The Duchess Of Windsor Read Free Page A

significant, she was the victim of a subtle yet persistent campaign to marginalize her role in public life.
    Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, had suffered years of deliberate humiliation at the hands of the British Royal Family and the court. Her position as a twice-divorced American commoner made her anathema to many, and she was widely blamed for Edward VIII’s abdication. The abdication was nothing if not a moral crisis—a battle waged between the new King’s modern approach to life and the traditional attitudes of the aristocracy. That the stigma of Wallis’s divorce made her unsuitable as a queen consort in 1936 is without question; that in exile, married to the Duke of Windsor for thirty-five years, she warranted the continued punishment is open to debate. For the very presence of Diana, Princess of Wales, in the Windsor villa that Saturday afternoon proved nothing if not how much values and circumstances had changed in the family of Queen Elizabeth II.
    The first cracks in Elizabeth II’s reign came in 1967, when her cousin the Earl of Harewood left his wife to live openly with his mistress, whom he later married. His brother also later divorced his wife. The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, following a very public renunciation of her divorced paramour in the 1950s, found her marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, crumbling amid intense media scrutiny. Their marriage was dissolved in 1978.
    The painful collapse of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, played out in front pages of newspapers around the world and on television programs, where both partners confessed their affairs, was surely as much a crisis as the abdication, if in a different way. Whereas the abdication had pitted Edward VIII against his government, the disintegration of the Waleses’ marriage seemed destined to tear at the loyalties of those faithful to Elizabeth II and tradition and those who championed the Princess of Wales, arguably the most popular woman of the twentieth century.
    Divorce also reared its head in the marriages of Elizabeth II’s other children: in 1992, the same year in which the Waleses’ marriage ended, the Duke and Duchess of York separated; and Princess Anne, the Princess Royal, not only divorced her husband, Capt. Mark Phillips, but remarried in a quiet ceremony in Scotland. This last occasion aptly demonstrated how much the monarchy had changed since the days of the abdication crisis. Not only did Anne marry a man with whom stolen and published letters indicated she had had an affair while still wed to her first husband, but the union was celebrated in the presence of both the Queen and the Queen Mother, the two women who had, for the last forty years, steadfastly refused to accept the Duchess of Windsor. The mounting criticism of the Royal Family, the behavior of its members, the shouts of “Ernest Simpson!” which greeted Andrew Parker-Bowles, husband of Prince Charles’s mistress, when he appeared at the Turf Club, all built into pressures that seemed as threatening to the continued survival of the monarchy as the relationship between Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII nearly sixty years earlier. 1
    Sarah Ferguson, the estranged Duchess of York, for one, was left pondering her future in a family whose rejection and indifference she had come to know well. Like her sister-in-law, the Duchess of York felt trapped by the machinations of court officials, those same forces whom the Duchess of Windsor had long ago blamed for much of the abdication crisis. “I thought quite a bit about the most famous female outcast of them all,” wrote the Duchess of York of the winter of 1991, “the one who had led a king to abdicate and ultimately brought Elizabeth to her throne. There were yellow roses strangely growing in my garden at Sunninghill at the time, defying the cold. I picked a bunch and took them to Frogmore, the royal mausoleum. And I laid those stubborn flowers on the sparsely kept grave of