benefit shakeup for the royals

ninky_2

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

I doubt he did much threatenging of abdication, because the British weren't about to make too much of a fuss about the Rhineland anyway. "The Germans are after all only going into their own back garden" as Lord Lothian put it.

I thought the problem the govt had with Edward VIII was more that he paid no attention to national and international matters, rather than anything else.

what we know of history is only that which we are told.

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/113232

Edward inherited the throne as a hugely popular new king – and set about meddling in government policy. This was in defiance of all convention but that didn’t stop Edward. He took to calling the German ambassador directly – a clear breach of constitutional protocol and one with serious practical consequences.
When Hitler made it clear he meant to send his forces back into the demilitarised Rhineland the government expressed its opposition. Edward should have stepped back. Instead he threatened to abdicate if Hitler’s advance was stopped, compounding the harm by phoning the German ambassador to tell him he had done so.
“The reassurances from Edward that Britain wasn’t going to fight were crucial,” says Professor Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Royals And The Reich. “Hitler had an ace in the hole, as we would say in American poker, knowing what he did from Edward at the time.”
In that context the abdication at the end of 1936 came as a godsend to the government. But even off the throne the Duke of Windsor posed an ongoing problem.
The FBI files show that at a party in Vienna in June 1937 – the month he married Mrs Simpson – the loose-tongued Duke told an Italian diplomat that the Americans had cracked Italy’s intelligence codes.Four months later the Duke and Duchess paid a high-profile visit to Germany where the Nazi regime fawned on him. They met Hitler, who saw the value of cultivating an ally once so intimately involved with British affairs. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote of the Duke: “It’s a shame he is no longer king. With him we would have entered into an alliance.”

neverdespairgirl

The govt wasn't really that opposed to the Rhineland, though. Which makes me take the rest of it with a pinch of salt.

FTBFun

Do you reckon when the Express are talking about the "Nazi King" they're secretly thinking "If Only....."

This is the paper after all that had "Judea Declares War On Germany" as one of its 1930s headlines.

ninky_2

FTBFun wrote: »

Do you reckon when the Express are talking about the "Nazi King" they're secretly thinking "If Only....."

This is the paper after all that had "Judea Declares War On Germany" as one of its 1930s headlines.

do you think they might of changed editorial since 1930s?


on the other hand.......it is the daily express.

nicko33

ninky wrote: »

Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote of the Duke: “It’s a shame he is no longer king. With him we would have entered into an alliance.”

If only...
Then we may never have had the EU
Lesser of two evils and all that