“An Amazing King [&] Government Crisis”: Wallis Simpson, Alberta, and the American Way

If you have a moment, please tap the heart button. THANK YOU! It helps others find my work. 💗 To join the conversation, consider upgrading your subscription today.

Today I spent the morning filming for a documentary on the Abdication Crisis — that glittering, heartbreaking episode when love clashed with duty, and a king gave up his crown for a woman the establishment could never accept.

Standing under the studio lights, speaking as a Gilded Age historian, I was there to explain how American women had, decades earlier, transformed British society — and how Wallis Simpson became the final, catastrophic chapter of that story.

Yet as I spoke about Wallis — the Baltimore-born divorcée whose charm and chic shook the monarchy — I found myself thinking of another American who had watched it all unfold quietly: our very own Alberta Sturges Montagu, Countess of Sandwich.

While Wallis dominated headlines, Alberta was writing in her diary. No gossip, no dramatics — just a few, spare lines that caught the pulse of a nation in turmoil.

---

Before the Abdication: The Death of the King

In January 1936, Alberta’s diary entries trace the slow, solemn decline of King George V — a monarch whose passing marked the end of one era and the uncertain beginning of another.

Monday, January 20: “A day of great grief throughout the nation. Parliament being summoned… sympathy also family & household to the Queen at Sandringham and to King Edward at St. James’s Palace.”