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The Legend of Millicent Milroy and Edward Prince of Wales
Royal scandal. Love. An enduring mystery.
Schoolteacher Millicent Milroy
Galt-born and educated schoolteacher Millicent Milroy quietly claimed to have wed Prince Edward, as her gravestone at Mount View Cemetery contends.
Edward, Prince of Wales
Almost everyone in Galt, as well as sizeable contingents from Preston and Hespeler turned out to see the handsome prince when he arrived by the royal train in 1919.
About Us
In the foothills of Alberta
- The Prince of Wales on the range at the Bar U Ranch, 1919.
Prime Minister Mackenzie King
Canada’s prime minister’s diary entry for August 4, 1927, is revealing. He notes that Edward confided in him that he was in love with a Canadian woman and he would later send her name. King also makes reference to British PM Stanley Baldwin telling him of a “little Canadian miss.”
Some Ranch
When he stayed at the famous Bar U Ranch near High River, Alberta, during the Royal Tour of 1919, Prince Edward was captivated by the western lifestyle. That fall he purchased the adjoining ranch from the Bedingfields, and renamed it the EP Ranch. Over the next decade or two he would return to his ranch, and even brought his new bride, Wallis Simpson there.
the controversy
Gravestone at Mount View has controversial inscription
In the nearly four decades since the death of Millicent Milroy, the legend of her supposed marriage to Edward, Prince of Wales, has only grown.
Born near Little's Corners—part of present-day Cambridge, Ontario—in 1890, Milroy was a single Canadian schoolteacher who caused a sensation in 1969 and into the 1970s when news of the inscription she had approved for the family tombstone became known.
The Milroys were among the first settlers to the Galt area; the first Milroy arrived from Scotland in 1827, just 11 years after the community was founded. Not surprisingly, there are several Milroy gravestones in Cambridge.
The inscription on Millicent’s stone, which was completed in 1968 on the east side of the tall granite obelisk marker at Mount View Cemetery in the west Galt section of the city, became widely known in the early 1970s.
It read: "Millicent A.M.M.M. I P. St. Daughter of James and Helen Jane Milroy. 1890- Wife of Edward (VIll), Duke of Windsor 1894 Millicent was far from dead in 1968. Nor was Edward Vill, who was referred to as the Duke of Windsor following his abdication of the British throne in 1936. At that point, free from the constraints of the throne, Edward was free to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Why did Milroy's inscription state she was his wife? Because, quite simply, Millicent believed—or at the very least, maintained throughout her life—that she was his wife.
It's an unlikely tale involving an early twentieth-century Canadian schoolteacher and one of the world's most famous and eligible bachelors, Edward, Prince of Wales. If true, or even partially true, it hints of royal scandal, romance and sex, and perhaps unrequited love.
Perhaps. But regardless of whether true or not, it is a juicy tale with more than a passing ring of truth to it. The unlikely part is not that the prince of Wales would have had an affair with a pretty young Canadian woman. Or even that a proper young schoolteacher would have fallen for the handsome prince. Rather, the unlikely part is that the prince would have secretly entered into marriage.
After all, he was famous for his romantic liaisons with single and married women and left a wake of conquests wherever his ship sailed. The extent of his carnal involvements became known to a fuller extent with the passage of the years. Lord Byng, Canada’s Governor General at the time of Edward’s royal visit in 1919, was reportedly aghast at the young prince’s conduct, even though Byng and Edward’s father were longtime friends. Just two years earlier Byng gained fame and glory as commander of the Canadian army corps on the western front when the Canadians were victorious at Vimy Ridge.
That victory was a foundational event in Canada’s identity. Some have gone as far as to say that Vimy Ridge marked the point in time in which Canada became a nation. Byng further endeared himself to Canadians when he assumed office and demonstrated his love for hockey, rarely missing the Ottawa Senators games. In 1925 Lady Byng presented the Lady Byng Trophy to the National Hockey League, a trophy that continues to be presented to the NHL player who exemplifies sportsmanship and excellence.
The playboy prince was, it appears, too freewheeling for the conservative, Eton-educated Byng. What Byng knew about Edward’s carnal activities in Canada is not known.
In 1926 Freeman Thomas was named Byng’s successor and as Canada’s new Governor General, he hosted Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, and Prince George, who had come to celebrate the 1927 Diamond Jubilee of the Confederation of Canada. On that trip the Prince of Wales dedicated the Memorial Chamber at the Peace Tower in a ceremony that was part of the first ever coast-to-coast radio broadcast in Canadian history.
Did Millicent see the prince during that visit? We don’t know. What seems more unlikely is that she and the prince would have been married, morganatic ceremony or not, in those post-war years, Morganatic weddings, which Edward VIll, by then King of England, had proposed as an expediency to British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1936 to allow him to marry Simpson, permit the union of two people of unequal social rank—royals and commoners—preventing the passage of the husband's titles and privileges to children born of the marriage.
Before delving into the unique circumstances of Milroy, and the prince, let's first briefly consider why the prince might possibly have entered into marriage at that stage of his life.
He was immensely famous, with women falling for him wherever he went. The Galt Reporter included a front page headline of his 1919 visit, saying “Prince Charming Accorded Warm Welcome by Galtonians.”
The war had just ended in 1918, a year before he commenced his royal tour of Canada, a tour that brought him, as it turns out, to Galt, Ontario on October 24, 1919. Life was pretty good, one would assume, for such a prince. A sanctioned royal wedding might have been acceptable to the twenty-something prince but his actions through those post-war years seem to show he enjoyed his bachelor status.
Why might he consider a secret morganatic marriage, as Milroy, contended was the case? If he had truly "fallen" for the pretty schoolteacher, such a wedding had few strings attached. There was no publicity, no public "record" of the union, no responsibilities. Assuming he did, indeed, have a romantic tryst with Milroy, and was duly smitten, offering such a wedding might have been his way of showing his love.
But this, of course, is mere speculation, as indeed, much of the tale is. So rather than continue with what-ifs, let's look at what is known about the Canadian schoolteacher and the prince.
Even those who think the whole tale is nothing more than a fanciful tale, admit to wanting it to be true. Sadly, concrete evidence doesn't exist to validate the claim by the late Millicent Milroy, who died in 1985, some 13 years after the Duke of Windsor.
But for some, truth (and facts) be damned. Many of those who firmly believe the story are satisfied with much of the anecdotal "evidence" that seems to support Milroy's contention.
Coupled with this anecdotal material, especially after the passage of nearly four decades since Milroy's death, at the age of 95, is the growing legend, which has seemingly taken on a life of its own. Fact and myth have become blurred. Many believe, for instance, that the two lovers hooked up at Galt's Iroquois Hotel on one of the prince's visits to Canada after the war.
Prince charming
Millicent Milroy first met prince in Galt
Let's start there. Fact. The prince of Wales did, indeed, visit Galt on Friday, October 24, 1919.
The royal train arrived at the Galt CPR station at 4:30 p.m., having come from the west, across the long, high bridge beside Galt Collegiate. He was in Galt for one hour, an hour packed with the usual formalities of speeches, laying a cornerstone, and inspecting troops and veterans of the Great War. Nothing was scheduled for the Iroquois Hotel, and indeed, the prince had no free time to break away from public view.
But the story of Millicent Milroy, does get interesting here. Much was made the in the press at that time of how area schoolchildren were given permission from various authorities to see the prince. Special arrangements were made, for instance, for schoolchildren from Hespeler and Preston to ensure they had a chance to see him and even get close.
Millicent was a schoolteacher at the time, and according to the late writer, artist and musician Bob Green, was pictured in a photograph taken of the prince when he was laying the cornerstone of the Memorial Hall at the Galt Veteran's Home. Green, who had been a reporter at the Galt Reporter a couple of decades after the prince's visit, said he saw the photograph himself in the newspaper's so-called "morgue." The prince was the focal point in the shot; Millicent happened to be captured off to the side.
The Reporter ceased publication September 19, 2003 and the photograph hasn't, to my knowledge, been seen since. Green liked to tell tales, but they were all true, though he would change names when necessary to avoid litigation. Let's suppose that there was indeed a photograph of the prince that included, by chance. Millicent Milroy, It would be evidence of the protagonists being in the same place at the same time. Green insisted he saw the photograph, and, having known him, I have no reason to disbelieve him.
Fact. Prince Edward did, indeed, lay the cornerstone for that hall, as validated by the Galt Daily Reporter at the time. And schoolchildren by the score, along with their teachers, were in attendance at various stages along his route during that hour-long visit. So it seems highly likely that Millicent met, or saw, the future king, perhaps even shaking his hand.
But of course, such a meeting, of which the prince would carry out hundreds of times a day, does not constitute a romance, much less a marriage.
Yet the legend of just such a wedding endures, more than a century after the prince visited Galt. What's more, people want the story to be true. And as with many legends, there is some plausibility; in the 1920s there was speculation that the playboy prince had been carrying on an affair with one or more Canadian women.
Millicent descended from an old Galt-area family of Scottish origin. According to the Hon. James Young, the Milroys were among the early settlers to the area that had been opened up to mostly fellow Scots by Dickson and his agent, Absalom Shade in the years after they first staked out the town in 1816. Mount View Cemetery contains several Milroy gravestones.
It was in Galt that Millicent received her schooling before becoming a schoolteacher. Yet Galt was a long way from the royal family.
Edward VIll, born four years after Millicent, in 1894, was a staff officer during the Great War and when the war ended, he grudgingly embarked on the Canadian tour, telling Dominion residents to be thrifty following the war as goods and materials were in short supply.
He loathed the continual platitudes and speeches he had to endure as heir to the throne. In 1917, during the First World War, Edward began a love affair with Parisian courtesan Marguerite Alibert (later Fahmy), who kept a collection of his indiscreet letters after he broke off the affair in 1918 to begin one with a married English textile heiress, Freda Dudley Ward. His letters revealed his disdain for the Canadian tour, which would keep him away from his lady friends back in England.
Edward's womanising and reckless behaviour during the 1920s and 1930s worried Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, King George V, and those close to the prince. George V was disappointed by his son's failure to settle down in life, disgusted by his affairs with married women, and reluctant to see him inherit the Crown. "After I am dead," George said, "the boy will ruin himself in twelve months."
Edward, it is clear now, was not temperamentally suited to inherit the throne. George V favoured his second son Albert ("Bertie") and Albert's daughter Elizabeth ("Lilibet"), later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II respectively. He told a courtier, "I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.
Given Edward’s extended tour in Canada during the fall of 1919, and his penchant for relationships with attractive women—married or single—it stands to reason that he might have been involved with a Canadian woman.
During the Diamond Jubilee tour of 1927, Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary, on August 4 of that year, that the prince confided in him that he was in love with a Canadian woman and would send King her name later. They were at Laurier House when he made that claim.
In the very same diary, King reveals that British prime minister Stanley Baldwin knew the prince was involved with a Canadian woman and told him that he hoped the prince would forget about “his little Canadian Miss.”
The prince had also visited nearby Guelph in 1919. Did Millicent see him there? This question was not on anyone's mind in 1919, of course. Indeed, the story of their supposed relationship might have remained an interesting tale of local lore had it not been for those words Millicent had inscribed on the Milroy, family tombstone at Mount View a half-century after Edward visited the area.
When the Duke died in 197–famed for not only having been King of England but the man who had given it all up for a divorcee—Millicent was questioned by the Guelph Daily Mercury (June 13, 1972) about the inscription.
Reportedly a quiet woman who rarely spoke about the affair, she did tell the newspaper at the time of the Duke's death that the initials after her name on the stone stood for Agnes Mary Maureen Marguerite, Princess of the Royal House of Stuart. The latter designation is based on her claim that her father Prince James was royal pretender to the throne of Scotland.
It stands to reason then that when they met, she envisioned one royal meeting another. But of course, such an innocuous meeting, of which the prince would carry out hundreds of times a day, does not constitute a romance, much less a marriage.
It is interesting to note that, aside from reported rumours that the prince had a love interest in Canada, as noted by newspapers at the time, there would have been no other hint that Milroy and the prince had been connected were it not for Milroy, herself, quiet and unassuming as she may have been. Indeed, King’s diary contents would not be revealed for many more years. King died July 22, 1950. When his diary was available for researchers at the National Archives, his references to a Canadian woman bolstered Milroy’s claim, but didn’t prove it.
She may have demurred from giving facts or information to curious journalists over the years, all seeking some confirmation or proof of the relationship, but it was Millicent herself who approved the inscription in stone on her tomb. That speaks volumes.
As taciturn as she was perceived to be, we have to consider that it was Millicent herself, after all, that told the world she and the future king had married. It's written in stone.
When pressed, she said she secretly married the duke during one of his frequent visits to Canada, though she refused to offer details other than saying the couple wed in western Canada and that they had two sons, Edward and Andrew.
Her own words should quash the rumours of her having met the Prince in October 1919 at the Iroquois Hotel on Main Street in Galt. Still, as CBC reporter Dan Bjarnason noted when working on a 1990 story for The National, "It's quite a story. It's something you can't quite prove and you can't quite disprove." (Cambridge Reporter, Nov. 5, 1990)
As we have noted, it is an implausible story, no doubt, but as Bjarnason says, "there are some nearly believable aspects to it.”
As the twentieth century unfurled, more and more evidence laid bare the prince's proclivity for affairs of the heart. Yet even at the time, the prince's reputation as a ladies man was common knowledge, openly reported in Canadian newspapers during his visit. The papers observed how Canada's young women swooned over the boy prince. This was in stark contrast to the demure young Canadian schoolmistress. He was already worldy, despite being younger than Millicent; she was pretty, to be sure, and an exemplar of Dominion female virtue, dedicated to instilling the proper values in the next generation of Canada's youth.
During that 1919 royal tour, Edward stayed at the famed Bar U Ranch in Alberta. Signing the visitors’ book at the Bar U, he wrote “Some Ranch!”
Simon Evans, who wrote a book about the history of the Bar U ranch, said the prime had been impressed with the size and diversity of the operations at the ranch, by the beauty and expansive openness of the foothills, and by the warmth of his welcome.
The ranch was already four decades old, and Evans told how the prince liked rubbing shoulders with some of the early cattlemen, those rough and tumble real-life cowboys who had contributed to the establishment of the ranch during the 1880s.
Not only was the Bar U one of the most famous ranches in Canada, but its fame was legendary and included brushes with Owen Wister, an American writer and historian—he authored The Virginian—considered the father of western fiction. Legendary cowboy John Ware worked there, as did a cowhand known later as the Sundance Kid—he of butch Cassidy fame.
The young Prince of Wales was so impressed with the ranch, and western Canada, that he purchased the adjacent ranch to make a foothold in the foothills of the Rockies. That ranch, purchased from an Englishwoman and her son—she was the widow of a former British soldier—set the stage for future Canadian trips for the boy who would be king.
Of note was that Ainslie Melross, a Galt resident and athlete who was later enshrined into Cambridge's Sports Hall of Fame, was a cowboy on the Bar U around that time.
The future king, if he didn’t like the routine and repetitive aspects of the royal tour, did enjoy the west, and the ranch he bought that year. Were there other “fringe benefits” of his tour that also brought pleasure in 1919 and subsequent years?
Milroy said she and the prince had wed in western Canada. And it was possible that she met him there. Former Reporter writer Marie Sutherland, writing in 1990, said that the Reporter first broached the subject of the prince having a budding romance, saying he had purportedly fallen in love with a local girl. But no names were ever published.
The CBC's Bjarnason stated that "this was before Miss Milroy, ever went public with the story." And, he added, "in those days this sort of speculation was unheard of in the papers.
Not entirely. Indeed, when a local woman by the name of Emma Orr went missing late in the nineteenth century—it was discovered she had been murdered—a prime suspect was the writer of several love letters discovered in Orr's desk drawer that were duly re-printed in the newspaper for all the world to see. The writer of the love letters was none other than a well-known businessman named Briscoe. So the papers were not as conservative as we might believe. The well-known Galt merchant couldn’t have been pleased, though no doubt he was relieved when young James Allison was arrested, then tried and convicted for her murder. Allison was the first person ever hung at the Waterloo County Gaol.
As for Millicent and the prince, tangible proof of a marriage, let alone an affair between them, is nowhere to be found.
Here again, we are left with, at best, merely anecdotal reports. But with the inscription on the gravestone, and given the reputation of the prince with women, it has been enough to inspire a play—Queen Milli of Galt, by Gary Kirkham—and at least one novel, Millicent: A Mystery, written by respected Canadian author Veronica Ross, who, it must be noted, was the late wife of Green.
Ross and Green died within weeks of each other in 2019. I knew them both, and they said that Veronica, armed with research that would help give credence to the legend, was going to write a non-fictional account of the relationship between Millicent and the prince.
Her earlier book about Milroy was a work of fiction, though based on Millicent’s story. She never finished the non-fictional account, nor is it known if, indeed, she ever started it.
But she and Green were local experts on Milroy and the details of how the prince and the schoolteacher met. Millicent insisted she met Edward during his 1919 visit to Galt, but that they wed out west.
Ross never lived to write that full account of the schoolteacher and the prince, but on September 8, 2001, she did write a lengthy feature article about the alleged affair for the K-W Record. In that article, she revealed she had written to the Queen in 1991 seeking information about the relationship if any such archival material existed.
Miss Pamela Clarke, Deputy Registrar of the Royal Archives, wrote back to Ross saying Her Majesty had asked her to reply—Edward was Queen Elizabeth’s uncle—stating there was no reference to Milroy in the archives.
"But it is, of course, virtually impossible to disprove a story such as this as one can do no more than say there is no evidence here to support it."
Ross openly wondered whether this response was "politeness or a clue." She thought, in all probability, that the archivist's reply was not, in fact, a clue, yet in speaking with an employee at Mount View Cemetery, she wondered. The Mount View employee casually mentioned that a relative of the postmaster from Rockwood, where Milroy lived most of her adult life, visited the grave and "confirmed he had received royal mail, something Milroy insisted was the case.”
And according to Sutherland's 1990 Reporter article, "it was known that she was the legal guardian of a man who would have been the right age-born in 1920-to have been the result of the 1919 affair."
But another newspaper article states in later years that Milroy said she and the prince didn't wed until several years after that 1919 visit to Galt. If she had been a schoolteacher meeting the prince that late October day in 1919, how would it have been possible for her to hook up with him in western Canada until at least the following summer when school was out? And even if that were the case, having a child in 1920 seems highly improbable, if not impossible.
Milroys came from Scotland
The Milroys were early Scottish settlers to what is now the Cambridge, Galt, area in the mid-nineteenth century.
The relationship “could have happened”
Milroy was eccentric, yes, “but not crazy”
Besides, the legal guardian Millicent was in charge of died in a car accident in 1950, according to the 1990 Reporter story.
Bjarnason believed his research indicated that Milroy might have been somewhat "eccentric, but not crazy."
In the end, the CBC story straddled the fence about the legend. "It involves a lot of speculation, a lot of leaps of faith," he said, "but at no point does the story actually break down. It could have happened."
An October 19, 1985 K-W Record article by John Roe, published the same week that Millicent died, said "It is a matter of record the dashing Prince of Wales, then 25, visited Guelph on Oct. 21, 1919, and Galt three days later during a week-long tour of southern Ontario. Milroy, 29 at the time, was living in nearby Rockwood and teaching school.
In 1924 and 1927 the prince returned to Canada and spent considerable time at his ranch in Alberta.
Ross reported doing an extensive search of the archives of Ontario, and found evidence of Milroy’s teaching career in Ontario, but also reported a gap from 1927 to 1930.
“Where was she, then, during those years,” asked Ross?
The Prince of Wales made his fourth visit to his ranch near High River, Alberta in 1927, accompanied by his brother, Prince George—later King George VI—and Stanley Baldwin and his wife.
During that low-key royal visit the High River Times described Mrs. Baldwin as “generous-sized,” and said that Edward went by the “names of Ted Windsor or Baron Renfrew,” when he was in Alberta, and that he looked “almost like a flapper.”
In the 1920s, flappers wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behaviour.
That same summer, when the prince was in Ottawa, he spoke privately with Canada’s prime minister, Mackenzie King, at Laurier House. In King’s diary entry for August 4, 1927, he wrote that Baldwin had expressed reservations about Edward. He was concerned about what should be done if the Royal family were to throw up a sort of George IV. “Let your fertile mind work on that.”
It was a reference to an earlier Prince of Wales, Edward IV, whose infatuation with Maria Fitzherbert, a beautiful but twice-widowed woman six years his senior. The two were first introduced in the spring of 1784, and the prince became infatuated with her. He wouldn’t rest until she agreed to secretly marry him on December 15, 1785, in the drawing room of her house on Park Street in London.
The ceremony was invalid given that it had not been given approval by the King and the Privy Council.
Even if the wedding had been sanctioned, the Prince of Wales would have been removed from the succession to the British throne. Nevertheless, the couple had a large family before the prince eventually publicly married Duchess Caroline of Brunswick on 8 April 1795.
Was the supposed marriage between Millicent and Edward merely history repeating itself? Was Baldwin’s concern raised to Canada’s prime minister a reference to the prince’s situation with the Canadian schoolteacher?
In 1796, three days after Caroline gave birth to a daughter, the Prince of Wales incredulously included his “first” wife, Maria, with whom he may have fathered at least two, and, as some scholars maintain, many more children, in his last will and testament. He bequeathed all his "worldly property ... to my Maria Fitzherbert, my wife, the wife of my heart and soul."
Edward IV was also known to have had a daughter with actress Mary Perdita Robinson.
Interestingly, that earlier but invalid marriage ceremony was performed by one of the prince's chaplains, Reverend Robert Burt, who had been sent to the Fleet Street prison because of his enormous debts, debts that were paid by the prince to release him from his incarceration.
British royals, like those elsewhere in the world, have dealt with similar issues throughout the annals of recorded history. Human nature does not always follow protocols, and there are many secrets in the royal closets. Questions, like the ones novelist Veronica Ross posed to the Royal Archives, must be asked, of course, but the official answers are as predictable as they are un-enlightening. Perhaps the diary of Canada’s prime minister is as close as we’ll ever get to confirmation of Millicent Milroy’s story.
For the royal protagonists, there are support systems and money to deal with the aftermath of an event that could never be acknowledged. Case in point: look no further than the life of Edward and Wallis Simpson.
For commoners like Milroy, she could only draw on memories to sustain her in the years following what she claimed to have been an affair of the heart, a flesh and blood relationship that only one side could ever confirm. Even her confirmation was proffered reluctantly.
Unfortunately, the list of “commoners” who are are left to make sense of their brush with royal dramas, is a long one, and history does not always look kindly on them.
Given the nature of Edward, and the otherwise reputable character she offered to the world through her lifetime, her claim of marriage to the prince does not strain our sense of credulity.
Record reporter Roe, like Bjarnason, said there were enough tantalizing threads of truth to the whole story of Millicent and Edward VIII that the remaining unanswered questions, at the very least, "make it difficult to dismiss her claims totally."
At the time Edward gave up the throne as King in 1936, Mackenzie King’s diary was private, where it would remain seen by no one other than King himself for several decades. Yet he revealed in his diary entry on August 4, 1927, when he and the prince had spoken privately, that the prince told him of “his intention to marry and that he would send me the name of the lady later on.”
Marriage! This was years before Wallis, at the time he was involved with a “little Canadian Miss.”
After the prince left his ranch and the decade of the 1920s closed and the world was consumed with a global depression, Millicent went on with her life as a schoolteacher. Her Ontario teaching career records remained blank between the years 1927 to 1930. Evidently she did not teach during those years, but resumed teaching afterwards.
Decades later, as researchers looked back on her life and tried to piece things together, those seemingly missing years raised questions. Was she out west with the prince, at times, and giving birth to two children? She claimed her “Ted,” was a gentleman throughout and that there was financial support, though she never elaborated.
Edward’s next visit to his ranch would not be for more than a decade, and when he did return it was with his new bride Wallis Simpson. Much had happened by then, of course. He had created a world-wide sensation by giving up the throne for the woman he loved. Surely he could have secretly wed an earlier Canadian woman he loved. But there are no known facts that conclusively prove Milroy’s contention.
As Veronica Ross noted in her 2001 Record article, none of the available information shows a marriage between Milroy and the prince, “but it does allow for some interesting speculation.”
Twyla Hendry, a longtime school board trustee, only fuelled this speculation when she revealed to Ross that “In the thirties, I spent my summers in High River.” She recalled hearing about the prince and a local woman he had a dalliance with. “Later, I heard that Millicent had two children in Saskatchewan.”
Ross interviewed a Guelph couple, Tom and Norma Patterson, for her book. Millicent boarded with Norma’s parents in Campbellville when she taught there in 1939 and 1940. Sitting up late into the night, Milroy spoke to her about going west in the 1920s and about her relationship with the prince.
In a 1995 interview with Record editorial writer Lloyd Bibby, Millicent said she was still receiving monthly cheques from the Royal family, and had letters from the Duke and representatives of the Royal family. They were in a chest.
But she never showed the evidence to anyone, though occasionally she did show photographs of the prince. But besides having a portrait of the Duke, which Bibby said she could have acquired anywhere, "he saw nothing else to back up her statements."
Still, he said "she was a charming, intelligent, articulate lady (who) told these stories we thought ridiculous with a straight face, as if she knew they were true."
Cambridge electrician Gilbert Crossman did some wiring in the Milroy home, but even long before that, he recalled hearing of the story of the prince and Millicent in the 1940s.
“We should have let him had his little Canadian Miss.”
British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin referring to Edward V
more questions than answers
”A lot of truth to Milroy’s claims”
She seemed to be fond of the electrician and shared details of her wedding with the prince, even showing him wedding photos. He easily recognized the prince, and said that the prince had used another name, a royal name, but not the Prince of Wales.
In April, 1986, the Guelph Mercury published a letter from Gladys Aslett, who noted her aunt had been a lady’s maid for the Queen Mother’s family in England. She said her aunt had commented that there was “a lot of truth” to Milroy’s claims.
Puzzles remain. Just days after her death, reported the Record, her home was broken into and furniture and other items were stolen. That cedar box of letters she spoke of in her 1968 Record interview, the letters she said would prove her claim after her death, went missing. It was stolen along with a family bible and photographs, among other things.
Not long after the theft, Milroy’s nephew, Kenneth Letson, received a call from the OPP that they had some items they thought might belong to his aunt. The incident was reported by Daniel Jeffries of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in 1995.
“Ontario Provincial Police claimed they stopped a van which belonged to the thieves. They thought the contents might be Aunt Millie’s stuff.” But when Letson went to view the contents, the police said “they’d lost the photos and couldn’t find the other stuff.”
After surveying the available evidence and reading the stories about Milroy’s claims, Ross offers this: “None of the above offers proof. And yet, all these tantalizing facts at the very least point to a fascinating story, to the possibility that it is more than just a story that has grown and grown with the telling, with people using bits of memory and supposition to support a tale they very much want to believe.”
And many people believe the story. Many more want to believe it. Millicent, before her death in 1985 at the age of 95, put it this way: “I’ve been told not to say any timing or sign anything,” she told a reporter in 1972. “But I will say that he (the Duke of Windsor) has been a gentleman throughout it all.”
And including the inscription, she said, was not in her original plans. “It wasn’t my idea to put the inscription on the stone in the first place,” she said. “I didn’t want to but they said I should.”
According to Alan Ferris in a 1985 Guelph Mercury article, a friend of Millicent’s was quoted as saying Milroy told her “They’ll have to wait until I die and then they’ll know.”
As Milroy aged, she was hard-pressed to properly care for herself. Always consistent in her stories about her marriage, she began to get confused and when she was forced into a retirement home—Heritage House in Guelph—she suffered from malnutrition according to Ross, and her home was infested with fleas. Yet she would re-tell her royal tales frequently, and even protest when she thought she wasn’t being treated like a “royal.”
Milroy was 95 when she died at Guelph General Hospital on a Saturday in October, 1985.
Despite the best efforts through the decades of hordes of journalists, both print and TV, including some from Great Britain, no one has ever been able to publish sufficient evidence to show that Milroy’s claims were true. Nor can we say that evidence exists to disprove her claims.
Verifiable facts are few, though these almost invariably don’t preclude a relationship between Milroy and the prince. More common are the anecdotes, and these are legion. Years ago Grace Day, wife of the then retired Rockwood postmaster, recalled hearing that British Prime Minister Baldwin had remarked in 1936, after the Wallis Simpson affair instigated Edward VIII’s abdication: “We should have let him had his little Canadian Miss.”
Millicent Milroy may well have been that “little Canadian Miss.” What we do know is that a small wooden sign, carved by Cambridge native George Aitkin only a few years ago to replace an old sign that showed the way to the Milroy grave, is the only place marker in the entire cemetery, pointing visitors and the curious to Millicent’s gravestone.
There are two graves at Mount View that draw the bulk of the visitors; one is the grave of Toronto Maple Leaf hockey legend Syl Apps, a grave that drew hockey legends Ken and Dave Dryden in the summer of 2022, just months before Dave’s death. The Drydens, of which there are many at rest in Mount View, are related to the Apps. The other grave that people want to see in large numbers is the grave of the schoolteacher who claimed to have married Edward VIII.
The romance of the story is destined to only gain new generations of followers, and believers, with time. After all, truth really can be stranger than fiction.
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Mount View Cemetery contains many notable graves
The Milroys were early residents of Galt
The Milroys were early residents of Galt
The Milroys were early residents of Galt
John and Annie Milroy were relatives of Millicent’s; they were murdered at their farmhouse in the 1930s.
John & Annie Milroy grave at Mount View
The Milroys were early residents of Galt
The Milroys were early residents of Galt
The Milroy name is common in the Galt, Cambridge area. The Milroys were early settlers to the area from Scotland.