Bertie was a boy who couldn’t do anything right. He couldn’t walk right or talk right or write his letters with the right hand. And he lived in a time when doing things the right way, the proper way, was very important.
His father was the handsome and strong-willed King George V. His great-grandmother was that epitome of rightness and propriety, Queen Victoria.
His brother David, who would follow his father as King Edward VIII, was the perfect person for the job—handsome and popular and right in all the ways Bertie was wrong. Their father never got furious at David the way he did at Bertie.
But Bertie grew up to be the handsome and popular King George VI, the perfect king to lead his country through the dark days of World War II. And he recently became the subject of the Academy-Award-winning film The King’s Speech.
The title of the movie is a double entendre, referring at once to the speech defect that caused him to stutter and to the important address he needed to give on the radio about the threat posed by Nazi Germany.
Bertie never expected to be king. In fact, it was the last thing he wanted. His brother did became king, but then he did the unthinkable. He abdicated.
There are two reasons he decided to give up being king. One was the reason he gave in a speech at the time. He wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, an American woman who had been divorced. This is the reason many Americans still believe--that he gave up the chance to be king for love.
The second reason was darker and more sinister. He liked Hitler, the leader of Germany. He didn't really believe that Hitler would imprison and kill the Jewish people in Germany, take over most of the rest of Europe, and try to bomb the British into submission. But that's just what he did!
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