There the similarities between the Sussexes and the Windsors end. Meghan wanted to marry Harry from the word go, and ensured that she did by being the living embodiment of everything he had ever wanted in a woman. Wallis never wanted to marry David and did all she could to discourage him from marrying her. Meghan is from of a petit bourgeois background while Wallis was from an upper class Southern family. Wallis valued the royal way of life to such an extent that she never wanted to marry the King but to remain his mistress so she could remain a part of the royal system. Meghan’s disregard for the royal system was evident not only in her conduct while she was living in England, but in the manner of her departure. Meghan is essentially a lone wolf with social skills, while Wallis was genuinely a people person. In her own way, Wallis was a romantic, although one with a wide and frankly acknowledged streak of pragmatism. Her uncle Sol Warfield was one of the richest men in America and she was his sole heiress until she threatened to divorce her first husband, a wife-beating alcoholic named Win Spencer. Uncle Sol warned her that he would cut her out of his will and leave his money to a home for fallen women if she became the first Warfield to divorce. She divorced, he left his $2.5m estate as threatened. Although Wallis loved beauty and had style, her actions show that when push came to shove, she chose the heart over the bank. Her behaviour, once David abdicated, also showed that she was indeed the ‘good and honest woman’ Chips Channon labelled her in his famous diaries. Notwithstanding her genuine horror of finding herself living out her worst nightmare as the Duchess of Windsor, she put a brave face on it, was a loyal and devoted spouse to the man she never wanted to marry, created a truly regal lifestyle for them in France and the United States, maintained a dignified silence publicly about the reality of her life, and used to laughingly remark privately how taxing it was to be one half of one of history’s greatest romances.
Many of the comparisons between Harry and the Duke of Windsor are fanciful, born of ignorance or miscomprehension. While it is true that both men were prone to depression and had mental health issues, the Duke of Windsor was the archetypal royal. There was never any doubt that you were in the presence of a former king when you were around him. By the time I met him he might have been a doddering old bore, but he was always regal, immaculately turned out, and lived according to royal etiquette. There was nothing bovverish or oikish about him, which is certainly not true of Harry. The former king would no more have played strip poker in Vegas than have sex in the middle of the Mall. He used to sit on the edge of a room and people would be brought over to him, one by one, to talk with him until he indicated that he had had enough and was ready for someone else. There is nothing regal about Harry. This, of course, has been one of his charms. There certainly has never been anything stylish about him. He always looks as if he’s just crept out of bed or is about to head into it.
I knew the Duke and Duchess of Windsor slightly when I was a young girl in New York and they were coming to the end of their lives. She was a game old bird while he was rather pathetic, with an air of sadness, indeed defeat, about him. Nevertheless, he was very dignified. I knew a very great deal about them through family connections. My great family friend John Pringle, founder of the iconic Round Hill Hotel, where Harry and Meghan stayed when Tom Inskip had his wedding reception there, had been the Duke’s ADC during the war and was full of stories about the Windsors. My stepmother-in-law, Margaret Duchess of Argyll, was a longstanding friend of theirs. My sister-in-law Lady Jean Campbell, whose grandfather Lord Beaverbrook had been one of the Duke’s strongest supporters when he was king and wanted to marry Wallis, gained a wealth of information about them from her grandfather. Had Edward VIII followed the Beaver’s advice, he would have remained on his throne and Wallis would have become either Duchess of Lancaster or Queen of England. However, he was so terrified of losing her that he preferred to give up his throne rather than be separated, then ironically had to endure a separation of six months to validate her divorce.
The single greatest difference between the Sussexes and the Windsors was that Wallis never wanted to marry David while Meghan wanted to marry Harry from the outset. Wallis never wanted to be anything but maîtresse-en-titre while Meghan wanted to become a royal princess and duchess. Wallis loved her husband and wanted to remain Mrs Ernest Simpson while being the King’s mistress. Rather than losing a fortune to marry a man for love, the way Wallis did, Meghan has ensured the acquisition of wealth through a series of dextrous manoeuvres, some commercial, others personal, but all with her businesswoman’s eye firmly fixed on the baseline. Wallis’ idea of hell was the life she ended up with, saddled in perennial exile with a man-child (whom she and Ernest used to call Peter Pan), condemned for a lifetime to have him worship at her altar. Meghan, on the other hand, has encouraged Harry to embark upon a life of semi-exile and seems very comfortable with the pedestal he has put her upon.
Contrary to popular belief, Wallis did everything in her power to keep Edward VIII on the throne, but he was so ‘insanely in love with her’, as his cousin Prince Christopher of Greece put it, that he recklessly threw away his crown rather than
