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HISTORY
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The Life of Edward VIII
The 20th century monarch would abdicate from the throne of Great Britain and the commonwealth before marrying Wallis Simpson and retiring to America.
By Will Street
Jul. 25, 2019, 11:30 AM
Introduction
An age of economic depression and increasing international unrest, Edward VIII was crowned king on the 20th January 1936. Someone who would demonstrate a disregard for constitutional conventions during his time as king, Edward ultimately abdicated the throne when it became apparent he could not reign as monarch and marry his lover, Wallis Simpson.
Lasting for 326 days, Edward VIII is the shortest-reigning monarch of the United Kingdom in history. He was born during the reign of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and was particular for his many love affairs. In the analysis below, I look at his life in more detail.
Edward's Life Before Becoming King
The future king was born on the 23rd June 1894 at White Lodge in Richmond Park during the reign of his great grandmother, Queen Victoria. As the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of York, Edward was third in line to the throne behind his father and grandfather. From his early years onwards, the young prince was brought up by nannies following the royal customs of the age.
His early education was carried out by a home tutor, precisely by a woman called Helen Bricka. Later, after Queen Victoria had died and his grandfather and grandmother were king and queen, Edward’s education was transferred to Frederick Finch and Henry Hansell. In charge of the prince’s education, the two tutors kept Edward under strict supervision until the age of thirteen. During this time, private tutors provided him with an education into various subjects, including French and German.
Past the age of thirteen, the young prince enlisted in the Royal Naval College, Osbourne, before moving to the Royal Naval college at Dartmouth after two years after being unhappy at the former school. There, at the Royal Naval college, he planned to embark on a future career in the navy.
On the 6th May 1910, Edward VII passed away and Edward’s father, George V, ascended the throne. The prince was thus duly appointed the Prince of Wales and later also the Earl of Chester on the 23rd June 1910 – his sixteenth birthday. With this newfound position, provisions for his reign as king became truly underway. From his career in the navy, which involved a position as a midshipman on board the battleship, the Hindustan, for three months, he transferred himself to Magdalen College, Oxford. There, as historians have noted, being considerably underprepared for his studies, the prince eventually left the university after eight terms, with no qualifications.
Whatever absence of success the prince had experienced during his time as a student, before long the First World War would break out across Europe. Having reached the minimum age for service by this point, Edward was keen to enlist in the armed forces. His first overture was joining the Grenadier Guards in June 1914, and although he was willing to serve on the front lines, Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, refused to allow it on behalf of the enormous blow to the war effort the Prince of Wales being captured by the enemy would cause.
Nonetheless, Edward visited the front line as much as he could and experienced trench warfare at first hand. The prince’s involvement in the First World War was recognised by the award of the Military Cross in 1916 and he remained popular with veterans once the war came to an end. On top of this, Edward undertook his first military flight in 1918 and later gained a pilot’s license.
During the latter stages of the First World War, in January 1919, Edward’s brother, John, who was eleven years younger than him, died of an epileptic seizure. The Prince of Wales was somewhat insensitive regarding the death, and had thought of the young boy as more of a nuisance, at one point writing what he would later describe as a cold-hearted and unsympathetic letter to his mother, for which he would later apologise for.
Whilst as the Prince of Wales, Edward predominately travelled across the globe supporting his father. He gained notoriety as a fashionable celebrity who became the leading light in men’s fashion during the 1920s. Despite visiting both wealthy and impoverished regions all across the globe, Edward was somewhat at odds with some of the less developed regions of the world, particularly the Australian aborigines whom he described rudely as “the most revolting form of living creatures I’ve ever seen” at one point.
Whatever the lack of sensitivity and rudeness of the age, Edward would also become notorious for his love romances during his time as the Prince of Wales. The first notable one of these was with the Parisian courtesan, Marguerite Alibert. Edward had been accustomed to travel to Paris during the War while he had been on the western front to socialise and party. There, he had been introduced to Marguerite Alibert and soon became infatuated with her, sending her numerous candid letters, which Marguerite preserved. However, although Edward broke off the relationship after about a year, Marguerite was later involved in a much-publicised murder trial in 1923 after she had shot her husband at the Savoy Hotel for which she was acquitted. The Royal Household took every effort to ensure Edward’s name was not mentioned in connection with her.
Indeed, Edward’s numerous love romances, unwillingness to marry and relationships with married women during the 1920s and 1930s worried King George V, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and those close to the prince. King George V was reluctant to see him inherit the Crown and at one point said his son will “ruin himself in twelve months” if he were to assume the throne after his death. Rather, King George preferred his second son, Albert, and his daughter, Elizabeth (both would later reign as monarchs).
Nonetheless, despite jokes among the royal family over who would take over the throne, Edward continued life as the Prince of Wales during the 1930s. In 1930, King George gave Edward the lease of Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park. There, the prince continued his love affairs with a series of married women, including Freda Dudley Ward and the American wife of a British peer, Lady Furness.
Lady Furness introduced Edward to her friend and fellow Americana, Wallis Simpson. Someone who had divorced her first husband, U.S. naval officer Win Spencer, in 1927 and was currently married to Ernest Simpson, a British-American businessman, she and the Prince of Wales became lovers while Lady Furness was travelling overseas. This latest romance worsened Edward’s relationship with his father yet further. Although King George and Queen Mary, Edward’s parents, met Simpson in Buckingham Palace in 1935, they later refused to receive her. However, it would be this affair with Wallis Simpson that would have the greatest effect on the prince’s reign, when he was to become to king by the end of 1936.
King Edward VIII and Abdication
The man of 31 years in age ascended the throne of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth when King George V died on the 20th January 1936. Following the suit of the noticeable breaks with royal customs that would characterise his reign, King Edward immediately broke with convention by watching the proclamation of his own accession from a window in St. James’ Palace with his partner, Wallis Simpson, on the 21st January.
This feature of breaking with royal customs extended to the coinage minted to coincide with the coronation. Edward departed from the convention of positioning the monarch’s head in the opposite direction to their predecessor, instead facing left as his father had done so as to illustrate the parting in his hair.
Whatever the particular customs of his royal emblems, the king would cause uneasiness among government figures for his intrusion into political affairs. On a tour of the depressed villages of South Wales, he commented that something must be done to help the poor, unemployed coal miners, which was seen as an attempt to guide government policy. Alongside this, government official were even reluctant to send documents to Fort Belvedere, as the king showed little desire to read them and they feared they would be opened by Wallis Simpson or other guests, thereby inappropriately revealing government secrets.
There was even a murder plot during his short time as king. On the 16th July 1936, Jerome Bannigan, alias George Andrew McMahon, produced a loaded revolver while the king road on horseback at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. At the trial of Bannigan, the accused claimed he had been approached by a foreign power to carry out the deed, and he had informed MI5 and was merely carrying out the plan to help MI5 catch the real culprits. Bannigan was nonetheless sentenced to one year in prison, however historians today have suggested his claims he had informed MI5 may have been to some extent true, although the exact truth of his story still remains undetermined as of yet.
Yet while Edward VIII was enjoying his first year as king, stories of his romance with Wallis Simpson began to emerge in the press. The British Press was graciously quiet about the affair although the story became widespread in American media. However, King Edward and Wallis Simpson cruised the Eastern Mediterranean on the steam yacht, Nahlin, in August and September 1936 and, by October it became clearer that the king wanted to marry Wallis when divorce proceedings between the Simpsons were brought in Ipswich.
Indeed, the 16th November 1936 would be the day Edward VIII invited the then Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to Buckingham Palace and announced his desire to marry Wallis Simpson when she became free to marry after her divorce. To his dismay, the prime minister informed him that his subjects would deem the marriage unacceptable as marriage after divorce was not permitted in the Church of England. Edward, being the titular head of the Church of England, was expected to follow its teachings and he faced stark opposition, particularly from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, who demanded that Edward must abdicate.
A compromise was attempted to be reached. The king proposed the option of a morganatic marriage, where Simpson and the king would marry however she would not be made Queen, given instead a lesser title and their children would not inherit the throne. Despite having the support of some prominent politicians, for instance Winston Churchill, it was ultimately rejected by the British Cabinet as well as the Commonwealth governments.
The reason it was blocked lies in the Statue of Westminster 1931 that listed the provision that “any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Styles and Titles shall hereafter require the assent as well of the Parliaments of all the Dominions as of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.” The prime ministers of a range of Commonwealth nations expressed their opposition to the king marrying a divorcee, including Australia, Canada and South Africa.
Resolute, Edward VIII informed Stanley Baldwin that he would abdicate if he could not marry Wallis Simpson. There, with Edward’s wishes laid out, the prime minister presented the king with three options: he could either give up the idea of marriage, abdicate or marry against his ministers’ wishes. The latter would force the government to resign and cause a constitutional crisis thus, Edward, determined completely to marry Wallis Simpson, chose to abdicate.
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The procedures of an abdication were therefore carried out, Edward signing the instrument of abdication in Fort Belvedere on the 10th December 1936, in front of his three younger brothers, Prince Albert, Duke of York, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Prince George, Duke of Kent. The following day he received royal assent for the abdication and the consent of all dominion nations. In his worldwide radio broadcast on the night of the 11th December, he said, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.” He added that the “decision was mine and mine alone… The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different cause.”
Now, free from the burdens of the throne, the currently styled prince departed for Austria the following day, yet was unable to join Simpson until her divorce became absolute several months later. As for the throne, Edward’s brother, the Duke of York, reign began as George VI, while George VI’s elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth became heir presumptive.
Duke of Windsor and Later Life
Following the abdication, Edward became the Duke of Windsor with the style His Royal Highness. He would go on to marry Simpson in a private ceremony on the 3rd June 1937 at Château de Candé, near Tours. The Church of England refused to sanction the union, however a clergyman from County Durham, the Reverend Robert Anderson Jardine, offered to perform the ceremony. King George VI forbade any of the royal family members to attend, an act that would cause lingering resentment between the two parties in the years to come.
Nonetheless, Edward and Simpson’s living expenses were provided for out of the King George’s royal coffers, and their funds were increased further by the sale of Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle, which Edward had inherited, to King George VI. The sale earnt the Duke and Duchess approximately £300,000, which was the equivalent to between £20.5 and £134.4 million in 2019.
Relations between the couple and the royal family would, however, continue to be strained over the years to come. The Duke presumed he would settle in Britain after a couple of years in France in exile, however King George VI threatened to cut his allowance if he returned to Britain without invitation. And, at this point, Edward would embark on one of his most controversial periods as a statesman. Against the advice of the British government, in October 1937, the Duke and Duchess visited Nazi Germany and met Adolf Hitler at his Berghof retreat in Bavaria. The tour was much publicised by the German media and the Duke gave full Nazi salutes during the visit.
The couple were, indeed, treated like royalty and later biographers have described how members of the German aristocracy would bow and curtsy at both members of the couple. Edward, as someone who had experienced the terrors of war firsthand during the First World War and what he described as the “unending scenes of horror”, was disposed to favouring appeasement. On the other side, Hitler considered Edward to be friendly to Germany and thought Anglo-German relations could have improved had he not abdicated.
Yet, belying Hitler’s concord with the Duke of Windsor, was a devout expansionist zeal and, accordingly, war broke out across Europe in 1939. What had begun for Edward as an appeal to spare bloodshed later became suspicions of Nazi sympathies as the war progressed.
In May 1939, the Duke was commissioned by NBC to give a radio broadcast, which was to be his first since his abdication and took place during a visit to the First World War battlefields at Verdun. In the broadcast, he made an appeal for peace, saying, “I am deeply conscious of the presence of the great company of the dead, and I am convinced that could they make their voices heard they would be with me in what I am about to say. I speak simply as a solider of the Last War whose most earnest prayer it is that such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind. There is no land whose people want war.”
Widely seen as supporting appeasement, the BBC refused to broadcast it, although it was heard by millions across the world and made the front page of British broadsheet newspapers. When war did come to break out in September 1939, the Duke and Duchess were brought back to Britain and Edward was promoted from the rank of field marshal to major-general and attached to the British Military Mission in France.
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When Germany invaded the north of France in May 1940, the Duke and Duchess fled south, first to Biarritz and then to Francoist Spain in June. In the July, the couple moved to Portugal and lived with Ricardo Espirito Santo, a Portugese banker with both British and German contacts. At this point, Nazi agents sought to return the Duke to Spain, kidnapping him if necessary. Ministers worried about the Duke’s Nazi sympathies and Churchill threatened him with a court-martial if he did not return to British soil.
Edward was then appointed Governor of the Bahamas and sailed to the Bahamas in the summer of 1940. There, although helping the poor and helping to aid against poverty, Edward’s non-white antipathy and disdain of Jews became noticeable. He commented over the editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune, Étienne Dupuch, that, “it must be remembered that Dupuch is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium.” Dupuch nonetheless praised Edward for his resolution of the civil unrest over low wages in Nassau in 1942, although his antisemitic sympathies would also be noticeable, when he blamed the trouble on “mischief makers – communists” and “men of Central European Jewish descent who had secured jobs as a pretext for obtaining a deferment of draft.”
Many historians have claimed Hitler would have reinstated Edward as king under a Nazi controlled Britain. Whatever plans the Germans may have had, Edward resigned from his post as the Governor of the Bahamas on the 16th March, 1945, when the war was coming to a close.
Peacetime brought a retirement for the Duke and Duchess in France, Edward not holding any other position of the rest of his life. In June 1953, the couple watched Queen Elizabeth’s coronation from a television screen in Paris. Although the royal family never fully accepted the Duchess, leading a relaxed life, the couple visited President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House in 1955 and in 1956 President Richard Nixon invited them as guests of honour to a dinner at the White House.
By the 1960s, the Duke’s health was deteriorating. Being a smoker since a young age, in late 1971, the Duke was diagnosed with throat cancer. On 18th May 1972, Queen Elizabeth II visited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor while on a state visit to France. Being too ill at the time for even a photocall, ten days later, on the 28th May 1972, the Duke passed away at his home in Paris. Less than a month before his 78th birthday, his life had come to an end. His body was returned to Britain, and laid to rest in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.
Conclusion
A man famous for his romances, Edward VIII abdicated demonstrably for his inability to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson. What had been years of partying and socialising in Paris and elsewhere beforehand, with many doubting his resolve to reign as monarch, Edward’s reign would be the shortest in the history of the United Kingdom. Thereafter, a devout preacher of avoiding a second world war, Edward’s tour of Germany was highly controversial, although he was most probably not aware of the full extent of German racism or aware of what it would become. Despite being denigrated for Nazi sympathies throughout the war and demonstrating xenophobic tendencies, the war ultimately ended in defeat for the Germans and thereafter a retirement in France for the former king.