Without Wallis Simpson we would not have had Queen Elizabeth

On June 3, 1937, exactly 85 years ago, Wallis Simpson and the duke Edward of Windsor they were getting married in the south of France. For her it was her third marriage, for him her first. And in order to celebrate it, he had done the most six months earlier unexpected and revolutionary of gestures, for the British royal family: he had renounced the throne and abdicated in favor of his brother Albert, who thus became king George VI.

“The people who caused me the most problems in my life were Wallis Simpson and Hitler”he said, rigorously placing the American sister-in-law, the new queen consort, first in the order Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Nevertheless, without Wallis Simpson, there would have been no Elizabeth II and the history of Great Britain would have been very different.

Twice divorced, a stormy pasta non-spontaneous abortion, the American certainly does not embody the ideal profile of the queen of England. Especially in the 1930s, with a war that had just ended and another was just around the corner. Wallis is “indolent, frivolous and spendthrift,” say her detractorsand certainly not suitable for supporting those who have the task of leading a nation in those turbulent times.

And then he has another stigma on: ha high-ranking German friendsand in those years, to be highly placed in Germany, you had to be in the good graces of Nazi party. Wallis makes no secret of hers sympathies for Hitler (if they were real, or just by circumstance we will never know). But the most serious and most worrying aspect of the British apparatus is that among many flirt of the past, the lady also includes one with a Nazi notablethe former ambassador Joseph von Ribbentropwith whom he has maintained excellent relations.

A family that even has changed surname to hide her Germanic origins she certainly cannot risk an American from giving past misunderstandings can afford to “bring the enemy home.” And the fact that Edoardo do not find scandalous neither the sympathies nor the friendships of his beloved – indeed, according to some historians, share them (he called Hitler “not at all unpleasant”, after having tea with him in Berlin in 1937) – is even more dangerous.

These are years in which a match is enough to make a pop out fire (and in fact soon so it will happen) and the only thing to do is to limit the damage: this marriage does not have to be done. The official reason is that, as head of the Anglican church, the king cannot marry a divorced woman. But Edward is not there: love (or according to someone else politics) wins over everything and rather than renounce Wallis, renounce the crown.

From that moment the history of the United Kingdom – and of Europe itself – changed forever. On the throne George VI and then, 70 years ago Elizabeth II. And if Britain is celebrating today, proud of its past and its sovereign, she owes it somehow to Wallis Simpson, the woman who caused trouble for the Queen Mother, but who probably saved Europe.