husband. PdM was one of the creepiest people I've ever met.

R335 - I should hope so, with the money they got out of the BRF with, importing wallpaper from New York, their "Regency touches" and a room that had to match Her Grace's face powder.

I think Edward and Wallis' anti-semitism was sort of empty--almost casual. He wasn't a Nazi as much as someone who didn't care that there were Nazis and if someone was one. The only people who mattered were the people he cared about. He was loyal to Britain in that being so was part of his identity, but he didn't see why he should be inconvenienced by it if he didn't get to be king.

Just not a lot to either him or Wallis--trivial people being trivial during some most serious and darkest era of the 20th Century. Meanwhile, the future Queen Mother was propping up Bertie and doing an admirable job of keeping calm and carrying on in London and the future Liz II was being way cool by working as an auto mechanic.

R338 - I'm not sure there is such a thing as "empty antisemitism" unless you mean there wasn't much ferocity in it. But I take your point and that's a pretty good summation of things all around.

R334

The money they got out of the BRF? Edward could have been an ass, but he left before anything was agreed upon and was lied to, especially with the HRH for the Duchess, Fort Beleveder being kept for him and so many other things. Big mistake- he should have had everything in writing.

Considering a morganatic married was rejected (of which Queen Mary was a daughter of), funny how it was fine to deprive Wallis of HRH.

I mean that I don't think Edward put a lot of thought into it--he was anti-semitic because anti-semitism was common in his class and time. It was virulent and focused the way Hitler's was. Edward was brought up to believe he was innately superior to most people. Most people didn't matter, certainly not Jews. Edward would have been anti-immigrant and pro-Brexit without question.

Wallis, meanwhile, was originally from the South and probably had her own version of people who mattered and people who didn't. I'm sure she was polite to her inferiors, but she never doubted for a minute that they were inferiors.

Edward had an ongoing battle with the Firm about how much money was his--I remember reading that his net worth was around $10 million, which was a lot of money at the time, but not oodles and oodles. A lot of money that he thought was his belonged to the Crown. Naturally, neither he nor Wallis thought of doing anything productive with their time or money.

There was something truly pathetic about them.

wasn't virulent

R340 - Mary's parents weren't heirs to the throne (she was born a Serene, not even a "Royal" Highness) and the morganatic marriage option was offered as one of the three to the Commonwealth nations - who all rejected it, so don't blame Queen Mary for rejecting it, because if the Commonwealth nations had agreed, she couldn't have done a damn thing about it. There's no comparison between Mary being born of a morganatic marriage in the 19th century and the 1936 King of Great Britain trying to foist one off on a public who hated Walls's guts.

The grim 1930s - WWI barely over in memory, the Great Depression wreaking havoc - fuck, the Jarrow Walk took place in October 1936 while all Edward worried about was Wallis.

What did Chips Channon call them, "the thin-faced thirties"?

Yes, Bertie went back on his promise about the HRH, which Bertie probably made in a solo conversation with his brother, and not in consultation with the Privy Council and the rest of the government, who'd been keeping tabs on Wallis and Edward.

Jesus, he sent high-level state papers back with the ring marks of cocktail glasses on them in the short time he was King.

He was manifestly unfit, and what's more, he didn't even want the job. End of.

Can we ask why you are filled with admiration for this woman who lifted Edward from his current mistress, and smiled at Hitler and insisted on rooms being painted to match her face powder?

R341 - Rather agree. And "pathetic" is true except for all that money and comfort they enjoyed. Still, pathetic is better than how destructive they could have been to the fabric of Britain had Edward gotten his way.

R344, I tend to think Churchill would have held Edward in check during the War, but I'm not sure how well the monarchy would have done afterwards. Wallis would never have been as careful as Camilla has been about not overstepping boundaries.

I guess I think of them as pathetic because they lived such useless lives. They had the money and connections to have done some goods or at least provided some pleasure for others, but they really didn't. The whole thing in the U.S. used to be played as this big love story, but it really was more a story of an insecure, self-centered brat and his vapid gold-digging paramour.

The world was basically handed to Edward on a gold platter and he still didn't manage to do anything. At least Charles is big on organic gardening and the environment.

R345 - I agree with your (very sane) analysis. I'll give Charles that much: his work in Gloucestershire helped bring back some species that were declining due to loss of habitat, and he made a going concern of the Duchy of Cornwall with the organic agriculture and products and land management. And The Prince's Trust helped, as well.

I've said before (God help me) that "patronage" as an optic works much better for women than men, and Charles has done as much as he could to cloak himself in some dignity as he hob-nobs with men who built companies and businesses and who he knows look down on him privately as a soft sap who had it all handed to him and spent his life waving to crowds, painting, and playing polo.

That's what I think will catch up with Harry eventually, who won't have nearly the opportunities that Charles did to Do Something so other men won't sneer at him. I think that's really why Harry wanted out, especially after a military career, however less glorious than presented to the public, and he missed his chance. I think he hopes that marriage and fatherhood will offset that, too.

Too bad with such "strict rations" during the war, that the Queen Mother wasn't able to loose some weight. Seems she gained 5 pounds a year.

R342 - Eleanor Roosevelt's description of food at Buckingham Palace during the war gave a different view,

You can keep stretching - the lower and pettier you get the more pathetic your hatred looks.

Wallis, of course, is famous for saying, "You can't be too rich or too slim."

The Queen Mother, of course, was famous for saying things like, "Work is the rent you pay for the space you occupy on earth" and, when told she should consider sending the children to Canada for safety during the war, "The children won't leave without me, I won't leave without the Kind, and the King will never leave."

But keep trying to paint Wallis as a noble victim of historical revision. It's quite amusing.

^"I won't leave without the KinG" (not Kind) dammit.

Here's a documentary showing the masturbating scene mentioned in r174. Skip ahead to 56:50.

I don’t know R350. Might be garden variety crabs.

^ It should be said he's only mock masturbating in that clip, but it illustrates his un-royal behavior in public.

Bullshit, R352. Have a closer look. He's got a definite chubby, and he reaches into his pocket and goes straight for his dick and begins manipulating it - that's masturbation. He was a cad, and his father was totally justified in despising him. Thanks for finding the clip, R350 - I knew it was somewhere out there.

R174

I agree that he is masturbating. Any man who did the exact same thing in public is not getting away with it today. There's several fraus who are reaching for their phones and calling the police in 3...2...1

She was a dominatrix. He was a masochist.