A Tale Of Two Brides

Two American divorcées marrying into the British royal family: one was met with disdain, the other with adulation. What a difference 80 years makes.

- Andrew Morton

WHEN Meghan Markle walks down the aisle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle on 19 May, listen carefully for a low humming below the singing of the choir.

It will be the sound of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who are buried at Frogmore within the castle grounds, furiously spinning in their graves.

While the duchess was the last American to marry into the royal family, her fate was the polar opposite to that of the charismatic Ms Markle.

Their lives stand as vivid testimony to the changes in British society – and the House of Windsor – over the past two royal reigns. 

The issue that binds and divides them is that of divorce. How differently they were treated – former actress Meghan, who divorced her film producer husband, Trevor Engelson, after less than two years of marriage, has been warmly welcomed into the royal bosom.

She was invited to spend Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham even though she isn’t yet officially part of it, and she walked arm-in-arm with fiancé Harry, chatting with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they left St Mary Magdalene Church after the Christmas Day service – her place firmly ahead of Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.

By contrast, when King Edward VIII decided he couldn’t reign without, as he said in his famous abdication broadcast, “the help and support of the woman I love”, he and his future wife, Wallis Simpson, were effectively exiled from the realm.

For the rest of their lives they were condemned to roam the earth without purpose or plan – at various times living in Paris, New York, the Bahamas and the south of France – the British government turning a deaf ear to the duke’s pleadings to be given a worthwhile job.