A nurse for former King Edward VIII claims that the late Queen Elizabeth II, Edward’s niece, rejected his dying wish to grant Wallis Simpson, his wife, a Her Royal Highness title.
Julie Alexander, who served as Edward’s nurse before his 1972 death, makes that claim in the new docuseries “The Real Crown: Inside the House of Windsor,” which premiers on ITVX on April 20, according to People.
As anglophiles know, Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936 after a 10-month reign so that he could marry Simpson, an American divorcee. George VI, Elizabeth’s father, then ascended to the throne, followed by Elizabeth in 1952.
In the new documentary, Alexander recalls Elizabeth, her husband Prince Philip, and son then-Prince Charles visiting the cancer-stricken Edward in Paris in May 1972, just before the former king’s death.
“He was terribly sick. He couldn’t have weighed — maybe 80 pounds, if that, and wasn’t eating at all,” she says, per People.
Edward, then 77, asked Elizabeth to give the HRH title to Simpson, who never got that styling following Edward’s abdication. (Instead, Simpson was called the Duchess of Windsor, with Edward the Duke.)
“The Queen said no. She said no, even on that sad day,” Alexander reveals. “It was, you know, breaking his heart, I think. That’s what he wanted. That’s what he wanted, that title for her. Not having that title for his wife was a slap in his face.”
It was George who initially denied Wallis the HRH title, and she and Edward never got over that snub, The New Yorker reports — adding that Simpson, who died at age 89 in 1986, recalled the snub in her 1956 memoir, “The Heart Has Its Reasons.”
“On the very eve of my marriage the King, his brother, would, by an unexpected excise of his historical prerogative as the Fountain of Honour, exclude me as a member of the family,” she wrote.
