The Duke and Duchess of Windsor after their wedding.

Our website, Great Romances, has a piece on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who sparked the Abdication Crisis of 1936, in which the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, refused to allow the King, Edward VIII, to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American woman of shady reputation.

Today, the Windsors would probably be known as the Royal Simpsons, but we’re much crueller than they were then.

Read the story here.

Autumn Kelly, Peter Phillips’s live-in girlfriend.

Here on Royal Anecdotes we have been discussing the possibility of a Royal wedding next year, but could we have another much sooner than that?

There’s quite a bit of speculation going on about Autumn Kelly, Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips’s live-in girlfriend. Autumn, who’s Canadian, was invited to last week’s Hebridean cruise by the Queen and is pictured (above) boarding the small luxury liner for the trip.

Princess Anne has always said that her children are not “Royal”, so an autumn/fall wedding would not strictly be a Royal wedding, although I doubt the public would make that distinction when one of the parties is a grandson of the Queen.

Voyage Over
Now that the initial voyage of the Hebridean Princess as a Royal Yacht is over, it’s interesting to reflect on the events surrounding it. The most dramatic, according to the press, was when Camilla “abandoned Charles” and “left the ship” to return home to Raymill House, her Wiltshire estate which is costing the taxpayer nearly £2 million ($3.7m) to refurbish for her police protection squad.

Actually, she left the ship with the others at the conclusion of the trip. Prince Charles remained aboard alone to sail around the top of Scotland to a point just a 20-minute drive from the Castle of Mey, where he will be joined by Camilla in five days.

Oh, the dramas the press likes to stir up.

There’s still a lot of talk about the longish-term relationship between Chelsy Davy and Prince Harry.

Apart from the difficulties of being thousands of miles apart for most of the year — she in Cape Town, South Africa, he in the British Army — there’s also the question of her father Charles Davy’s links with the malicious Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.

One question that doesn’t seem to be considered though is that Chelsy is very good academically. Her 80%+ score in her best subject, statistics, is an eye-opener. In a world where “soft” courses like, Golf Course Management, Media Studies, Art History, etc., are the preferred options for many students, Chelsy goes for the hard, abstract subject of statistics — and does exceptionally well at it.

What does this tell us about Chelsy’s future? We know that companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. are always desperately seeking graduates with expertise in abstract thinking. It’s the new Holy Grail in the world of software engineering, where what’s in the box is more important than the box itself.

After she graduates, Chelsy would be a prime candidate for one of the big software/search companies.

Could Chelsy end up working for Google in Mountain View, California? And what would Harry make of that?

Would-be King, Anthony Hall.

Secret files released today reveal that a claimant to the Throne, who regarded King George V as an interloper, threatened to chop the sailor King’s head off back in the 1930s.

Reuters reports: An ex-policeman who claimed to be related to King Henry VIII threatened to behead the reigning monarch and take his place on the Throne in the 1930s, according to secret files released on Friday.

The “quarrelsome and scandalous” campaign by former police inspector Anthony Hall against George V ruffled feathers in Buckingham Palace and at the heart of government.

“I claim the crown,” Hall wrote in a letter to the King. “You have no connection with the British Royal family. You are an outsider. Therefore, leave this country.”

Although dismissed by officials as “mere ravings”, Hall’s antics sparked a flurry of correspondence between the police, Government and the Palace on how to silence him.

George V, grandfather of the Queen, was keen for Hall to be arrested, according to official documents released for the first time by the National Archives.

“His Majesty quite agrees that a stop should be put to his effusions,” the King’s Private Secretary Sir Clive Wigram wrote in a letter to the Home Office.

At one of several public meetings, which attracted audiences of up to 600, Hall said he wanted to be the first policeman to “chop off the Monarch’s head” and the first to be crowned King.

At another he said he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the King “like a dog”. Hall claimed a direct blood link to the Tudor dynasty which ruled from 1485 to 1603.

George V, who changed his family’s Germanic surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor during World War One, was a “pure-blood German” who had no right to be King, Hall argued.

Moves to detain him in a psychiatric hospital foundered when doctors found “no absolute proof of unsoundness of mind”.

Police in Birmingham finally arrested Hall in July 1931 for disturbing the peace. He was found guilty and ordered to behave himself or pay a £25 fine.

Hall’s dream of being crowned “King Anthony” was dashed along with his plans to scrap taxes, build thousands of police stations and set up a Ministry of Pleasure to “revive the ancient merry times”.

What a grand nutcase.