The Crown: Edward the VIII Season 2, Episode 6

Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at the Waldorf

Edward the VIII’s abdication is something that I have been vaguely aware of for as long as I can remember.  It was a romantic, but, in my moral set, a tainted romantic decision – he chose to marry a divorced woman (when I was eight years old and first heard of this, divorce had a tone of scandal) and he gave up the throne for love.  It sets in motion the action in The Crown – but also in the King’s Speech – a movie that must have come out before I started blogging because I can’t believe that, to this point, I haven’t posted about it.  My personal connection with Edward is that his portrait – dancing with his wife, Wallis Simpson, used to adorn the walls of the Waldorf Astoria where, until last year when the Waldorf was sold to be turned into condos, the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association was held.  Edward and Simpson looked perfectly matched, and seemed to signify all that was royal and regal about the Waldorf Astoria back “in the day”.

And that fairy tale – tainted slightly further when it was hinted that Wallis Simpson was, in addition to being a divorcee, having affairs during the time that she and Edward were consorting - was largely sustained in both the King’s speech and in the first season and a half of The Crown.  So I was unprepared for the sixth episode of season 2 of The Crown.  If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want spoilers, stop reading.  In his appearances before episode 6, Edward is a slightly sleazy, slightly creepy character who is full of himself in a way that is more than a little off putting.  Handsome and aware of that, he believes he would have been a better king than “Bertie”, his brother and Elizabeth’s father, but if we have seen the King’s speech, we admire the pluck of the King George VI that Bertie became – and we know that his father prayed that Bertie and not Edward would become King.  Edward seems to be a self-indulgent fop and Wallis seems to have him wrapped around her little finger in the Crown.  He has nasty nicknames for everyone in the royal family, but then Elizabeth reaches out to him as an advisor, and there is a sense that he can be useful as she tries to navigate touchy family relationships.  Meanwhile, the dour old secretary, Alan Lascelles, who was intimately acquainted with Edward’s entire adult life as he had been his secretary when he was king and had watched him afterwards was incredibly opposed to him as a person – and by extension to Elizabeth’s sister Margaret who was displaying the same self-idolatry that he feared would cause her to rot from the inside out as Edward had rotted.  The language of rot was quite strong and it stood out.  When Lascelles used it, I experienced it as coming out of left field and being more of an old fuddy-duddy’s critical looking down his nose at the royals – but I should have listened to Mister Down-at-the-Mouth to be better prepared for episode six.

So the episode begins with the trading of secret Nazi documents at the end of the Second World War – documents that implicate Edward in a plot devised by Hitler to reinstate him as King of England should Germany have occupied England.  These documents are being reviewed by historians in the 1950s just as Edward is trying to figure out how to worm his way back into having some kind of role in public life in England – something that his brother George VI had worked very hard to prevent, but something Edward feels hopeful of achieving now that his relationship with Elizabeth is moving forward.   Meanwhile, to complicate things a bit, Billy Graham, of all people, played by the same actor who played the sleazy writer in House of Cards, is visiting Britain and Elizabeth has a chat with him.  She is taken by him, but, as the titular head of the Church of England, she can’t publicly support him and it is not clear that she would want to.

I think it is important – and the show does not emphasize this but we all know it in our bones – that England, under the leadership of Churchill and with the help of “Bertie” as King George VI survived the most harrowing of sea and air attacks during the Second World War.  During this time, in order to limit the mayhem that he might cause, Edward was installed as the protector of the Bahamas – a position that he used to look with disdain at the people of the Bahamas – especially the people of color (he was a class A racist who was not in the least discrete about it through the course of his life).  Now the British Empire as a whole was racist and was responsible for racially based atrocities including the slave trade with the United States (and slaving that brought Africans to England and the rest of Europe as well).  Being the titular head of the whitest nation on earth – whether you are Edward or George or Elizabeth – requires a fair amount of comfort with exploiting people whose skin is of a different color (and many of the same skin tone).  Elizabeth’s engagement with subjects of color is interesting – and certainly far more advanced than that of Edward’s, but it seems to fall into the “noblesse oblige” category, not the let’s hang out and chat category.

The first bombshell about Edward that is dropped is Hitler’s plan to instate Edward as the King of England after Hitler defeats Britain.  It is not clear that Edward is in on this, but he and Wallis tour Germany before the war and they are very taken with the treatment of them as royals – and especially the acknowledgement of Wallis as a royal – something the Brits never do – and something that has long infuriated both Edward and Wallis.  Edward’s plan was to marry Wallis as soon as she became divorced for the second time in a civil ceremony and remain King, but he was forced, by the intention of the entire government to resign if he did that, into abdication.  He did not weigh the investment of the government and the people in the propriety of the office.  His relationship with Wallis outweighed his obligation to The Crown.  Indeed, he appeared to be disdainful of the people and the office – there were fears that he was not protecting the documents that he was seeing as head of state from people – like Wallis – who were not cleared to see them.  Meanwhile, she was apparently, in addition to working on her second divorce, sleeping with a high Nazi official – von Ribbentrop – while also having her affair with Edward. 

But the bigger bombshell was the allegation, made by Lascelles when Elizabeth asked for it, that Edward sent information to the Nazi’s about the French defenses (he was originally a major-general in France responsible for British operations there) allowing Hitler to skirt the defenses as he drove to Paris and occupied it.  Should this have been the case, and I think there is enough evidence to suggest that his character would have supported it, Edward was every bit as nasty as Shakespeare’s Richard III who kept plotting and plotting to become king, regardless of who would have to die for him to accomplish it.  Edward’s character then is a particular kind of narcissist – one who is so full of himself and what he needs that he has no regard for what the impact of getting what he needs will have on others.  His subjects are not people with whom he identifies, but people whom he disdains because they don’t adequately love him.  The send up in the musical Hamilton of George III who reigned when we rebelled against Britain begins to get at the level of self-importance that Edward experienced.

Elizabeth’s dilemma at the end of the episode is that she cannot forgive Edward for what he has done, and this creates a moral crisis for her.  She consults with Billy Graham, who is encouraging her quite strongly to forgive as a Christian thing to do.  She desperately wants to do this but simply cannot – and we get why – but we also fear that Graham’s strident encouragement to forgive as that is the Christian thing to do will create a rift between he and Elizabeth, but then he saves her by suggesting that she can pray for forgiveness for the inability to forgive.  A nice trick – and one that allows her – as we see throughout the first two seasons – to retain the integrity of The Crown – to act in ways that are consistent with the needs of the country despite her own wishes and desires – demonstrating her capacity to do exactly what it is that Edward could not – to put her people and her country first, and, in so doing, to more fully inhabit herself.

To read a post on the Crown focused on Elizabeth, click here.

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