Wallis Simpson's Hard Lessons for Harry and Meghan

BBC: A popular, playful prince falls in love with a strong-willed US divorcee, who ends up vilified by a hostile British press. In Harry and Meghan, some royal watchers see echoes of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the couple at the heart of the abdication crisis eight decades ago. But does the comparison hold up? It could do if the Duke and Duchess of Sussex end up reliving the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's tormented exile.

In December 1936, The King gave up his throne and an Empire of half a billion souls so he could wed a woman who was divorcing her second husband.

The public vitriol spewed on his bride-to-be, Wallis Simpson, might strike a chord with the latest American to marry into Britain's royal family.

On top of being condemned as a social climber from a Baltimore, Maryland, row-house, Simpson was reviled as a cheap adventuress, a lesbian, a nymphomaniac, a Nazi spy and a hermaphrodite.

She was portrayed as a sexual enchantress who supposedly learned "ancient Chinese skills" in the brothels of Shanghai, where her first husband, a US Navy pilot, had been stationed.

But the media's attacks on Simpson weren't just in print.

Daily Express reporters hurled bricks through the window of her rented Regent's Park, London, home, the newspaper's owner, Lord Beaverbrook, would later acknowledge. » | Jude Sheerin, BBC, Washington | Saturday, February 22, 2020