The Wife Who Saved England (flash nonfiction)

They hated her. She had flirted with him. She was married, after all. Wicked, exotic, American divorcee. She had no shame. She put her designs on him and trapped him. Everyone said it.  Even though they knew better. It was important to control public opinion.  To protect the royals.  Didn’t the pictures even reveal a great love between the two? For years they carried on.  Forbidden love seemed sweeter—how utterly romantic that he would give up the kingdom for the woman he loved. To be exiled from his homeland. It was better than anything Hollywood could have invented.

You know the history. He was king fewer than 12 months in 1936. His brother reined successfully through the second world war. His niece became queen in 1953.

He died, still exiled, in 1972. By the time she died in 1986 she had stayed loyal to her third husband and had never spoken out about any strangeness, disease or malady that might have inflicted the abdicated king.  Conjectures looking far back into their past are the tools of the future to help defend or right the cruel luxury of harsh judgement.  He had anorexia nervosa, a disease that caused him to be trapped in a demanding juvenile obsession with the woman he loved; there are letters he’d written to other lovers before his marriage and escape from kingly responsibility where he referred to them as “mummie”; his threats of suicide; and her secret letters to the husband she had never fully intended to leave bore her loneliness and regret; he showed signs of having Asperger’s—even his own staff had claimed he was mad, as mad as king George the III.  But she had never said anything.  Never complained.  Never asked for help. For forty years. How much pain could she have endured in all the years that followed what she had thought was harmless flirtation?  What wondrous love is this?

While all around were accusations and bitterness between the men and women that made up the royal family and governing body of the land, a young lady growing up alongside all the politics must have felt mercy and love for her uncle.  Secure in her rein, she made a forgiving gesture by inviting the exiled prince to join the family in celebrating his mother’s 100th birthday.  He died not long after that.  When she died in 1986 the Queen granted her uncle’s wish that his wife be buried alongside him at Windsor.

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