Royal Family News
Wallis Simpson’s lesson for Meghan Markle: Don’t attack the Palace
Meghan should have drawn cues from Wallis Simpson, according to royal author Anna Pasternak, who has written extensively about the American.
Mrs Simpson, the American divorcee who fell in love with the Duke of Windsor, is reported to have offered a “tactful and “self-deprecating” interview.
The tell-all interview was provided by the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor in March 1970, more than 30 years after the royal's disastrous abdication.
Ms. Pasternak wrote in a Daily Telegraph column that the 1970 interview with BBC journalist Kenneth Harris “seemed equally electrifying and scurrilous at the time, making headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.”
While the author drew similarities between the two women's tales, the commentator pointed out that Meghan and Wallis' approaches and situations were dramatically distinct.
For instance, she points out that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were banished to France, while Meghan and Harry decided to abandon the Royal Family and migrate to the United States.
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Second, Ms Pasternak reported that in her interview, Wallis appeared eager to “build bridges,” while Meghan “appears to want to up the ante against her in-laws.”
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You would have thought that Wallis might take the chance to settle scores against her frosty in-laws when the Windors talked to Kenneth Harris from the silvery grey drawing room of their Parisian house, considering the plethora of falsehoods that the Royal family had levied against the Duchess for the previous 34 years.
Or that the Duke would eventually be able to vent his long-held grudges against his kin.
The Windsors were unstintgly generous in their replies and did not attack the Royal Family once.
There was no hint of resentment but a sanguine recognition of what must have seemed her own unsurvivable moments, when, during the abdication crisis, she became the world's most despised woman.
Watching this poignant interview now, through the lens of the Sussexes' explosive bid, which even Oprah calls ‘shocking,' the Windsors does not seem sweeter, nor their stance more quaint.
The saddest part is that, through their exile, Wallis and Edward remained dutiful and patriotic to the end.
How Much Money Did King Edward VIII Get After His Abdication?
George VI had hoped that the ex-debts King's would be covered by the government. Stanley Baldwin and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the other hand, did not want to enrage the Labour Party by funding the ex-King. As a result, the whole burden of duty fell on the shoulders of the new monarch. He reluctantly agreed, despite the fact that he would still have to buy out his brother's share of the Balmoral and Sandringham lands, which were Edward's own property rather than the Sovereign's. The estate was valued at £289,853 with much deliberation. The money was put into War Bonds. The Duke earned a tax-free salary of £10,144 per year. The King added £11,000 to the sum that would stop when he died.
Edward married Wallis and remained in exile, mostly in Paris, after abdicating the throne. They went on a blatant journey to Germany, where they were Adolph Hitler's guests. They were sent to the Bahamas during WWII, where the Duke served as governor-general. The pair then relocated to Paris, where the French government sold them a three-story villa along the Bois de Bolougne, later known as Villa Windsor, for a pittance. The pair also bought Le Moulin de Tuileries, a weekend resort about 30 minutes outside of Paris. The Duke of Edinburgh begged her niece, Queen Elizabeth II, to continue paying the rent on his life in Balmoral and Sandringham to Wallis Simpson a few years before his death. Following the Duke's passing, the Queen agreed to grant her a £5,000 annual “voluntary pension.” In 1972, he passed away.
The Duchess was a rich lady in her own right. Her liquid assets were worth about £3 million, and she had millions more in her fabulous jewelry collection, artworks, furniture, and objects. In reality, when her jewels and Duke-owned pieces were auctioned off in 1987, Sotheby's fetched more than $50 million.
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