Wallis simpson

In some ways, the world of George VI and his consort Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, from 1936-52 was very different from how we envision that of today’s British royal family; its rituals seem to belong to an era of Jurassic antiquity. In George’s day, Britain was still a global power, and its monarch ruled over both an empire and an elaborate court system with a “Page of the Backstairs” and a “Yeoman of the Pantry” — not to mention a fully staffed, oceangoing yacht — at his disposal. His coronation in May 1937 was as protracted as that of any maharajah. The Edwardian braid and sashes on display during more recent military pageantry look sadly Ruritanian by comparison. In other ways, their lives resonate more clearly with our own.

‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months,’ King George V groused in his last days about his oldest son and heir, David, Prince of Wales. Never a particularly cheery fellow, by 1935 George V was worn down by a lifetime of non-stop smoking. His gloom might have been understandable, but it wasn’t universal, since he had nothing but good things to say about his second son, the stuttering Bertie. In the prescience that kings sometimes display about their successors, George V suspected that he was about to pass the imperial crown into unsteady hands. When the old king died in January of 1936, David, Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. As Prince of Wales, he had been phenomenally popular, the House of Windsor’s first full-blown celebrity.