At least one very startling claim emerges in this study: according to her own account, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, never consummated her first two marriages. Indeed, she never allowed any man (before the Duke of Windsor, presumably) to touch her ‘below the Mason-Dixon line’. If this is true, it makes a nonsense of the Abdication, since an unconsummated marriage, within Christian canon law, is automatically grounds for annulment. This would mean that the lady was not — or did not need to be — a divorcee, and thus her pairing with Edward, Prince of Wales, should have raised no objection whatsoever.

Wallis certainly did represent a kind of American triumph in the realms of the British monarchy: the Baltimore girl who captured the heart of a king and for whom he sacrificed an empire. Famously, the American press was running with the story long before it was disclosed on this side of the Atlantic, and in its traditional firecracker manner: ‘King’s Moll Reno’d in Wolsey’s Home Town’ and ‘King Will Wed Wally’. This does not demonstrate, however, that the American press never practised censorship: as Frank Prochaska astutely points out, the US media was discretion itself when it came to Roosevelt’s ‘molls’, or indeed JFK’s (or Roosevelt’s disability for that matter). It just indicated that the dignity of the British monarchy didn’t weigh heavily in the States. In Canada, by contrast, the King’s choice of bride was regarded with great dismay, Canada being at that time still both strongly Scottish Presbyterian and deeply loyal to the monarchy.

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