Excellent performances by all concerned almost make one forget the equally important fact that this is the first movie in a long time to treat Edward VIII’s abdication of the throne as the act of gross selfishness by a narcissistic asshole that it was, rather than some grand self-important gesture.
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Though conversely, trading Edward for George, while a terrible deal for poor George, turned out to be a great deal for the Commonwealth.
If possible, would you mind going into more detail on what made Edward’s decision so self absorbed? The availible narritive on most web content I could access was the standard “gave it up for love” story.
I think its always best to not have a nazi king, especially if you are about to go to war with nazis. Its just a good idea.
But was it more grossly selfish and narcissistic than *remaining* on the throne? Because it seems like a pretty even trade to me.
It’s selfish to NOT want to be the King of England?
I mean, if you look at it from the viewpoint of ‘being a Royal has GROSSLY fucked up Elizabeth and Charles, you should get out while you can’ then yes, it was quite selfish. And hey, Edward VIII was a narcissistic assclown; his politics were troglodytic and he probably should have been in jail for his currency trading scams, but that’s sort of par for the course for a british royal.
But the decision itself? He decided he’d rather marry than be head of state, and remained, reportedly, quite happily married until he died. There’s some quiet dignity in that.
He left his brother in the lurch and did considerable damage to the Crown, and would have, had he been able to, violated a number of the most basic principles of constitutional monarchy in order to sway the public against his own government.
Murc – You’ve summed it up quite well. He WANTED not to be the King, and it was this desire that informed his decision, above any and all other considerations.
Prioritising personal desires above duties and responsibilities is the very essence of selfishness.
@aussie- That’s so if you think that Edward had any kind of affirmative duty to be King. He did not, any more than I have an affirmative duty to become a Doctor because my father is one or a school administrator because my mother is one. He was born the son of George V. Big deal. If he’d been elected an MP, a position you actually have to seek out, and then proceeded to fuck around, different story, but that’s not the case.
@SC – Nobody MADE George VI become King. ‘Left in the lurch’ indeed. And I regard doing damage to the institution of the British Crown as a feature, rather than a bug. As far as swaying the public against his own government… if I were British and Parliament had the gall to tell ME who I could or couldn’t marry I’d use every weapon at my disposal to sway the public against them.
This doesn’t excuse or condone Edwards various other douchebaggy actions, of course, but I’m not sure how you can spin his abdication as one of them.
@murc – I understand your point, and as a first opponent of Australia having a constitutional monarchy (let alone one hailing from another country) I am the last defender of the royal family.
However, despite the rotten luck of the draw ion being born into said family, I do consider that the power which the royal family in that era enjoyed carried with it certain responsibilities of continuance and stability. And it was hardly (for the era) repressive to say that you couldn’t marry a divorcee. Not that I agree with the stance, but in the Catholic Church, you still can’t! So I would say that it is very much part of society’s fabric that there are restrictions on who you can and cannot marry. George VI even caused a stir by marrying a comparative ‘commoner’ .
I just saw the trailer for this in front of TRUE GRIT. I’m actually really excited to check this out.
Wanted to see this for days, and finally caved on your recommendation. What a nice little movie!
Did you live a life of unimaginable luxury based solely on the expectation that one day you would become a doctor or a school administrator? No? Then it’s not quite the same thing. The only point of an aristocracy – and it’s not an unworthy point, honestly – is that they can serve to inspire the average citizen to do their civic duty. Edward shirked his, the only thing he was basically ever asked to do in his entire life, given that he even got out of the British royal tradition of military service with all due speed.
British society offered him literally any number of compromises, up to and including “look, just marry someone else for the sake of appearances, give Wallis a title and you two can do whatever you want on the side and we won’t say boo.” But that wasn’t good enough for the spoiled ass.
@MGK- I have not lived a life of ‘unimaginable’ luxury based on the fact that I would one day inherit either of my parents positions, no.
I have, however, lived in an above-average first world lifestyle (which would equate to unimaginable luxury for a non-trivial number of people on the planet) based on inheriting their social capital, social standing, and them funding all of my leisure and entertainment activities in a style they could best afford until I was 18, and my education until I was in my early twenties.
When my father dies (God willing, not for another span of decades) I have a relatively high chance of inheriting a very lovely paid-off house on a nice slice of land (dibs have been called between my siblings and I, and assurances made.)
Edward basically did the same thing at a much higher level, which is to take full advantage of the opportunities granted to him by being born to rich and powerful parents. I’m not sure its fair to have expected him NOT to do so.
It is fair to have expected him not to later on play extreme financial hardball with his brother, parents, and the Civil List. It’s also fair to generally expect him to, you know, not be a giant classist douchebag who spent a lot of time fucking around with married women before he settled down. But those are things that ought to be expected of everyone; the circumstances of his birth don’t incur a greater or lesser obligation on his part, in my opinion.
Your opinion of his military service (full disclosure; most of my knowledge of Edward comes secondhand from having written a paper on the fashions he spawned for an elective course in undergrad and a general longrunning interest in British history) is actually completely different from mine; your take seems to imply shirking. My impression has always been that he was eager to serve in WWI and actually tried to get down into the trenches as much as he was able, given that there was no fucking way the British government would ever allow the Prince of Wales to be exposed to REAL danger.
Also… no offense, MGK, but have you read your last paragraph? Because I parsed it as “Edward’s ministers generously offered him the opportunity to not only perpetrate a deception before the British public (and before God), but to enmesh multiple other women and whatever potential children might be involved in it as well.”
Dude wanted to get married. Just because he was a dick doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have been allowed to enjoy the same privileges any other member of the UK would have.
“Did you live a life of unimaginable luxury based solely on the expectation that one day you would become a doctor or a school administrator? ”
Current Prince Andrew isn’t exactly in line for the throne, but I expect he lives quite well anyway, on the public’s dime. As will Prince Harry, despite being at best Prince William’s understudy.
So the “we spend all this money on you, you damned well better take the job” argument doesn’t seem very strong.
Prince Andrew and Prince Harry are in line for the throne, and, if it came to that, would take the job (though modern medicine makes that eventuality unlikely, unless one of the future monarches is gay). They also do all manner of public functions.
“British society offered him literally any number of compromises, up to and including “look, just marry someone else for the sake of appearances, give Wallis a title and you two can do whatever you want on the side and we won’t say boo.” But that wasn’t good enough for the spoiled ass.”
I’m usually with you on most things, MGK, but this one you’re totally off-base. I mean, are you seriously suggesting that it would have been less selfish & dickish for Edward VIII to commit state-sanctioned adultery than to marry the woman he loved? What about the hypothetical wife? What about her feelings and the feelings of the supposed children? “Hey, dad, are you telling me you’re fucking around mom’s back and the government is paying for it?”
It’s not as if the British government would have collapsed with Edward’s abdication or that there weren’t any other successors around to take up the throne. And I don’t see the Windsors out on the street begging for change. Look, the UK still has the monarchy around because the citizens WANTS to have them around not because they NEED them. The Windsors are good for laugh & chuckles and oohs & ahhs. The British government can function just fine without them (at least function as best as they can). The Windsors are a long-held tradition and decorations at best. Cheers.
Of course when I say “Windsors” I mean the monarchy in general. I mean the Windsors are really upstart German imports that adopted a castle’s name to sound more British.
I think the whole “Nazi sympathizer” thing renders him unworthy of being defended by anyone here on any grounds no matter what the circumstances.
Ed, his Nazi sympathies are completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not it was okay for him to abdicate in order to get married. Which it was.
But something can be okay and still be a dick move. And as MGK stated above that it is his opinion that Edward’s actions were a dick move. I wanted to know why, and though some of the reasons are a bit weak, there are some that I can see do have a bit more heft to them.
On the other hand, Nazi sympathizing goes right through dick moves and into straight jackass territory.
It wasn’t so much that he sympathised with the nazis, as he used some of the tax payer money he received as a member of the royal family to fund the nazis during the rise to power.
He also used tax payer money to fund his various scams, and then used his position as a member of the royal family to avoid being prosecuted for them when they blew up in his face.
Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth; This bastard took that silver spoon, fashioned it into a crude shiv, and then spent his entire life stabbing the british tax payer in the face with it because the spoon wasn’t silver enough for his liking.
“Ed, his Nazi sympathies are completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not it was okay for him to abdicate in order to get married.”
Non-point. I said nothing about whether it was okay for him to get married, just that said Nazi sympathies rendered him unworthy of anyone lifting a finger in his defence.
Only peripherally related to this subject, but because of the obligation of every movie about British politics in the 30s to treat Churchill as a saint they got his politics on the abdication completely backward–he was a diehard defender of Edward’s staying king, mostly to annoy Stanley Baldwin, which was pretty much Churchill’s raison d’etre in the 30s.
The “Wuv and Mawage” thing would be somewhat more convincing if Edward had removed himself from the line of succession before George died, rather than become King, knowing full well that marrying Mrs Simpson would provoke a crisis, and hoping to brazen it through.
Instead, he provoked a constitutional crisis hoping to get his way. That seems to be, yes, being narcissistic and being an asshole.
And if he did realizing that marrying a twice-divorced woman while being Supreme Governor of the Church of England might raise an issue, he was a stupid as a box of rocks. Which, from everything I have read about Edward, is entirely possible.
Basically, it’s quite a debate, and (in my opinion) it comes down to “I want to eat my cake and have it too.”
Edward (or David, since that’s what he was called most of the time) knew that when his father died, he would be expected to become King, and perform all the duties of the King – and among those duties was to behave as a moral example to the rest of the country, to speak on their behalf as the best of what they wanted, and to support his government when possible. This expectation was far in excess, by the way, of what we expect from Royals now, though the Queen – with, it is generally believed, the impressive example of her father before her – does discharge those duties to the limits of her quite considerable capabilities.
When his father died, therefore, loving Wallis as he did, he had four options:
1) Marry her in a morganatic marriage, sidestepping most of the constitutional issues.
2) Not marry her, continue to be King, and possibly marry someone else, though there was no obligation for him to do so.
3) Abdicate in favour of Albert, I mean George.
4) Marry Wallis anyway, and accept that the entire government would resign, at the very least.
He tried for 1), but the government of England wasn’t all that charmed; more importantly, the governments of Australia, South Africa, and Canada told him to piss off.
He didn’t want to do 2). And, naturally, he felt unable to do 4), since one thing he really couldn’t do is govern an entire Empire by himself. So 3) it was.
Essentially, it was impossible for him to be King and married to Wallis. So he stopped being King. He should, of course, have realised this before his father died and stepped aside beforehand, but he clearly lacked the realism to do so.
I personally think that the Crisis was helpful in showing a very large number of people (including, of course, those in Australia, Canada, S Africa, NZ, etc.) that Edward/David was a short-sighted selfish little b*tch, and that George/Albert, stammer or not, was their best bet. As he proved.
It’s also worth mentioning that George/Albert had been quite aware of the likelihood of becoming King pretty soon for some time (as in, about ten years), since his father and mother had clearly been in favour of it, David had mentioned it several times as a possibility, and it was overall a bit hard to miss. It did, of course, worry him terribly, but I think it would be rather fatuous (as his wife did) to blame it for his early death; I rather think that was the lung cancer.
Great film, by the way. A certain amount of inaccuracy, much of it reasonable (I don’t think we need to see the only King in recent memory to have been euthanised dying the way he actually did, timed in time for the morning papers). I thought that the scene with Wallis playing hostess at Balmoral, particularly, showed us the impossibility of the situation very well.