Good fashion sense?
She was a stick figure who said that one could never be too rich or too thin. Hardly the sort of anorexic look I want for my girls. At least her sister-in-law the Queen Mother looked like a real woman.
I don’t think the ties to Nazism were that strong. The impression I have was that Nazi was the new shiny thing in Europe and he was attracted to it. Edward was probably mildly anti-semitic, as a lot of people were, and was impressed by some the ideals Hitler espoused (as many, fascists and others, were and are). But I think once Hitler became Enemy No. 1 he would have put away his admiration. His former connections would have been embarrassing, as opposed to dangerous.
Quite so. There were a fair number of admirers of the Nazis in both Houses of Parliament and in the press, but ended up declaring ‘my country, right or wrong’ and fought with patriotism as bravely as the next man’s.
And I have to mention a bugbear of mine. Many of those who during the 1930’s continually voted against greater defence spending went on to become (often self proclaimed) anti Nazi during the war.
Elizabeth has been an incredible PR boon to the royal family - and to England. She keeps up a busy calendar into her 80s - and its always been busy enough that the rest of the royal family pitches in to dedicate gardens, sit on charitable boards. She has held the Commonwealth together - if you believe that there is any importance to the Commonwealth. Can you imagine Wallis and Edward managing to do the same? Both of them were far to selfish to be a modern British monarch - whose role is to look good and wave. They have to bring in more in good will and tourist dollars than the nation subsidized them for - and the nation already feels rather put upon to subsidize them at all - how long would they have lasted with the extravagant selfishness of Queen Wallace. And since Wallace and Edward didn’t have children, it would have created a nice easy place to break the monarchy.
It’s okay to change your mind based on new evidence, and hindsight has perfect vision.
It is difficult for us today to imagine the impact the First World War had on people’s thinking and how fervently most people wanted to avoid a repeat. It was an event unlike any in the living memories of any human, a bloodbath on a scale nobody in 1913 even thought possible, a tragedy that was as real and raw to them as you can possibly imagine. To many, the overriding priority for international relations was simply NOT have another Great War.
Imagine if, tomorrow, we were to have a fairly nasty international nuclear war involving every nuclear power on the planet. A limited exchange, not enough to kill everyone, but… let’s imagine Washington and a few other cities gone, Moscow gone, Beijing gone, Paris hit by a small bomb so partially gone, India and Pakistan wipe each other out and Israel nukes Cairo and North Korea gets levelled. Every major battle fleet on the high seas is wiped out. A billion people are dead. Afterwards everyone makes a hasty peace. 15 years from now ho much stomach would YOU have for another war? Don’t you think a lot of people would say “I don’t want war for any reason, to hell with that, it’s insane”? That’s how people in the 30s felt.
Hell yes. People like Leslie Hoare-Belisha, John Wardlaw-Milne and (otherwise likeable) Mannie Shinwell stopped rearmament before the war and then spent the war complaining about how rubbish the army was!
I can quite understand their point of view. That WWI fundamentally changed perceptions of a generation of people. However, hindsight shows us that not spending on defence was a wrong policy in the 1930’s. Not just slightly wrong, but very, very wrong.
Perhaps its my right wing political side coming through. It is fairly widely known narrative that Conservatives often underestimated the threat from Hitler during the 1930’s. The best known writers on this subject probably being John F Kennedy and Michael Foot. The lesser known narrative is the one that states those on all sides were culpable - the far Left, the far Right, the centre Left and the centre Right. That standing up to Hitlers aggression required more than strong words and obsolete weaponry. That if a pissing contest was held in order to apportion “guilt” then very few would remain unsoaked.
Thank you for giving me these names. I’ll look into them in some more detail soon.
Sure, and in hindsight I wish I’d bet everything I owned on Buster Douglas to beat Mike Tyson. Seems obvious now why Douglas beat him. Of course, at the time Douglas was a 40-to-1 underdog. Hindsight’s very easy.
The truth is that almost everyone underestimated the threat Hitler posed, and it’s quite understandable they did so because Hitler and the Nazi movement was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. One can hardly be blamed to not anticipating things they had no prior experience with.
That’s a fair assessment for 1933 - late 1938, but after that point foot-dragging is less forgivable, and foot-dragging there was in spades.
Except this does not explain those who did forsee the threat. When you say people cannot be blamed for things they had no prior experience with you forget WWI. The lessons of WWI need not have been only lessons of “peace”. They could just have easily been interpreted as a lesson in the need for maintaining a strong defence. It’s not as if external threats, or specifically German threats were unheard of. German expansionism was an ongoing process, not something dreamt up in 1930’s Nazi Germany. While the specific war at that specific time may not have been forseeable, a threat was on the horizon. Too many chose to ignore it: some for noble reasons, some for money grabbing political reasons, some for both.
Oh, Wallace Simpson may not have been attractive, but those Mainbocher creations were indeed beautiful.
In the end, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the Queen Mum was probably a much, much better face for the monarchy than Simpson would ever have been.
Pretty much, although unlike Simpson, Peter Townsend would’ve been a perfect candidate for marriage, if he hadn’t been divorced. Also, unlike her uncle’s situation, her family was sympathetic. But the fact is, she still would’ve had to give her royal status, and the Church of England would probably have excommunicated her. Margaret, unlike her uncle, wasn’t an idiot.
Her eventual marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones ended up being a disaster. (For one thing, he was gay)
They didn’t just go “shopping for a King”.
William was co-ruler though with James II’s daughter, Mary II. And he never had a line – after Mary died, William ruled alone, then his successor was Mary’s younger sister, Anne. None of her children survived, so the crown went to the next in line, the Hanovers. The Hanovers weren’t just picked at random by Parliament – they were the next in line for the throne. James II and his line was excluded because he converted to Catholicism, and the new laws forbade any Catholics from assuming the throne.
As for Victoria’s descendents marrying into the families for Russia and Germany, they spread out a hell of a lot more than that – Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Greece, you name it. You can’t swing a dead cat in Europe without hitting someone in line for the British throne. Back then, royalty could only marry royalty, and Germany had more royals than anybody.
What do you mean, “was”? He’s still with us.
And, rather than being gay, he’s bisexual. He’s been twice married, has had children with three different women, and has had numerous long-term and short term affairs. Most have been with women.
Not quite. The Hanovers weren’t next in line. The Act of Settlement provided that, on the death of Mary without issue, the throne woud pass to Anne, and on the death of Anne without issue, it would pass to Sophia, Electress of Hanover. She was Anne’s first cousin once removed (James VI and I was Sophia’s maternal grandfather, and Anne’s paternal great-grandfather) and definitely not her heir under either English or Scottish law. Numerous other people had a stronger claim to inheritance than she did, not just the descendants of James VII and II, but also a large class of descendants of James VI and I. Nothing was done to alter inheritance law in Sophia’s favour; the Act simply provided that Sophia would be the next monarch, not by inheritance but simply by virtue of her designation by Parliament.
The Act went on to provide that, thereafter, the throne would pass to Sophia’s descendants, as long as they were Protestant. No such stipulation was applied to Sophia herself (although she was in fact a Protestant and presumably would not have been named in the Act if she had not been).
And it’s not true that the Act excluded the descendants of James II. Anne, who came to the throne six years after the Act was herself a daughter of James II.
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Not quite. The 1689 Bill of Rights had already altered the succession by barring any Catholic or spouse of a Catholic. The 1701 Act of Succession simply confirmed that and it did so by reciting the relevant section of the 1689 Bill. All those Catholics barred by the 1701 Act had already been barred. The implications of this had been grasped in 1689 - William III had then written to Sophia to warn her that there was a good chance that she or her sons might end up inheriting the British thrones. The purpose of the Act of Settlement was therefore not to make Sophia the next-in-line if neither William nor Anne produced children but rather to remove any uncertainty on the point. Everyone was aware that with Sophia’s claim depending on the exclusion of so many Catholics, some of whom were minors and some of whom were the subject of enemy powers, there was plenty of scope to quibble over whether all of them had in fact been excluded. Much easier just to declare that Sophia was the next Protestant heir under the terms of the 1689 Bill of Rights.
Moreover, as the requirement that the monarch should be Protestant was not new in 1701, it applied to Sophia as much as to anyone else. The Act of Settlement explicitly confirmed that it applied to anyone claiming the throne on the basis of that Act. Had Sophia gone on to convert or to marry a Catholic after 1701, she too would have been barred from the succession by the Bill of Rights.
Also, strictly speaking, neither the Bill of Rights nor the Act of Settlement ‘provided that, on the death of Mary without issue, the throne woud pass to Anne, and on the death of Anne without issue, it would pass to Sophia, Electress of Hanover.’ The crucial concession to Anne in 1689 which persuaded her to accept the Bill of Rights was that she and her heirs were to succeed to the throne before any heirs that William might have by a wife other than Mary. In 1701 there was still the theoretical possibly that William might remarry and have children. The Act of Settlement confirmed that bit of the Bill of Rights, so those children would have come in the line of succession after Anne but before Sophia. The question as to what issue Mary might have was irrelevant as she was already dead.
Finally, Anne came to the throne less than a year, not six years, after the Act of Settlement had been passed.
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OK, ignorance fought, thanks.
Having checked, I see that the 1689 legislation provided for the crown to devolve (1) to Mary’s heirs of the body, and in default (2) to Anne’s heirs of the body, and in default (3) to Williams heirs of the body. But it said nothing about what would happen in default of heirs of the body to all three of them which, by 1701 was looking distinctly possible.
Presumably, if Parliament had made no other provision, on the death of Anne the crown would have passed to the senior Protestant descendant of James II. As it happens, James II had no Protestant descendants other than Mary and Anne, but he had several Catholic descendants, and any of them could have mounted at least a plausible claim to the thone by the expedient of renouncing Catholicism and embracing Protestantism at any point before Anne died. There would have been a dispute over whether the effect of the 1689 legislation excluded anyone who had ever been Catholic, or just anyone who was Catholic at the moment when the throne would devolve to them. But even if a convert to Protestantism was excluded, a child of that convert, raised in Protestantism, would not be. Sophia could only be sure of succeeding if nobody senior to her became Protestant, or raised a Protestant child.
The practical effect of the Act of Settlement was to close off this possibility. Regardless of what the more senior descendants of James II might say, believe or do, on the failure of the issue of Mary, Anne and William the throne would pass to Sophia, and descend to her issue exclusively.
Also some obscure politician called Winston something who occupied an offiice called Chancellor of Excess or something. Slashed defence spending to the bone.
Wonder what became of him?
Anne is such a sad case. She had SEVENTEEN pregnancies. Five live births. And only one child survived past toddlerhood to die young (eleven if I remember).
There were about 50 people in line ahead of Sophia, but they were Catholic or married to Catholic spouses. By the way, Princess Alexandra, Lady Oglivy - the Queen’s cousin, is currently #47 - you don’t go too far out to get to 50 generally.
This wasn’t the first - or really the last - time the British succession has been a pain in the ass. Henry’s wives had lots of pregnancies, only three children lived and of those three, Edward VI only lived to be 15. Mary was Catholic and had been barred from succession and Elizabeth declared a bastard and barred. Hence Jane Grey. But Mary had an army and when she died without children, little choice but to legitimize Elizabeth.
Then you have the race for the heir that the sons of George III. His sons had enough illegitimate children to fill a schoolbus - but only one legitimate child between them - Charlotte. - who died in childbirth. This meant George now very middle aged sons needed to get an heir - Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, came through with what would be Queen Victoria.
George III had fifteen living children - and one legitimate grandchild to inherit.
In case you are wondering, Princess Alexandra is the Grandaughter of King George V, also Elizabeth II’s Grand father. She was also at one time a Royal who did major duties.
As for Sophia, she was also a grand daughter of King James VI/I.