The royals - Kitty Kelley [276]
Sarah Ferguson made millions but spent even more, until she found herself, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, “spiraling downwards,” and again in the words of Oprah, “spiritually and morally bankrupt.”
Like a priest hearing confession, Oprah was prepared to absolve Sarah. “None of us are defined by our mistakes,” said the revered talk-show host, “but once you get the lesson, you don’t repeat it again.” Sarah nodded, but Oprah indicated she didn’t get it.
“So what is the lesson?” she asked her befuddled guest. Sarah stammered a little, her eyes glistening with tears.
“I guess chronic abuse of myself… dealing with it from a place of egotistical fear.”
Viewers watched the Duchess the same way they watched the video, hoping, praying, screaming for someone to cap the swill. Within the U.K., Republic renewed its pledge to rid the country of royalty while monarchists sat back, confident that the House of Windsor would once again rise out of its muck to make magic.
UPI-Corbis/Bettmann
Windsor Castle is the best-known symbol of the British monarchy. William the Conqueror chose the site for a fortress after his conquest of England in 1066. In 1917, when King George V needed to camouflage his German origins, he chose Windsor as the royal family’s dynastic name.
UPI-Corbis/Bettmann
Queen Victoria (far right) in 1893. After the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, she went into mourning and wore black clothes the rest of her life. Here she is pictured with her grandson the Duke of York, later to become King George V, and his wife, the Duchess of York, who became Queen Mary.
UPI-Corbis/Bettmann
Prince Edward, who became King Edward VIII and later the Duke of Windsor, in 1909 with Czar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, his son, and Prince George, who became King George V. As monarch, he did not dispatch the British navy to rescue his cousins during the Russian Revolution. The imperial family was executed by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg in 1918.
Archive Photos
Queen Mary sits with three of her five sons: Prince Albert, who became King George VI; Prince Edward (Duke of Windsor), who became King Edward VIII; Prince George (Duke of Kent), who died during World War II. Absent are Prince Henry, later Duke of Gloucester, and Prince John, who died in 1919 at the age of fourteen.
Archive Photos
Britain’s German royal family reinvented as the House of Windsor. At left, Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, surrounded by four of her five brothers.
Archive Photos
The first published photograph of HRH Princess Elizabeth, age two, in May 1928 with her governess, Nanny Knight. They are standing in front of No. 145 Piccadilly, then the home of the Duke and Duchess of York, who became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
author’s collection (a.c.)
“Britons hated that American woman,” said the King’s equerry Edward Dudley Metcalfe, recalling placards at the time of the abdication.
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“I intend to marry Mrs. Simpson as soon as she is free to marry,” King Edward VIII told the Prime Minister. “If I could marry her as King, well and good…. But if not… then I am prepared to go.” He gave up the throne in 1936, and after her second divorce, he married forty-year-old Wallis Warfield Simpson on June 3, 1937, in France.
Archive Photos
“Our family, us four,” is how the new King, George VI, described himself, his wife, Queen Elizabeth, and his two daughters, Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth.
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Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor appear delighted to meet Hitler in 1937.
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Archive Photos/Express Newspaper
The King and Queen, accompanied by Prime Minister