Another duchess of American descent would surely relate to the current uproar over Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back

When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex begin their transatlantic “progressive new role” at arm’s length from the royal family, as they announced this week, they will continue to use as their British home Frogmore Cottage, the Windsor property given to them by the Queen last year.

Just a few minutes’ walk from Meghan and Prince Harry’s house, along the western edge of Frogmore Gardens, is the final resting place of another duchess of American descent who, were she alive today, would surely find the current brouhaha highly reminiscent. Wallis Simpson lies in a grave beside that of her husband, the Duke of Windsor, who shocked the world in 1936 by abdicating as Edward VIII to “marry the woman I love”.

Meghan and Harry's story is quite the drama, but it's no abdication crisis Read more

Much newspaper acreage has already been devoted to comparing the duchesses who at face value appear to have so much in common. Both were American born and raised (Wallis in Baltimore, Meghan in Los Angeles), both met their princes aged 34 and both were divorced.

Both have been demonized in front of the British public in terms that are surprisingly similar. So much so that when Harry and Meghan dropped their bombshell announcement on Instagram on Wednesday, the reaction from some quarters was like a wrinkle in time.

Piers Morgan, Meghan’s self-appointed baiter-in-chief, led the charge. He said of her that “she split Harry from [brother] William & has now split him from the Royal Family”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Duke and Duchess of Sussex on 7 January. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

That accusation – of the outside American femme fatale using her wiles to tear the royal family asunder – was one that was to follow the Duchess of Windsor around for the rest of her life. After abdicating on 10 December 1936, the newly named Duke of Windsor was exiled from Britain having spent only 11 months on the throne.

The couple married in France six months later, after Wallis’s decree absolute came through.

The duchess was subjected to vitriol from inside the royal family that makes Morgan’s jibes against Meghan sound almost pleasant. The Queen Mother, whose life was turned upside down when her husband, Bertie, was unexpectedly propelled on to the throne as George VI dubbed her “the lowest of the low” and went on to blame her for his early death in 1952.

Much to her chagrin, the Duchess of Windsor was withheld the title of Her Royal Highness. A month before her marriage to the former king an article began circulating in Britain, written by an anonymous author that portrayed her as a “Delilah and a harlot” who was responsible for “more grievous harm to the British empire than any other foreigner”.

The writer, who was suspiciously well-informed about the target, lamented that “British citizens had rather King Edward married a respectable shop girl whom he could have ennobled” rather than a divorcee. But when the duke tried to get the Metropolitan police to investigate the anonymous source, they declined the invitation noting that the article was “rather well done and as far as we know … surprisingly accurate”.

Given the parallels, Meghan will have her work cut out countering similar toxic accusations that she has led her royal husband into the wilderness. With Harry, as they split their new life with their child, Archie, between the UK and her native North America, they might look to the Windsors example about how to live well at a distance from royal largesse.

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The Sussexes said in their Instagram post that they will now “work to become financially independent”. They could learn a great deal about how to fulfill that ambition from Harry’s great-great-uncle.

After abdication, Edward was offered a stipend by his newly enthroned brother with the strict proviso that he agreed never again to set foot on British soil without permission. Edward spent the rest of his life roaming around Europe and the Caribbean bemoaning the hardship he endured and trying to extract more from British taxpayers.

The reality was rather different. The Windsors continued to live in splendor as a result of Edward’s shrewish money management combined with the couple’s bottomless ability to sponge off others; they spent most of their later years living in a 14-room mansion in the Bois du Boulogne rented for next to nothing.

When he abdicated, Edward demanded his brother buy him out of his life interest in the Balmoral and Sandringham estate for a tidy sum. He also secreted away more than £1m from the Duchy of Cornwall that rightfully belonged to the public purse.

By hook or by crook, the former king was left with enough to buy his wife a lavish jewelry collection that sold after her death in 1986 for $50m.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Château de Candé in France in 1937. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

On the downside, the Sussexes might learn another lesson from Wallis Simpson: that ostentatious displays of wealth by those outside the royal bosom do not go down well with the British public. The Duchess of Windsor was savagely criticized for going on epic shopping sprees in America – something that Meghan should have noted before she held a baby shower last February in a penthouse in Manhattan that costs $75,000 a night.

The final bit of advice that the Windsors could posthumously offer the Sussexes as they drift off into the royal margins is, try not to let any Nazi sympathies show. Harry will presumably not need much tutoring in this regard, though he did infamously wear a German desert uniform replete with swastika to a fancy dress party in 2005.

As for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, their enthusiasm for the Nazis knew no bounds. Their 1937 wedding took place in a French villa owned by an American, Charles Bedaux, whose active enthusiasm for Nazi rule landed him during the war in a Miami jail.

Notoriously, four months after they were married the Windsors travelled to Munich as the personal guests of Adolf Hitler. Edward, who in the 1930s taught his six-year-old niece (now Queen) Elizabeth how to do a Nazi salute, continued to flirt with Hitler through the war, much to the dismay of Winston Churchill, who eventually got him out the way by dispatching him to be governor of the Bahamas.

At one point the Nazis even concocted a plot to offer Edward a return to the British throne following German invasion of the country. In 1940 the former king, an inveterate antisemite, returned the favor, telling an old friend that the best way to secure peace was for Germany to “bomb Britain effectively”.