GREAT BRITAIN: Edvardus Rex

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Blasphemously in Baltimore, the home city of Mrs. Simpson, Editor H. L.

Mencken last week declared that "the greatest story since the Resurrection" is the now living drama of Edward VIII. It cannot be staged in Britain as a play, although George Bernard Shaw hastily wrote last week for William Randolph Hearst a strongly pro-Mrs. Simpson and pro-Edward VIII playlet in which he flung at Prime Minister Baldwin the ultimate Irish insult of tagging him "Prime Minister Goldwyn." But the drama the world wanted to see, Edvardus Rex, was acting and writing itself hour by hour as the amazing facts erupted. They formed not a stately royal play such as Laurence Housman's Victoria Regina* but a breathless cinema of swift pace and jazz tempo.

The Duke of York, heir to the Throne and hitherto always dignified to the point of insipidity, was so quickened and excited last week about whether he might at any moment become King and Emperor that, after a conference with his mother, Queen Mary, breathless York alighted at his home and rushed inside to tell his Duchess the latest with the long-legged bounce of a bolting jack rabbit, too fast for anything but the camera to catch (see cut). The accustomed massive aplomb of the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin was accelerated until the Prime Minister became one day last week a palpitating and perspiring fat man dashing between No. 10 Downing St. and Buckingham Palace in an atmosphere so agitated that he even forgot his hat.

Queen Mary alone played her role not in jazz time but with the stateliness of Wagnerian opera. For Her Majesty and all she stood for it might be Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods"), but she was far from "broken and weeping" as some dispatches reported. Just as they were being printed the Queen drove out in her regal Daimler. The chauffeur bowled along at moderate pace through a middle-class section of London and presently Queen Mary inspected through her lorgnette the still smoking ruins of the $10,000,000 Crystal Palace on which Queen Victoria and Prince Consort Albert lavished so much care when preparing the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The conflagration of the Crystal Palace last week sent towering 500 feet in air a column of flame seen by rustics in eight counties round about and was called the biggest London blaze since the historic "Great Fire" of 1666. One of 90 fire engines which struggled vainly to save the Exhibition Hall accidentally soused His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, the youngest son of Queen Mary, who was nicknamed by playfellows at school as "The Scent Bottle." In last week's unreeling of an Empire crisis, sleek, scented Kent was most of the time an orchidaceous extra waiting on the lot while British bigwigs performed the stellar roles in Edvardus Rex. Scenes from this cinema of official facts and carefully checked dispatches: