They were one of the world’s most famous couples, their future sealed when he renounced his throne for her and she renounced her husband for him. But so much disapproval surrounded the audacious affair between King Edward VIII of England and American socialite Wallis Simpson that their eventual marriage, before a handful of guests in France in 1937, felt more like a perp walk than a wedding.

“It was a sad little service,” Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a wedding guest known as “Baba Blackshirt” because of her reputed fascist sympathies, wrote in her journal. “It could be nothing but pitiable and tragic to see a King of England of only six months ago, an idolised King, married under these circumstances.”