The Duke of Windsor died in May 1972 — just over 50 years ago — after almost forty years spent in exile from the Royal Family. It’s an exile that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex need to possibly find out about — due to the fact the parallels between the marital lives of the two couples is uncanny.
The future Edward Vlll used to be a good-looking, popular, charismatic younger man who made no secret of his desire to modernize the monarchy. But his want to marry Wallis Simpson — like Meghan Markle, a divorced American — price him his throne and led to him being reduce off from friends and family, as I write about in my new book, “Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor” (Pegasus Books).
In 1936, he withdrew from Royal responsibilities to live overseas — but he never quite reconciled himself to his loss of status, and the ensuing years had been to be marked through a sequence of disputes with his family.



The first was once over security, which Buckingham Palace felt the Duke of Windsor pay for himself. Despite the squabbling, he eventually loved police protection till his loss of life — a privilege solely accorded to the Sussexes when in Britain.
The second used to be over finances. Like Prince Harry, the Duke of Windsor had inherited sizable wealth — as properly as savings made from the Duchy of Cornwall Estates — but it did not quit him complaining, like Harry, that he had been cut off financially.
Both troubles contributed to a breakdown of trust and lingering tensions and suspicions with both the Duke and Harry complaining of poor parenting, fallouts between siblings and sisters-in-law — King George Vl’s spouse Elizabeth may want to solely refer to Wallis as “That Woman” — and accusations that the “rogue royal” was trying to upstage the dutiful one.



In Windsor’s case, this involved a sequence of embarrassing speeches or visits, which includes one to Nazi Germany in 1937. With the Sussexes and Cambridges, William and Kate, this competitiveness has been displayed in social media announcements.
It was once felt that the ambitious, wise and manipulative Wallis was once shaping the views of her weak, dull and susceptible husband, a similar accusation now being made with regard to Harry’s newly adopted woke views.
Windsor persevered till his loss of life in 1972 to whinge that Wallis had wrongly been denied the title of HRH — it was generally because it used to be felt that the marriage would no longer closing — which is paralleled by means of the worries raised in interviews with the aid of the Sussexes that their teens would now not have titles.



Both couples used the media to boost their instances with interviews which had been no longer continually “helpful” — the Sussexes with Oprah Winfrey, and the Windsors, quite with Kenneth Harris and a sequence of articles through Wallis in McCall’s Magazine, a mix of pointers on exciting interspersed with remarks about the royal family.
In June 1960 the Duke was once two persuaded by an adviser now not to signal a contract for a TV series in which the Duke would re-enact the abdication speech. Shortly afterwards he did just that in a documentary which supposedly netted him the equal of $3 million now. One wonders what Harry and Meghan might also nonetheless have in keep as part of their suggested $25 million Netflix deal.





Both couples have tried to form the media narrative, either thru cooperation with tame biographers or suing the press — the Windsors each produced beneficial memoirs at the same time as the Sussexes cooperated with biographer Omid Scobie, and Harry has a e book out later this year.
Just as the Sussexes have taken prison action in opposition to a number newspapers, the Windsors have additionally sued the Press, most incredibly the creator Geoffrey Dennis for suggesting they had slept together earlier than marriage. It used to be true, but the Duke still received his case.





Then there are the allegations about Meghan’s treatment of staff. The Windsors have been also stated to have dealt with their body of workers in an entitled and unforgiving manner. Their ghost writer, Charles Murphy, remembered: “A dropped plate, a careless intrusion, a slip in attentiveness could be counted upon to carry a swift dressing down, observed often by peremptory sacking.”

Tags: Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince Louis, Prince William and Kate Middleton, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Meghan, Lilibet


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