'This creepy woman': are Megan Markle and Wallis Simpson really alike
'26.02.2020'
Source: Air force
Popular among the people, a playful, provocative prince falls in love with a strong-willed divorced American who the British press begins to trample in the mud. In the history of Harry and Megan, some royal observers see echoes of the novel of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, because of which eighty years ago the monarch abdicated and a constitutional crisis arose in the country, writes Air force.
But are these stories really similar? Maybe yes. In the event that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have to repeat the life in exile, which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had to lead in the end, this is the title that Edward and Wallis received after the abdication.
In December 1936, the king gave the throne and the whole empire with a population of half a billion people, in addition to being with the woman who was at the time divorcing her second husband.
The stream of anger splashed out on the bride-to-be is somewhat reminiscent of the one that fell on Megan, the new American addition to the British royal family.
They didn’t call Wallis as an upstart from the Baltimore suburbs, and a cheap swindler, and a lesbian, a nympho, a Nazi spy, and even a hermaphrodite.
Bricks in the window
She was portrayed as a woman wise in sexual pleasures, who supposedly mastered the once ancient Chinese erotic techniques in the brothels of Shanghai, where her first husband, a former pilot of the US Air Force, was stationed with his platoon.
But the attacks on Wallis were not limited to media publications.
As the owner of the Daily Express later admitted, Lord Beaverbrook, his newspaper reporters threw bricks at the windows of Wallis's rental housing in London's Regent's Park.
As the crisis with the abdication expands, Simpson fled to France, to Cannes, where journalists followed her.
She tried to avoid the attention of this “gluttonous besieging army,” as she called them, sometimes leaving them at home through the bathroom window and driving away.
Anna Sebba, author of The Same Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, believes that the consequences of Harry and Meghan's decision to relinquish royal duties are not even close to the cataclysm that happened to Wallis, given that she was accused of being nearly destroyed the British empire.
“We are not living in 1936, when people were afraid of divorced women. Then it was thought that society would be strange if everyone divorced, - said Sebba in an interview with the BBC. "But the big difference is that Edward was king and Harry was sixth in line to the throne, which means he will never be king."
On the subject: Furious Meghan Markle is ready to sue the queen for the brand Sussex Royal
Wallis Simpson and Hitler
Wallis Simpson received bags of letters with threats and insults, many of which were frankly misogynistic.
She wrote in her memoirs: "There were very few expletives about my gender in my daily morning mail."
But the most offensive attacks sounded just from the lips of women.
According to Hugo Vickers' biography, “Behind Closed Doors. The Tragic Untold Story of Wallis Simpson,” Queen Elizabeth II once said, “Two people have caused me the biggest trouble in my life. : Wallis Simpson and Hitler. "
Continuing this theme, Wallis's childhood friend, Mary Kirk, who married Wallis's second husband Ernst Simpson, who was left as a fool, once wrote in her diary about her longtime friend: “I think of her the way people think of Hitler - how about evil power ... full of animal cunning. "
Princess Margaret called her uncle's beloved woman only “this creepy woman”.
"Fallen Angel"
To this day, many hold the view that Edward was a mattress manipulated by an ambitious, demanding mistress - and the same is said about Harry.
However, Edward found royal duties terribly boring from the start - even before Wallis had earned her reputation as the "woman who stole the king."
Like Megan and Harry, Edward dreamed of driving away to Canada and settling there.
His personal secretary, Alan Lassel (known by his household name “Tommy”), said that back in 1927, after a long conversation with Edward, when he was a prince, he realized that “such words as decency, honesty, duty, dignity, etc. P. mean absolutely nothing to him. " He concluded that Edward was a fallen angel.
As Megan and Harry arrange their new lives, it can be assumed that they are unlikely to want to live in an aimless existence, as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor did.
A completely different case
Apart from the short period during World War II, when Edward was governor in the Bahamas, neither he nor his wife ever worked in their lives.
According to Olivett Hotel, Britain's first black professor of history, while Megan had a successful career as an actress, was a human rights activist, and a blogger, Wallis never had a job in her life.
“One was a socialite, and the other was an independent, successful woman who lived on her own money,” says the professor. According to her, “both disguised and overt racist attacks” against the Duchess of Sussex, who is a mulatto, is another reason why it is completely ridiculous to draw parallels between the two women.
Edward and Wallis arranged a sort of exile royal court, spending time surrounded by heraldic trinkets and wealthy friends through whom they fed.
Like Megan and Harry, Edward and Wallis made friendships with Hollywood celebrities and hosted screen stars such as Richard Burton and Marlene Dietrich in France.
Edward did little besides playing golf. He did not regret leaving the throne, on which he stayed for only 11 months, although all his stories often began with the words: "When I was king ..."
Who did Wallis love?
For his abdication, he scolded everyone except himself - from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to the Queen Mother, the wife of his younger brother and the mother of Queen Elizabeth II. “For twenty years I worked for my country, and they gave me a bum,” Edward once said to his friend with bitter irony.
But perhaps the greatest irony of this twentieth-century “fairytale love” is what most biographers agree on: that Edward left the crown for a woman who didn't really love him.
During their long evenings together, whiskey was served after supper, and since “they had nothing to say to each other, the contents of the decanter gradually went away, went away, went away ...” their personal secretary John Utter recalled.
According to the book Wallis in Love by British journalist Andrew Morton, Wallis's heart belonged to her American friend Herman Rogers, a wealthy Yale graduate.
Wallis allegedly herself admitted this to Rogers' second wife on the eve of their marriage ceremony in 1950.
The Windsor was very worried about their fading glory.
Charles Peak, publisher of the Duchess's 1956 memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, said that when he first met Wallis to discuss the book, she even got up from her sun lounger to complain that she was ousted from the first pages by Marilyn Monroe.
In 1966, the Duke and Duchess of Vinzdorsky recovered to Vienna by train, grumbling that the paparazzi would be waiting for them upon arrival. Their assistant noted that they could not restrain their disappointment when none of the reporters materialized on the platform.
As Meghan and Harry get used to their semi-exile, they should keep in mind the parting words given by Shakespeare. In the play "Henry IV" the king blames his son, Prince Harry, for shirking his duties, and for becoming close to those who are not worthy of his royal friendship: "Because of rudeness, you have lost your place / In our Council, where replaced you / Your younger brother; you have lost love / All courtiers and princes of our blood ”(translated by E. Birukova).
