This Side of the Pond

It didn’t make it into the Peek at the Past, but we came across an interesting tidbit in the archives that certainly piqued my interest. It comes from an issue published a century ago and reads as follows:

“The visit of the Prince of Wales to the United States is making quite a stir. For fear some of us won’t get to meet him, his name is partly given as Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Wettin. He has some thirty odd titles, too, but the best title he might have is missing – American citizen.”

No details of the visit, but the final joke compelled me to email the entry over to my dad, along with my own quip about the cheek of them, trying to thieve our prince while we weren’t looking.

It turned out, after some research, that a throwaway line meant to raise a smile among Crook County’s residents hit closer to the mark than you might think.

I wondered exactly which prince had attracted the attention of the Sundance Times one hundred years ago, because the royal family is quite large and a lot of them have the same name, so it does get fuzzy somewhere around the middle. I was convinced it was our current queen’s uncle, while my dad felt sure it was a son of Queen Victoria.

My guess was Edward VIII, while my dad’s was Edward VII. To prevent arguments of this nature, it would be helpful if the royal family could extend their tastes past a pool of four favorite names.

I was right, but please don’t tell my father I told you. His guess had been dead for a decade when the newspaper in question was published, while mine was just beginning his unfortunate story.

King Edward VIII, you see, fell desperately in love with America. He never made it to the Midwest during the trip this paper reported, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some of the credit: his first taste of American culture happened when he was a little boy, when he saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

By all accounts, the young royal was enraptured and wanted nothing more than to run away and become a cowboy on the prairie. It wasn’t until after World War I that he got the chance.

Like today’s royals, Eddie the Eight was sent on a number of diplomatic visits, but most were to territories within the British Empire. It wasn’t until 1919 that he got his first taste of America, and it was a defining moment for the prince that echoes through history to the present day. You might even say that the United States changed the course of royal history.

The trip began with a tickertape parade in New York City. He spent time in the capital, visited the Panama Canal, made his first speech using loudspeakers in San Diego and surfed in Hawaii.

The prince partied every night with society debutantes, fell in love with jazz, chewing gum and American cards and experienced a whirlwind romance with Carolyn Granberry, a shop girl he met in a ballroom with whom he danced the night away.

It wasn’t to be his last romance with an American woman. Five years later, the “playboy prince” had an affair with actress Pinna Nesbit Cruger on Long Island and several others after her. The prince’s womanizing was worrying to the extent that his private secretary wrote that “for some hereditary or physiological reason, his normal mental development stopped dead when he reached adolescence”.

Eddie the Eight also fulfilled his childhood dream to a certain extent during that first visit. He purchased a cattle ranch in Alberta that he owned for four decades, living out his cowboy fantasy on horseback. He allegedly once thrilled the diners in a restaurant in Cannes, France by performing tricks with a lasso.

The prince’s life after that visit was filled with Americana. He danced the Black Bottom, fancied himself a jazz drummer and visited Paris often to spend time at the American nightclubs. In his memoirs, he wrote, “America meant to me a country in which nothing is impossible”.

His father did not approve of his visit to America, or his second trip in 1924, because it caused him to indulge in the kind of behavior that apparently led to several uses of the headline, “Prince gets in with the milkman”. Further visits were blocked, including one that would have brought him near Wyoming.

But then, in 1930, Eddie the Eight met Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite who embodied everything he adored about the American lifestyle. He took the throne upon the death of his father at the beginning of 1936 and, in November, informed Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that he wished to marry Simpson once her divorce was final.

Unfortunately, the Church of England at that time deemed re-marriage after divorce unacceptable; the monarch is the head of the church, so Baldwin believed the people would not tolerate her as queen.

This was echoed by the Prime Ministers of Australia, Canada and South Africa. Eddie the Eight was given a choice: give up Simpson, or abdicate.

One month after he made his request, Edward VIII became the first and only monarch in British history to voluntarily abdicate the throne. The crown passed to his brother, George VI, and from him to Queen Elizabeth II; had he remained king and started his own family, our current monarch may never have inherited the throne and the balcony shots at Buckingham Palace would look very different indeed.

As someone who identifies as an Elizabethan, I cannot help but think the outcome was positive. By all accounts, Eddie the Eight did not have the temperament to rule – he never really wanted to be king. There are also whispers to this day that he and Simpson had Nazi sympathies, which wouldn’t have done us much good when war broke out again.

Whether or not that’s true, Eddie the Eight became the Duke of Windsor, later Governor of the Bahamas, and retired to France after World War II. He and Wallis Simpson remained happily married for the rest of his life, flitting back and forth between Paris and New York to spend time with presidents and celebrities.

Eddie the Eight never did get his American citizenship, though the Sundance Times may have been right in thinking he wouldn’t have turned it down. But whatever you think of his behavior, the man who wouldn’t be king did get his American dream, in the end.