The curse of the House of Windsor: how love has torn apart the royal family

Love has been a curse for the family since its inception. The House of Windsor only came into being in 1917. Until then the family was the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But in the midst of the First World War that was too Germanic, and George V – Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather – changed the name to the House of Windsor.

The Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line slipped into the royal lineage in 1840 with the marriage of Prince Albert (of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) to Queen Victoria. So it’s here, at the point of this wedding, that the roots of the House of Windsor are found. It’s also here that we see the first shadows of the curse of love start to stalk the family. That curse would play out through the generations – all the way to the crisis today centred on Harry and Meghan.

Britain likes to think of Victoria and Albert’s marriage as a beautiful love affair – and in many respects it was. But it was also an obsessional relationship. When Albert died in 1861, Victoria wasn’t just grief-stricken, she was left devastated for the rest of her life.

Like many aristocrats, the young Victoria was starved of love. She described her childhood as “melancholy”. As a result, Albert became her world. When he died, she entered a state of mourning that lasted until her death. Victoria only wore black from then on. She avoided the public eye. She began comfort-eating and gained weight – which only increased her sense of unhappiness.

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Love – or rather the loss of her object of love – broke Victoria emotionally. Even now, looking back more than 150 years later, we can see that here, right at very beginning of what would eventually become the House of Windsor, this family has always been unable to love as others love. Love is easy for no-one but for many of the Windsors love is either impossible, unattainable, or fatally damaging.

Some in the family seem incapable of love – like Victoria’s son, Edward VII. He married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863. It was a typical mid-19th century royal wedding, in that love had little to do with the match – as can be judged by Edward’s numerous and very public affairs. He had a relationship with the actress Lillie Langtry, one of the most famous women of the age.

Edward had affairs with around 55 women, sleeping with countesses and prostitutes. In his 50s, he began a relationship with a married 29-year-old aristocrat called Alice Keppel – the great-grandmother of Camilla, now Duchess of Cornwall and the second wife of Prince Charles. Alice’s husband knew about the affair and accepted it. It was even rumoured that Alice’s child, Sonia Keppel – Camilla’s grandmother – was Edward’s daughter.

Edward and Alexandra’s wedding also created the first major clash with the press over access to the royals when it came to matters of the heart. Newspapers were unhappy that the wedding was to take place in Windsor rather than London. Windsor meant smaller crowds, and fewer reporters.

Back in the Edwardian era, the British press was not the rottweiler it is today – it was obsequious to the royals, seldom reporting anything which would embarrass the family. However, the king’s affairs were so notorious that even the tame Edwardian commentators of the time couldn’t ignore what was happening. In 1869, British MP Sir Charles Mordaunt threatened to name Edward in his divorce case – and the then heir to the throne was called as a witness. The scandals surrounding Edward were containable, because of the deferential time period they took place in, but they were nonetheless damaging to the family.

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The press was not so tame when the next great love story came to shake what was now officially the House of Windsor – and the damage would be greater than ever. The fallout of the love affair between Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis Simpson in 1937, and the resulting abdication crisis, has become almost a template for doomed Windsor romances.

At its heart the Edward and Mrs Simpson story tells us this: the Windsors try desperately to love as others do, they want to be with the people their hearts tell them to be with, but their position prevents them from doing so. As a result two things happen – they become wounded human beings, and the institution of the monarchy is simultaneously wounded in the eyes of the British people for its cruelty and coldness.

Such a similar story would go on to play out time and again in the lives of Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and Prince Harry. The curse seems to hand itself down from generation to generation.

The collision between religion and monarchy lies at the heart of Edward VIII’s battle to marry the woman he loved. Religion has haunted royal love lives before – there would be no Church of England if Henry VIII hadn’t wanted to leave Catherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn. When Henry broke with Rome in the 1530s over the separation, he established himself as Defender of the Faith, the supreme head of the Church of England. More than 400 years later, that title would haunt Edward VIII and see his love for Wallis Simpson end his reign.

In January 1936, Edward VIII, who had embarked on a series of affairs, many with married women, assumed the throne. His father, George V, had said: “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.” Edward’s reign would last barely a year. In 1930, he’d met the divorcee Wallis Simpson and the pair became lovers.

In November 1936, Edward told Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that he wanted to marry Simpson. It was impossible. The church opposed divorcees remarrying. As head of the Church of England, Edward couldn’t very well break the rules of the institution he led. With the government, church and heads of the Commonwealth against him, Edward had no choice but to abdicate in order to marry Wallis Simpson. His brother, George VI, the Queen’s father, assumed the throne.

On abdicating, Edward VIII said: “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as a king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.” The rest of his life was a glamorous waste. He was tormented by the power he had sacrificed, and his reputation destroyed by his flirtation with Nazism.

History would be replayed a generation later in 1953, when Edward VIII’s niece, Princess Margaret, went through similar suffering over love. The Queen’s sister had fallen in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a royal courtier and Battle of Britain flying ace. Townsend, who had been equerry to King George VI, was divorced from his wife.

The stigma of the sister of the head of the Church of England marrying a divorcee was too much for the establishment. Marrying in a church would have been impossible. Princess Margaret may be remembered for hard partying, but she was also religious, and the idea of marrying outside the church horrified her. She was even told she wouldn’t be able to receive communion. Winston Churchill’s government tried to discourage the relationship, and Margaret was asked to wait two years before marrying Townsend. Then he was effectively banished from the kingdom and sent on government business to Brussels.

In the end, the love between Margaret and Townsend couldn’t sustain the pressure put upon it. They drifted apart, and he married another woman in 1959. Margaret would go on to have a tempestuous, cruel and adulterous marriage with Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon. They married in 1960 and divorced in 1978.

There were rumours that Margaret attempted suicide and had a nervous breakdown, though such claims remain either unconfirmed or denied. Whatever the effect on Margaret, like so many in her family she was broken by love.

Unconfirmed rumours have also stalked Prince Philip. Throughout his marriage to Queen Elizabeth there has been gossip of affairs. Much of the TV series The Crown – which has been fairly accurate, if imaginative, with history – has centred around hints, whispers, speculation and innuendo surrounding Philip’s love life. What we do know for sure is that the Queen was very much in love with Philip when they married. The same cannot be said of her son Prince Charles when he married Lady Diana Spencer.

By the time Charles was introduced to Diana in 1977, he had already met the love of his life, Camilla Shand. But like so many Windsor loves the relationship was to be thwarted. The couple got together in 1971. Princess Anne was dating Andrew Parker-Bowles, who had just split up with Camilla. Charles got her on the rebound. The pair were very much in love, it seems, but some royals, such as the Queen Mother and Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle and Charles’ mentor, didn’t approve.

Camilla had lived life as a relatively “normal” young woman despite her aristocratic status. The fact that she’d had lovers made her unsuitable for Charles in the eyes of many senior courtiers. Charles’ godmother Patricia Mountbatten said, in the year Camilla married the Prince of Wales: “With hindsight, you can say that Charles should have married Camilla when he first had the chance. They were ideally suited, we know that. But it wasn’t possible.” It could be an epitaph for so many doomed Windsor romances.

Biographer Sarah Bradford wrote in her 2007 book Diana that Lord Mountbatten apparently arranged for Charles to be sent overseas on a Royal Navy posting in order to strain the relationship. The machinations of the royal family and its loyal courtiers eventually put an end to the love affair.

Camilla returned to Parker-Bowles and married him in 1973. However, by 1980, Charles and Camilla were lovers again. Parker-Bowles didn’t object. In 1981, Diana would marry Charles in a seemingly fairy-tale wedding. As Diana would later tell the world, there were three people in the marriage, thanks to Camilla, not two.

Diana was seen by the royal family as the perfect bride – pure, wholesome, everything Camilla was not. Lord Mountbatten once told the young Charles: “In a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for ... It is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.”

Diana once said of Charles and their relationship: “He’d found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.”

Diana would, in a way, end up as a sacrifice. As her marriage broke down, she was the most celebrated woman on Earth – hunted ruthlessly by the press and paparazzi.

With Charles and Camilla in the background, Diana found solace with a lover herself, having an affair with James Hewitt between 1986 and 1991. Charles and Diana eventually separated in 1992.

Diana had been starved of affection. After the breakdown of her marriage, she went in search of real romantic love – and it would lead her to her death.

On August 31, 1997, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed were pursued by paparazzi through the streets of Paris late at night. The car they were in crashed, and the world’s most glamorous woman was left dying in the back of a black Mercedes in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Soon the entire world was saying that love had killed Diana.

Today, the memory of his mother seems to inform every decision Harry makes – especially when it comes to his wife, Meghan. As a boy, he was forced to walk behind the gun carriage bearing the body of his dead mother in front of the eyes of the world. No parent would want the same horror to shape the lives of their own children.

Harry and Meghan now want to step back from their royal duties in the hope of living something which approximates to a “normal life”. Like many Windsors before him, Harry wishes to love as other people do. But is that possible for a Windsor? Can the shackles of royalty ever be shaken off?

As with many royal “crises” of the past, the country has split over the announcement. Megxit is the new Brexit. Some wish them well, others see it as an insult to the royal family. The seemingly insurmountable problem for Harry and Meghan, though, is that they wish to retain some of the trappings of royalty – the homes, wealth, privilege, titles, the power – while divesting themselves of the duty, obligations and public scrutiny of life within the House of Windsor.

In the end, if Harry does wish to live freely, as all people should be allowed to do, then it seems he must abandon those trappings in order to finally break the curse of the House of Windsor, and the tragedy that being a member of that family brings to the simple act of falling in love.