By JANE RIDLEY [Literary Review] – Husband number two, Ernest Simpson, was an Anglo-American businessman. The couple lived in a flat in Bryanston Court, and she socialised with the American colony in London. Simpson’s sister was a friend of the American Thelma Furness, then mistress of the Prince of Wales, which was how the meeting that changed Wallis’s life was arranged. Few could explain the attraction Wallis exerted on the Prince. She had a raucous voice and an overlarge chin, and she was uneducated, with no interest in music or art.

It is well attested that Wallis tried to stop Edward from abdicating. She wasn’t in love with him, didn’t want to be queen and was horrified when she realised how much he was giving up. Although she allowed herself to be persuaded to divorce Simpson, she apparently failed to see what was coming. Vickers argues that Edward alone brought about the abdication, and there was no Establishment plot to get rid of him. Marriage condemned Wallis to a lifetime dedicated to entertaining the spoiled and childlike Duke. By all accounts he remained devoted to her. She dominated him, and she was fortunate that an empty life of socialising, fashion and jet-setting suited her far more than it did him. It was the Duke, not Wallis, who cared that she wasn’t styled HRH – this meant that women were not expected to curtsey to her – and who nursed her in-laws’ petty slights.

The Queen allegedly once remarked: ‘The two people who have caused me most trouble in my life are Wallis Simpson and Hitler.’ Hugo Vickers’s compelling account makes one feel that Wallis did the Queen a favour. She made a success of a marriage she had never really wanted, and kept the restless Duke of Windsor safely anchored for thirty-five years.

Continued at the Literary Review |

…and the House of Windsor’s other missing prince.

Eddy? Left. George. Right.

By STEVE DONOGHUE [Open Letters] – The British monarchy in the 20th century has two almost-kings in its history, two men who didn’t take their appointed turns to rule what we now know as the House of Windsor…Edward the Duke of Windsor…[and] his uncle, Prince Albert Victor, who was the eldest son of King Edward VII and would have succeeded him in 1910.

Albert Victor – known to his family, the press, and the nation as “Prince Eddy” – was born in 1864, the eldest son of the heir to Victoria, Edward the Prince of Wales. He and his brother Prince George became inseparable as boys and were educated together by Canon Hugh Dalton, a handsome 31-year-old curate chosen by the Queen herself. Dalton provided both Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales with daily progress reports, repeatedly noting the differences in their temperaments. Prince George could be a handful, sly, arrogant, and vicious, whereas Prince Eddy was sweet and docile – and very much attached to his one year-younger brother. Dalton claimed they complemented each other: Eddy moderated George’s sharper tendencies, and George motivated Eddy to pay attention and apply himself. Their tutor reported that “the mutual influence of their characters on one another (totally different as they are in many ways) is very beneficial. Difficult as the education of Prince Albert Victor is now, it would be doubly or trebly so if Prince George were to leave him.”

That separation was avoided by sending the two boys to the training ship HMS Britannia, moored at Dartmouth.

Continued at Open Letters Monthly | More Chronicle & Notices.