History Cafe
History Cafe
Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe
#09 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster
33 minutes Posted May 4, 2022 at 12:26 pm.
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We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a quietly brilliant palace coup?