King Edward VIII provoked one of the greatest crises to face the modern British monarchy when he proposed to Wallis Simpson shortly after he ascended to the throne in 1936.The Associated Press
Calvin Trillin is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of more than 30 books.
Given months of heightened interest in the British monarchy reflected in the continuing popularity of Netflix’s The Crown and the hullabaloo over Oprah’s interview of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and the imminent Broadway opening of Diana and the naughty bits about Prince Andrew in the tabloids, this may be the opportune moment for launching my campaign to have a statue of Wallis Simpson erected in Parliament Square.
Why should Mrs. Simpson join notables like Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli? The facts are irrefutable: If King Edward VIII had not abdicated the throne in 1936 in order to marry Mrs. Simpson, an American divorcée, Britain would have approached the Second World War led by a king who was a Nazi sympathizer of Germanic origins.
I’m aware that my campaign is no slam dunk. I realize that I might be accused of launching it simply to put a thumb in the eye of the British monarchy -– a way to demonstrate how arbitrary and capricious and, well, silly it is. Not at all. I firmly believe that the way the citizens (excuse me: the subjects) of the United Kingdom choose to organize their government is up to them. There’s a festival in Bunol, Spain, whose celebration includes the residents throwing tomatoes at each other. I feel exactly the same way about that: Who am I to determine what people choose to do with their own tomatoes?
There are 12 statues in Parliament Square. Only one is of a woman – a feminist and suffragette named Millicent Fawcett. I count on that disparity to bring feminist support to my campaign. Even there, though, I can see the possibility of some opposition. There have always been rumours (fabricated, some say, by those opposed to Mrs. Simpson’s match with Edward VIII) that she might have lured the king off the throne with some exotic bedroom tricks she’d picked up on her worldly travels, and we might have to put up with mockers proposing that the statue depict her amidst tangled sheets.
And then there’s the fact that that Mrs. Simpson herself apparently had a soft spot for Nazis. It is true that the Duchess was said to have had an affair with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, when he was ambassador to Britain. According to one theory, a fondness for Nazism might have been passed on from Von Ribbentrop to Mrs. Simpson to Edward VIII. I would assume that some people on the far right believe that the statue in Parliament Square should therefore be of von Ribbentrop rather than Mrs. Simpson and that failure to back this idea is symptomatic of what they might refer to as a “deep societal prejudice against white males, particularly Nazis.”
I’ll admit, also, to being a bit concerned about the effect my campaign could have on the bitter controversy in the United States over statues of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. There is, of course, a powerful argument for taking down the statues of someone who led an army against his own country in a war that his side fought in order to preserve involuntary servitude. What concerns me is that my campaign could inspire the pro-statue crowd to present its case in a fresh way – a rather tortured version of the way I’ve looked at Mrs. Simpson.
What if, they might say, Lee, instead of surrendering at Appomattox, had managed to hold on until the Union tired of the fight? There must have already been a corps of people in the North whose response to the secession of Southern states was “glad to see the back of them.” As the war grew more and more costly in blood and in treasure, a growing number of Northerners might have been ready to throw in the towel. In the way Mrs. Simpson should be memorialized for winning the king, they would argue, Lee ought to be memorialized for losing the war. If he hadn’t, the country that was to become (at least briefly) the Earth’s pre-eminent super power would now be two middle-sized countries, one of which still practiced slavery.
But that’s a stretch. History without Mrs. Simpson isn’t. The Nazi would be on the throne. The speeches remembered from the blitz would not be Churchill’s inspirational exhortations to carry on but King Edward’s reminder to his subjects that even though the Nazis were a bit rough at times they had a lot of nice qualities.
Mrs. Simpson single handedly prevented that. She probably saved the monarchy and may have saved the United Kingdom. Is that not worth a single statue?
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