The Irish Free State, at least officially, couldn’t give a stuff about the marriage, beyond welcoming it as affording an opportunity, when they legislated to give effect to the abdication, to make a few other changes to diminish the role of the British crown in the Irish constitution.
Northern Ireland had its own parliament and executive within the UK, but matters relating to the crown were outside its competence. The marriage probably would not have been popular in NI, but the NI Prime Minister of the time, James Craig, was not consulted about the abdication, and the NI Parliament didn’t need to take any action to give effect to it. So, officially, Northern Ireland took no position at all on the matter.
Very true, all of this. It was barely a generation earlier that Alice Liddell, she of Alice in Wonderland fame, had grown into a beautiful young woman and was courted by Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, the youngest son of Queen Victoria. She could have married into royalty but Queen Vic would have none of it because … well, because she was a mere commoner. Rejected by royalty, she ended up marrying a failed businessman and living an unhappy life descending into eventual poverty.
Stupid or not – and he probably was – the salient feature of Edward is that he just didn’t want to be king. As Prince of Wales he would constantly lament the terrible business of “doing prince things” which he vehemently detested. He also enthusiastically met with top Nazi officials and even once with Hitler himself. To be sure, at the time Hitler and the Nazis were regarded as fervent German patriots and not as the monsters they turned out to be, but this wasn’t exactly weighing in his favor.
It was all a complicated mess but his decision to abdicate was a merciful way of putting an end to it all, and good riddance.
Well, I think the “Prince Leopold wanted to marry her” thing is a bit speculative. He knew her, but there isn’t much evidence that he wanted to marry her and, if anything, he was a closer to her sister Edith. But, yes, Queen Victoria did insist on her children marrying only into royalty.
But things were quite different by the 1930s. Only one of David’s brothers and sisters married royalty, and several married commoners. Mary had married the heir to the Earl of Harewood in 1922. Bertie (who became George VI) had married a commoner (Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons) back in 1923. (Yes, her father was an Earl, but she herself was a commoner.) Henry married a daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, also a commoner, in 1935. Only George (who became Duke of Kent) married royalty; Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark.
So the problem with Wallis Simpson was not really that she was a commoner. That could have been dealt with, probably. The problems were (a) that she had been twice divorced, and (b) that she was as unsuited to being Queen as David was to being King. And, of the two, the divorce was much the bigger problem.
nitpick: Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise married non-royally, to a British nobleman, the Duke of Argyll. Queen Victoria approved of and seems to have encouraged the match.
Not really such a problem, I think. It was common for British royalty to marry foreigners. (Indeed, they had to, if they wanted to marry royalty.) And while none of them had previously married Americans, quite a number of senior aristocrats had done so. Americans were certainly not beyond the pale, socially.
Yet both of those marriages were made in other countries. (Queen Mary’s great-grandfather was King of Wurttemberg). And in both of those cases, the people were NOT divorced.
Remember that Edward would’ve been the head of the Church of England, which frowned on divorce. So it wouldn’t have been a good idea to have the King married to someone who had been divorced once, let alone twice.
And as stated, Edward was a selfish moron who cared more about being a playboy than he did about being a king. And he was a freaking Nazi sympathizer.
Yes, Reginald Hargreaves, who did indeed inherit money and a magnificent estate called Cuffnells featuring the finest great house in the area with twelve bedrooms and massive rooms for entertainment. But he was bad at managing money and constantly had to sell off pieces of the estate; two of their three sons died in the first world war, and by all accounts Alice had an unhappy life. After Reginald died, things got still worse financially, and when Alice herself died, the great house was in such disrepair that it was torn down. In perhaps the most poignant finale to the whole thing, nothing was ever built in its place. The vaunted estate where Alice once lived most of her adult life has now returned to natural woodland, as if she had never been.
British royals marry foreign royalty in that era. They marry British commoners, but only those with noble backgrounds (i.e. the daughter of a peer).
Wallis was not foreign royalty. Nor did she have a noble background.
British peers married American heiresses, but British peers are most definitely not royalty. Wallis was not an American heiress by any means.
By no measure was she an appropriate consort for the king. Mistress, sure. I don’t know if Harry would be successful marrying a twice divorced American with no family connections without facing a huge backlash - its possible it would be years before his wife was received in an official capacity. Charles and Camillas marriage only happened after years - and when Camilla was well into menopause - and she is British, from a very good family (her maternal grandfather is a peer, her father a very well respected military man)
Alice had been dead for nearly twenty years before the house was demolished (she died in 1934; it lasted into the early 1950s). In fact, her son operated it as a hotel in the later 1930s and it was requisitioned for military housing during the war. Caryl Hargreaves sold it in 1948, and the new owner, Peter Barker-Mill, also bought the adjoining estate, where he likewise pulled down that house and turned the whole thing into dairy farms.
Considering that Henry VII’s claim to the throne was based in part on his descent from John of Gaunt’s mistress, and that all subsequent English / British monarchs, including Her Majesty, trace their bloodline to Henry, that’s perhaps not so strong an argument.
And they all trace their ancestry to William the Bastard – Duke of Normandy, and King William I of England by conquest – whose parents were not married.
