Wallis, of All People

On January 20th, just five minutes before midnight, King George V died at Sandringham House and his widow, whose sense of duty had never at any time been jeopardized by sentiment, instantly turned from the deathbed to kiss the hand of the young man at her side. He was embarrassed but she was right. The following morning Britain and the Empire contemplated the features of King Edward VIII. They were the most familiar features--blue eyes, retrousse nose, wistful mouth--in the whole world, and the Press was unanimous in declaring that the kingship became them. The new king was forty years old but an unparalleled expenditure of celluloid had arrested the years in his case, and his subjects, hallucinated by a photogenic fairy-tale which had begun in 1911 at Caernarvon Castle, watched tenderly as a slight blond youth ascended, with what appeared to be becoming reluctance, the remote eminence from which death alone could release him. Or so it was believed.

The new King flew from Norfolk to his Accession Council in St James's Palace in an aeroplane, so creating the first of a series of precedents which were to land him in a dilemma usually reserved for the characters of Dornford Yates. That afternoon, in the Banqueting Hall of St James's, a hundred Privy Councillors swore allegiance to the High and Mighty Prince Albert Edward Christian George Andrew Patrick David, their only lawful Liege Lord. But all the new King saw was a large group of elderly men wearing on their faces the expression of the last reign and hiding in their hearts some astounding suspicions.

Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion