In1936 Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, who was also clearly a commoner. In the interim William’s father, Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, divorced his mother, Princess Diana, in 1996, one year before her death. And in 2005 he remarried another infamous divorcee, Camilla Parker Bowles, who was also a commoner. Now William is following in his father’s footsteps. Instead of marrying another royal as his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II did, or instead of marrying a member of the British nobility as his father did when he married Lady Diana in 1981, he chose to also marry a commoner.
If Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, and Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, could see the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton they would shake their heads and wish they had been born a couple of generations later. The British royal family took a giant step toward becoming middle class on Friday like the monarchs of the Netherlands, Scandanavia, and Spain.
