An American In Windsor

Why Meghan Markle is a revolutionary kind of royal.

- Daisy Goodwin

THE LAST TIME A MEMBER OF THE BRITish royal family announced his intention to marry an American divorcée, there was a constitutional crisis, and the future of the monarchy seemed to be in doubt; indeed, King Edward VIII had to give up the throne in order to wed the woman he loved, Wallis Simpson, a native of Baltimore. When she began her affair with then Prince Edward, Simpson was married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson, whom she would divorce two years later. Both her nationality and marital history made her unacceptable as a royal bride to almost every section of society. The diarist Harold Nicolson remarked at the time, “The upper classes mind her being an American more than they mind her being divorced. The lower classes do not mind her being an American but loathe the idea that she has had two husbands already.”

Perhaps the British might have accepted a commoner, and in a pinch an American. But a woman who had been married twice before marrying the man who was also supreme governor of the Church of England was beyond the pale. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior cleric in the Anglican church, said in 1935 that no Christian could remarry while their former wife or husband were still alive. Couples who had been divorced could not be received at court.