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A love that changed British royal history

A young Prince of Wales meets and falls in love with a beautiful, spirited commoner.
But Rebecca Dean’s “The Golden Prince” is set nearly a century ago, so instead of leading to marriage – as with Prince William and Kate Middleton next week – the relationship between Prince Edward, later King Edward VIII, and Lily Houghton was doomed from the start.
Dean said her novel was an attempt to explore the idea, put forth by some historians, that a thwarted early love so changed
Edward that it eventually led to his 1936 abdication of the throne in order to marry US divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Dean, who is currently working on a trilogy about Edward and Simpson, spoke with Reuters about royalty and her book.
Q: What inspired you?
A: “The questions have been asked endlessly, ever since the abdication. Why did he give up an empire for a plain, middle-aged, twice-divorced American woman of apparently doubtful reputation. But more intriguing to me was, why prior to his affair with her, had all his previous affairs been with married women? Never with anyone who’d have been remotely acceptable as a Princess of Wales and a future queen.
“I found the answer when I learned as a very young man, serving as an officer in France during World War I, his first romance was with a single young woman. She was a daughter of the Duke of Sutherland, her name was Rosemary Leveson-Gower, and she was in France as a Red Cross nurse.
“I wanted to be able to write about Edward as he was then, as a young, golden prince with just everything to look forward to, who wanted to marry a girl who – by our lights these days – was of aristocratic birth, would have made an ideal queen, and then there would have been no Mrs. Simpson in the 1930s, no abdication and our entire royal history would have been different.”
Q: Why are these two people so fascinating to you?
A: “Both of them were complex characters, and intensely interesting. I thought that when I started researching about Wallis, I would be writing a book that included Edward. But the more I read about her, the more I realised she was a stand-alone heroine if you like, deserving a book entirely to herself. She was, in the years before she met Edward, a Becky Sharp character. She was very sassy, not always someone you liked, but she had guts and determination to rise to the top.
But you were always entertained by her. If it was fun, Wallis wanted to try it. If it was daring, she was willing to take the dare. And if it was exciting, she wanted the excitement.

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