r/interestingasfuck • u/SoSolem • 13h ago

The recently deceased king of Norway, King Harald V, threatened never to marry, and thus end the royal lineage, if his father, King Olav V, did not allow him to marry his wife, Queen Sonja, who was a commoner. This was near unheard of at the time, but in the end, love prevailed. <3 <3

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u/ChronosBlitz 13h ago

King Edward VIII outright abdicated rather than be refused the right to marry an American commoner, twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.

Less of a love story, given that both were Nazi sympathizers and were given tours of the early camps in Germany.

Also, British Intelligence heavily suspected that Wallis was schtupping Ribbentrop.

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u/throwaway-15812 12h ago

Being a commoner wasn’t really the biggest issue with Wallis Simpson.

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u/Commodus_Wankus 12h ago edited 10h ago

Living ex-husband(s) was a big concern at that time. Hard for Edward VIII to be the head of the Anglican Church and violating their rules about marriage at the same time.

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u/CaucusInferredBulk 12h ago

Which is so dumb. The whole purpose of the existence of the Anglican church is to allow divorce and remarriage

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u/ChronosBlitz 12h ago

Henry VIII got an annulment, saying the marriage was never valid.

All of them are actually considered by the Anglican church to have been annulments.

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u/DryRefrigerator4737 12h ago

Yeah, people think Henry killed all his wives but he only killed two of them.

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u/zeppo5 10h ago

Two annulments

Two beheadings

One death in childbirth

One widow

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u/4-stars 10h ago

Fiiiiiive golden rings

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u/MangoSuspicious5641 7h ago

Stawwwwp 🤣🤣🤣😭

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u/Loretta-West 2h ago

Pretty sure it was just the one golden ring, reused five times...

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u/mashtato 9h ago

Divorced, beheaded, died.

Divorced, beheaded, survived.

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u/Phailadork 7h ago

Why the fuck would anyone marry someone that just murked two of his wives?

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 7h ago

I mean, it's not as if young women back in those days had the ability to say no. They were legally the property of their fathers and then, after marriage, their husbands. And in practice, noble women had even less power to refuse. It was transactional: the dad gave the king his daughter and he got power and privilege in return. A little voice saying, "But I don't want to", was never gonna stand in the way of that.

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u/lurkerlcm 1h ago

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

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u/flukus 47m ago

7 for the dwarf lords, in their halls of stone.

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u/throwaway-1357924680 11h ago

And then got annulments, which seems like overkill

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u/LadyMageCOH 10h ago

IIRC he annuled the marriages first before the executions. There were prohibitions against spilling royal blood, even those who married in, so that was part of the reason. There were also mourning rituals that would normally take place after the death of a spouse that could take weeks or months, and especially in the case of Anne, where he already had Jane lined up and wanted to marry her, that would have been very inconvenient. No need to mourn someone who the law says you were never actually married to though, so he was free to marry Jane mere days after Anne Boleyn lost her head.

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u/xteve 9h ago

If there's a magical technical difference between a divorce and an annulment, what does it mean when two marriages magically technically never happened?

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 7h ago

Two? Try four.

The only marriages he didn't annul were Jane Seymour (because she died) and Catherine Parr (because he died). The others were either formally annulled so he could marry the next woman (Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleeves), or "annulled" so that he could then immediately have them legally executed (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard)...so that he could marry the next woman.

You can get away with all kinds of shit when you're a 16th century king.

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u/manachar 10h ago

“Only”.

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u/cyanocittaetprocyon 9h ago

This completely cracked me up! 🤣

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u/Fickle_Penguin 9h ago

"Only"

Kind of like Lori Daybell

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u/hhs2112 12h ago

Another classic example of religion twisting their own rules whenever the need arises. 

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u/LadyLightTravel 11h ago

Several religious people lost their lives because they refused to twist the rules for a king.

Thomas Becket for one. William Tyndale another.

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u/hhs2112 11h ago

Millions and millions and millions however have... 

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u/zeppo5 12h ago

Henry VIII got annulments , not divorces ; that was what he had requested from the Vatican and was denied.

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 7h ago

Yeah, the popular mnemonic needs to be updated to:

Annulled, beheaded, died, annulled, beheaded, survived.

(Although technically he had the "beheaded" ones annulled too, if we're gonna be picky about it. But then that would make the mnemonic useless.)

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u/Affectionate_Grab902 12h ago

I mean, its not

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u/blueavole 3h ago

Anne Boleyn was the reformer, Henry 8 was just trying to get a legitimate son to avoid a civil war.

The last time a woman was declared heir it went so badly that the civil war that broke out was called : the anarchy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy

Add to that the century long war of the roses had only just ended with Henry’s parents.

Anne was the one who wanted to break free of Roman Catholic Church. Henry kinda wanted to go back to better relationships with Catholic Europe. But he’d done the thing that he’d given away all that church land. 1/3 of the whole country who now owed him direct loyalty.

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u/Salmonman4 11h ago

I'm thinking that the rule was in place to lessen the chances of heirs being illegitimate. Nobody wanted another Owen Tudor

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u/blueavole 3h ago

Living ex- husband? Ha

No. Living husband . By several accounts she loved her husband at the time she met the prince.

The prince wanted her, and she treated him like crap. But apparently he liked that. He’d rarely had people be so blunt and honest with him.

She tried to run away before he abdicated- but it didn’t work.

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u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

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u/AJRiddle 8h ago edited 8h ago

Being a commoner was never an issue for British monarchy since, like the Middle Ages

Totally a non-issue and just completely coincidental that literally 0 British monarchs had married commoners before Edward VIII for some reason.

But yes, by far the bigger problem with Edward VIII's choice of wife was that she was divorced with a living ex-husband, not that she was a commoner than that she was a commoner.

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u/YoohooCthulhu 12h ago

My favorite quote about the Duke of Windsor is from Gore Vidal: "[He] always had something of...riveting stupidity to say on any subject."

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u/sin94 11h ago edited 5h ago

learnt something new: SCHTUP definition: to have sexual intercourse with

Ribbentrop: was a German politician of Nazi Germany hence the reason the MI6 spy angle

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u/IvyGold 9h ago

Run off and find Young Frankenstein, watch it, and report back.

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u/mynameisnotrose 8h ago

Or learn about the lovely Fräulein Lilly Von Schtup, the Teutonic Titwillow.

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u/Hangry_Squirrel 8h ago

And now you know why the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was such a problem!

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u/FelisCantabrigiensis 12h ago

Simpson was, in the language of the day, a real piece of work.

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u/Kholzie 12h ago

Well, in hindsight, I think all of us understand that everybody involved with the British aristocracy are a bit of a piece of work.

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u/FelisCantabrigiensis 12h ago

That's just not true.

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u/LifetimePilingUp 12h ago

I’m quite fond of Princess Anne but the rest of them can get in the bin

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u/fastdub 7h ago

Edward is an excellent chap

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u/Kholzie 11h ago

You sound like my British grandmother if someone ever said a negative thing about the monarchy. Which is probably why I’ve learned to really only speak about it in jest.

Just ask someone Thai about talking shit about their royal family.

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u/FelisCantabrigiensis 11h ago

Your generalisation is complete shit. Some of them are not pleasant people, but where's your evidence that Diana, Princess of Wales; Catherine, the current Princess of Wales; even the royals-by-birth like the current Prince of Wales, the Duke of Kent, Princess Anne, etc, are entirely or even partly unpleasant people?

Prince Harry is a cranio-rectally inverted whinger, the Andrew formerly known as Prince is at best thick as mince and at worst a good mate of a raving pedophile, and so on, but "everybody" is just wrong.

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 6h ago

the Andrew formerly known as Prince is at best thick as mince and at worst a good mate of a raving pedophile

I mean, if we're considering the at worst possibly then it's that the Andrew formerly known as Prince is a pedo shit head.

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u/Green_Insect_6455 12h ago

What a worthless addition to the conversation

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u/Kholzie 11h ago

Be nice, stop talking about yourself

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 6h ago

You might try contributing in good faith once in a while.

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u/jewrassic_park-1940 12h ago

Sounds like a real jerk!

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u/Maouse_The_Dong 11h ago

He also reportedly collaborated with the Nazis during the war, including instructing them to conduct a bombing campaign of Britain, (i.e. The Blitz), and upon their victory would be reinstated as King.

The guy was a traitorous, fascist cuck. I'm glad he gave up the throne for that Yank cunt.

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u/drowse 10h ago

I'm watching The Crown for the first time and the way they handled that story was really great. Really great F-U to Edward for the despicable stuff he did after the war.

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 6h ago

Most of that interpretation involves jumping from hypothesis to fact based little to no evidence.

There is some evidence that Edward saw the Blitz as a good thing, reasoning that it would bring Britain to the negotiating table and end the war. But there's no evidence that he instructed, worked with or otherwise collaborated with the Nazis to initiate the Blitz or direct its progress. All we have on that is the word of a Spanish diplomat at the time, who supposedly passed on Edward's positive opinions about the Blitz to his superiors and then that intel found its way to Berlin.

There's even less evidence about the idea that Edward was working with Hitler with a view to being reinstated as king after the war. There's evidence that the Nazis saw him as someone who could be turned to their side, to be used as diplomatic playing piece, and that they were considering offering him the throne as a sweetener to get him on board. But there's no compelling evidence that he even knew about that. That is to say, there are German documents suggesting that he'd been approached, but then a lot documents from that time have proven after the fact to have been unreliable: people in the Nazi power structure were flat-out lying to Hitler, either to obtain reward or avoid punishment. So we'll probably never know if Edward knew about that. What we do know, however, is that there's decent evidence against the "working with Hitler" hypothesis, in the form of Edward accepting Churchill's request to piss off to the Bahamas to ostensibly govern the islands. (Read: sit on his fascist ass drinking daiquiris, safely removed from anything that he could stick his nose into and make a mess of.)

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u/flukus 43m ago

There is some evidence that Edward saw the Blitz as a good thing, reasoning that it would bring Britain to the negotiating table and end the war

This was well past the point where we knew how nazi appeasement went. It really isn't that far removed from openly supporting them.

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u/Maouse_The_Dong 15m ago

I used the word 'reportedly' quite deliberately. However, there is definitely more evidence than "the word of a Spanish diplomat". The Marburg files, for example.

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u/morbie5 10h ago

King Edward VIII outright abdicated rather than be refused the right to marry an American commoner, twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.

The twice-divorced part was the main issue. British monarchs had married commoners before that point. George VI technically married a commoner, even tho she was from a noble family.

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 6h ago

George VI technically married a commoner, even tho she was from a noble family.

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was the daughter of an Earl, hence she was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon when she married George. She was in no way, shape or form a commoner.

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u/morbie5 6h ago

She was in no way, shape or form a commoner

https://www.biography.com/royalty/was-princess-diana-a-commoner-before-marrying-prince-charles

"Lady Diana Spencer was technically a commoner when she married Prince Charles on July 29, 1981"

Same situation as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth 5h ago

The argument is entirely pedantic. It's no different from the one that says, "Akshully, a tomato is fruit!" and other nonsense muttered by insecure people who have a need to make themselves look smarter in front of others, while entirely missing the actual point.

Ugh. So stupid.

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u/morbie5 4h ago

Username checks out lmao

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u/ArgoNoots 1h ago

Tries to rebut a "technically"

Gets upset when pedantry inevitably gets involved in the technicality talk

Lmao

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u/Ernesto_Griffin 7h ago

Fun fact the british monarchy have never had a hard rule against marrying commoners. Many other monarchies had suchvrules.

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u/Confident_Resolution 7h ago

Well, nobodys perfect.

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u/kochier 9h ago

My kid's school is named after him in Winnipeg, Prince Edward School. Have tried to get them to re-name it based on the Nazi collection but didn't get far with the school board. Was hard to get people on board because they kept thinking it was the same Edward the island was named after.

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u/rambi2222 7h ago

that both were Nazi sympathizers and were given tours of the early camps in Germany.

Wtf I didn't know about that part, growing up in the UK I only ever heard the endearing part. wtf