I can’t love Edward VIII. I know he had some good qualities. He was a people’s king, in contrast to his stuffy father, George V. He was a modernizer, refusing to be hidebound by outmoded tradition. And there is, even today, a romantic, Ruritanian Prisoner of Zenda quality to the idea of a man who could give up a throne for love.
Except that in the original Prisoner of Zenda Rudolf Rassendyll put his duty first, and gave up the woman he loved for the sake of a throne. That’s the difference. No matter how much I try to admire Edward VIII, I keep coming back to a story that Tommy Lascelles, the private secretary to George VI and Elizabeth II, told about an exchange between Edward and his mother at Marlborough House when the abdication crisis was at its height.
