Edward VIII

Early life

Edward was born at 10:00 pm on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, on the outskirts of London, during the reign of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. He was the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary). His father was the son of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) and his mother was the eldest daughter of Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge and Francis, Duke of Teck. At the time of his birth, he was third in the line of succession to the throne, behind his grandfather and father.

Edward was baptised Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David in the Green Drawing Room of White Lodge on 16 July by Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury. The name Edward was chosen in honour of Edward's late uncle Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, who was known within the family as "Eddy" (Edward being among his given names); Albert was included at the behest of Queen Victoria for her late husband Albert, Prince Consort; Christian was in honour of his great-grandfather King Christian IX of Denmark; and the last four names – George, Andrew, Patrick and David – came from, respectively, the patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. He was always known to his family and close friends by his last given name, David.

As was common practice among upper-class families of the period, Edward and his younger siblings were brought up by nannies rather than directly by their parents. One of Edward's early nannies frequently mistreated him by pinching him before he was due to be presented to his parents. His resulting crying and distress would prompt the Duke and Duchess to send him and the nanny away. Her behaviour was eventually discovered, and she was dismissed and replaced by Charlotte Bill.

Edward's father, though a harsh disciplinarian, was demonstratively affectionate, and his mother displayed a playful side with her children that belied her austere public image. She was amused by the children making tadpoles on toast for their French master as a prank, and encouraged them to confide in her.

Education

Initially, Edward was tutored at home by Hélène Bricka. When his parents travelled the British Empire for almost nine months following the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Edward and his siblings remained in Britain with their grandparents, Queen Alexandra and King Edward VII, who showered them with affection. Upon his parents' return, Edward was placed under the care of two men, Frederick Finch and Henry Hansell, who virtually brought up Edward and his siblings for the rest of their nursery years.

Edward stayed under Hansell's strict tutorship until he was almost 13. Private tutors taught him German and French. He took the examination for entry to the Royal Naval College, Osborne, and began there in 1907. Hansell had wanted Edward to enter school earlier, but the prince's father disagreed. After two years at Osborne College, which he did not enjoy, Edward moved on to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. A two-year course, followed by entry into the Royal Navy, was planned.

Upon the death of Edward VII, Edward's father ascended the throne as George V, and Edward himself became heir apparent. Preparations for his future as king began in earnest. He was withdrawn from his naval course before his formal graduation, served as a midshipman for three months aboard the battleship Hindustan, and then immediately entered Magdalen College, Oxford, for which, in the opinion of his biographers, he was intellectually unprepared. A keen horseman, he learned to play polo with the university club. He left Oxford after eight terms, without any academic qualifications.

Prince of Wales

Edward automatically became Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay on 6 May 1910 upon his father's accession. He was created, by letters patent, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester a month later, on 23 June 1910, his 16th birthday. Edward was officially invested as Prince of Wales in a special ceremony at Caernarfon Castle on 13 July 1911. The investiture took place in Wales at the instigation of the Welsh politician David Lloyd George, Constable of the Castle and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Liberal government. Lloyd George devised a rather fanciful ceremony in the style of a Welsh pageant and coached Edward to speak a few words in Welsh.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Edward had reached the minimum age for active service and was keen to participate. He had joined the Grenadier Guards in June 1914, and although he was willing to serve on the front lines, the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, refused to allow it, citing the immense harm that would occur if the heir apparent to the throne were captured by the enemy. Edward visited frontline trenches several times, for which he was awarded the Military Cross in 1916. His role in the war, although limited, made him popular among veterans of the conflict. He undertook his first military flight in 1918 and later gained a pilot's licence.

Edward's youngest brother, Prince John, died on 18 January 1919, aged 13, after a severe epileptic seizure. Edward, who was eleven years older than John and had hardly known him, saw his death as "little more than a regrettable nuisance". He wrote to his mistress of the time that "[he had] told [her] all about that little brother, and how he was an epileptic. [John]'s been practically shut up for the last two years anyhow, so no one has ever seen him except the family, and then only once or twice a year. This poor boy had become more of an animal than anything else." He also wrote an insensitive letter to his mother, which has since been lost. She did not reply, but he felt compelled to write her an apology, in which he stated: "I feel such a cold hearted and unsympathetic swine for writing all that I did ... No one can realize more than you how little poor Johnnie meant to me who hardly knew him ... I feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his mother."

In 1919, Edward agreed to serve as president of the organising committee for the proposed British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park, Middlesex. He wished the Exhibition to include "a great national sports ground", and so played a part in the creation of Wembley Stadium.

Romances

Before the First World War, a royal match between Edward and his second cousin, Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, was suggested. Nothing came of it, and Victoria Louise married Edward's first cousin once removed, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick. In 1934, Adolf Hitler, seeking to forge a link between the British and German royal houses, asked Victoria Louise to arrange a marriage between the 40-year-old Edward and her 17-year-old daughter, Frederica of Hanover, who was then at boarding school in England. Her parents refused, citing the age gap, and Frederica later married Paul of Greece.

By 1917, Edward liked to spend time partying in Paris while on leave from his regiment on the Western Front. He was introduced to Parisian courtesan Marguerite Alibert, with whom he became infatuated. He wrote her candid letters, which she kept. After about a year, Edward ended the affair. In 1923, Alibert was acquitted in a spectacular murder trial after she shot her husband at the Savoy Hotel. Desperate efforts were made by the Royal Household to ensure that Edward's name was not mentioned in connection with the trial or Alibert.

Also in 1917, Edward began a relationship with Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, the youngest daughter of the 4th Duke of Sutherland. According to Leveson-Gower's friends, Edward proposed to her, but the relationship ended when the King and Queen expressed their disapproval of certain relatives of hers, namely Daisy, Countess of Warwick, a maternal aunt, and the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, a maternal uncle.

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. The King was disappointed by his son's failure to settle down, 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."

George V favoured his second son Albert ("Bertie") and Albert's daughter Elizabeth ("Lilibet"), later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. 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." In 1929, Time magazine reported that Edward teased Albert's wife, also named Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), by calling her "Queen Elizabeth". The magazine asked whether "she did not sometimes wonder how much truth there is in the story that he once said he would renounce his rights upon the death of George V – which would make her nickname come true".

Reign

George V died on 20 January 1936, and Edward ascended the throne as Edward VIII. The next day, accompanied by Simpson, he broke with custom by watching the proclamation of his own accession from a window of St James's Palace. He became the first monarch of the British Empire to fly in an aircraft when he travelled from Sandringham to London for his Accession Council.

Edward caused unease in government circles with actions that were interpreted as interference in political matters. His comment during a tour of depressed villages in South Wales that "something must be done" for the unemployed coal miners was seen as an attempt to guide government policy, though he had proposed no remedy or change in policy. Government ministers were reluctant to send confidential documents and state papers to Fort Belvedere because it was clear that Edward was paying little attention to them, and it was feared that Simpson and other house guests might read them, improperly or inadvertently revealing government secrets.

Edward's unorthodox approach to his role also extended to the coinage that bore his image. He broke with the tradition that the profile portrait of each successive monarch faced in the direction opposite to that of their predecessor. Edward insisted that he face left (as his father had done), to show the parting in his hair. Only a handful of test coins were struck before the abdication, and all are very rare. When George VI succeeded to the throne, he also faced left to maintain the tradition by suggesting that, had any further coins been minted featuring Edward's portrait, they would have shown him facing right.

On 16 July 1936, George Andrew McMahon produced a loaded revolver as Edward rode on horseback at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. Police spotted the weapon and pounced on him; he was quickly arrested. McMahon alleged at his trial that "a foreign power" had approached him to kill Edward, that he had informed MI5 of the plan, and that he was merely seeing the plan through to help MI5 catch the real culprits. The court rejected the claims and sentenced him to a year in prison for "intent to alarm". It is now thought that McMahon had indeed been in contact with MI5, but the veracity of the remainder of his claims remains debatable.

In August and September, Edward and Simpson cruised the Eastern Mediterranean on the steam yacht Nahlin. By October, it was becoming clear that the new king planned to marry Simpson, particularly when divorce proceedings between the Simpsons were brought at Ipswich Assizes. Although gossip about his affair was widespread in the United States, the British media kept silent voluntarily, and the general public knew nothing until early December.

Abdication

On 16 November 1936, Edward invited Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to Buckingham Palace and expressed his desire to marry Simpson when she became free to remarry. Baldwin informed him that his subjects would deem the marriage morally unacceptable, largely because remarriage after divorce was, at the time, opposed by the Church of England, and the public would not tolerate Simpson as queen. As king, Edward was the titular head of the Church, and the clergy expected him to uphold its teachings. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, was vocal in insisting that Edward must go.

Edward proposed an alternative solution of a morganatic marriage, in which he would remain king but Simpson would not become queen consort. She would instead hold a lesser title, and any children they might have would not inherit the throne. This was supported in principle by senior politician Winston Churchill, and some historians suggest he conceived the plan. In any event, it was ultimately rejected by the British Cabinet as well as other Dominion governments. Their views were sought pursuant to the Statute of Westminster 1931, which provided in part that "any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Style 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 Australia (Joseph Lyons), Canada (Mackenzie King), and South Africa (J. B. M. Hertzog) made clear their opposition to the King marrying a divorcée; their Irish counterpart (Éamon de Valera) expressed indifference and detachment, while the Prime Minister of New Zealand (Michael Joseph Savage), having never heard of Simpson before, vacillated in disbelief. Faced with this opposition, Edward initially responded that there were "not many people in Australia" and that their opinion did not matter.

Edward informed Baldwin that he would relinquish the throne if he could not marry Simpson. Baldwin then presented him with three options: give up the idea of marriage; marry against his ministers' wishes; or abdicate. It was clear that Edward was not prepared to give up Simpson, and he knew that if he married against the advice of his ministers, he would cause the government to resign, prompting a constitutional crisis. He chose to abdicate.

Edward duly signed the instruments of abdication at Fort Belvedere on 10 December 1936 in the presence of his younger brothers: Prince Albert, Duke of York, next in line for the throne; Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester; and Prince George, Duke of Kent. The document included the words: "declare my irrevocable determination to renounce the throne for myself and for my descendants and my desire that effect should be given to this instrument of abdication immediately". The next day, the last act of his reign was the royal assent to His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936. As required by the Statute of Westminster, all the Dominions had already consented to the abdication.

Duke of Windsor

On 12 December 1936, at the accession meeting of the British Privy Council, George VI announced his intention to make his brother the "Duke of Windsor" with the style of Royal Highness. He wished this to be the first act of his reign, although the formal documents were not signed until 8 March the following year. During the interim, Edward was known as the Duke of Windsor. George's decision to create Edward a royal duke ensured that he could neither stand for election to the British House of Commons nor speak on political subjects in the House of Lords.

Letters Patent dated 27 May 1937 re-conferred the "title, style, or attribute of Royal Highness" upon Edward, but specifically stated that "his wife and descendants, if any, shall not hold said title or attribute". Some British ministers advised that the reconfirmation was unnecessary, since Edward had retained the style automatically, and further that Simpson would automatically obtain the rank of wife of a prince with the style Her Royal Highness; others maintained that he had lost all royal rank and should no longer carry any royal title or style as an abdicated king, and should instead be referred to simply as "Mr Edward Windsor". On 14 April 1937, Sir Donald Somervell, the Attorney General for England and Wales, submitted to Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, a memorandum summarising the views of Lord Advocate T. M. Cooper, Parliamentary Counsel Sir Granville Ram, and himself:

1. We incline to the view that on his abdication the Duke of Windsor could not have claimed the right to be described as a Royal Highness. In other words, no reasonable objection could have been taken if the King had decided that his exclusion from the lineal succession excluded him from the right to this title as conferred by the existing Letters Patent.

2. The question however has to be considered on the basis of the fact that, for reasons which are readily understandable, he with the express approval of His Majesty enjoys this title and has been referred to as a Royal Highness on a formal occasion and in formal documents. In the light of precedent it seems clear that the wife of a Royal Highness enjoys the same title unless some appropriate express step can be and is taken to deprive her of it.

3. We came to the conclusion that the wife could not claim this right on any legal basis. The right to use this style or title, in our view, is within the prerogative of His Majesty and he has the power to regulate it by Letters Patent generally or in particular circumstances.

Wedding

Edward married Simpson, who had changed her name by deed poll to Wallis Warfield (her birth surname), in a private ceremony on 3 June 1937, at Château de Candé, near Tours, France. When the Church of England refused to sanction the union, a County Durham clergyman, Robert Anderson Jardine (Vicar of St Paul's, Darlington), offered to perform the ceremony, and Edward accepted. George VI forbade members of the royal family to attend, to the enduring resentment of the couple. Edward had particularly wished his brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent, and his second cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, to attend the ceremony. The French organist and composer Marcel Dupré played at the wedding.

The denial of the style Royal Highness to Wallis caused further conflict, as did the financial settlement. The Government declined to include Edward and Wallis on the Civil List, and his allowance was paid personally by George VI. Edward compromised his position with his brother by concealing his full financial worth when they informally agreed upon the amount of the annual allowance. Edward had accumulated wealth over the previous twenty-six years from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, paid to him as Prince of Wales, which was ordinarily at the disposal of the incoming monarch. George also purchased Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle from Edward; both were Edward's personal property, inherited from his father, and thus did not automatically pass to George VI on his accession. Edward received approximately £300,000 (equivalent to between £23.8 million and £173 million in 2024) for both residences, which was paid to him in yearly instalments. In the early days of George VI's reign, Edward telephoned daily, importuning for money and urging that Wallis be granted the style of Royal Highness, until the harassed king ordered that the calls not be put through.

Relations between Edward and the rest of the royal family remained strained for decades. He had assumed that he would settle in Britain after a year or two of exile in France. King George VI (with the support of Queen Mary and his wife Queen Elizabeth) threatened to cut off Edward's allowance if he returned to Britain without an invitation. Edward became embittered toward his mother, Queen Mary, writing to her in 1939: "[your last letter] destroy[ed] the last vestige of feeling I had left for you ... [and has] made further normal correspondence between us impossible."

1937 tour of Germany

In October 1937, Edward and Wallis visited Nazi Germany, against the advice of the British government, and met Adolf Hitler at his Berghof retreat in Bavaria. The visit was widely publicised by the German media. During it, Edward gave full Nazi salutes. In Germany, "they were treated like royalty ... members of the aristocracy would bow and curtsy towards her, and she was treated with all the dignity and status that the duke always wanted", according to royal biographer Andrew Morton in a 2016 BBC interview.

The former Austrian ambassador Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, who was also a second cousin once removed and friend of George V, believed that Edward favoured German fascism as a bulwark against communism, and even that he initially favoured an alliance with Germany. According to Edward, the experience of "the unending scenes of horror" during the First World War led him to support appeasement. Hitler considered Edward to be friendly towards Germany and thought that Anglo-German relations could have been improved through Edward had it not been for the abdication. Albert Speer quoted Hitler directly: "I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us." Edward and Wallis settled in Paris, leasing a mansion in Boulevard Suchet from late 1938.

Second World War

In May 1939, Edward was commissioned by NBC to give a radio broadcast (his first since abdicating) during a visit to the First World War battlefields of Verdun. In it, he appealed 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 soldier 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." The broadcast was heard across the world by millions. It was widely regarded as supporting appeasement, and the BBC refused to broadcast it. It was transmitted outside the United States on shortwave radio and was reported in full by British broadsheet newspapers.

On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Edward and Wallis were brought back to Britain by Louis Mountbatten on board HMS Kelly, and Edward, although he held the rank of field marshal, was made a major-general attached to the British Military Mission in France. In February 1940, the German ambassador in The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, claimed that Edward had leaked the Allied war plans for the defence of Belgium, which he later denied. When Germany invaded northern France in May 1940, the Windsors fled south, first to Biarritz, then in June to Francoist Spain. In July they moved to Portugal, where they lived initially in the home of Ricardo Espírito Santo, a Portuguese banker with both British and German contacts. Under the code name Operation Willi, Nazi agents, principally Walter Schellenberg, plotted unsuccessfully to persuade Edward to leave Portugal and return to Spain, kidnapping him if necessary. Lord Caldecote wrote a warning to Winston Churchill, now prime minister, that "[the Duke] is well-known to be pro-Nazi and he may become a centre of intrigue." Churchill threatened Edward with a court-martial if he did not return to British soil.

In July 1940, Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas. Edward and Wallis left Lisbon on 1 August aboard the American Export Lines steamship Excalibur, which was specially diverted from its usual direct course to New York City so that they could be dropped off at Bermuda on the 9th. They left Bermuda for Nassau on the Canadian National Steamship Company vessel Lady Somers on 15 August, arriving two days later. Edward did not enjoy being governor and privately referred to the islands as "a third-class British colony". The British Foreign Office strenuously objected when Edward and Wallis planned to cruise aboard a yacht belonging to Swedish magnate Axel Wenner-Gren, whom British and American intelligence wrongly believed to be a close friend of Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. Edward was praised for his efforts to combat poverty on the islands. He was "considerably more enlightened in his attitudes than the majority of Bahamian whites, or either of his predecessors", and had an "excellent relationship" with Black individuals such as jazz musician Bert Cambridge (later elected to the Bahamian House of Assembly, to Edward's delight) and valet Sydney Johnson, whom Edward retained for thirty years and was said to have "loved as a son". Edward maintained a long-standing dispute with Étienne Dupuch, the editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune, writing privately at one point that Dupuch was "more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium". But even Dupuch praised Edward for his resolution of civil unrest over low wages in Nassau in 1942, though Edward 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".

Later life

At the end of the war, the couple returned to France and spent the remainder of their lives essentially in retirement, as Edward never again held an official role. Letters written by Kenneth de Courcy to Edward, dated between 1946 and 1949 and published in extract form in 2009, suggest a scheme in which Edward would return to England and place himself in a position for a possible regency. The health of George VI was failing and de Courcy was concerned about the influence of the Mountbatten family over the young Princess Elizabeth. De Courcy proposed that Edward should buy a working agricultural estate within easy reach of London in order to gain favour with the British public and make himself available should the King become incapacitated. Edward, however, hesitated, and the King recovered from his surgery. De Courcy also mentioned the possibility of the British occupation zone in Germany becoming a kingdom with Edward as its monarch. Nothing came of the suggestion.

Edward's allowance was supplemented by government favours and illegal currency trading. The City of Paris provided Edward with a house at 4 route du Champ d'Entraînement, on the Neuilly-sur-Seine side of the Bois de Boulogne, for a nominal rent. The French government also exempted him from paying income tax, and the couple were able to buy goods duty-free through the British embassy and the military commissary. In 1952, they bought and renovated a weekend country retreat, Le Moulin de la Tuilerie at Gif-sur-Yvette, the only property the couple ever owned themselves. In 1951, Edward produced a memoir, A King's Story ghost-written by Charles Murphy, in which he expressed disagreement with liberal politics. The royalties from the book added to Edward and Wallis's income.

Edward and Wallis effectively took on the role of celebrities and were regarded as part of café society in the 1950s and 1960s. They hosted parties and shuttled between Paris and New York; Gore Vidal, who met the Windsors socially, reported on the vacuity of Edward's conversation. The couple doted on the pug dogs they kept.

In June 1953, instead of attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, his niece, in London, Edward and Wallis watched the ceremony on television in Paris. Edward said that it was contrary to precedent for a sovereign or former sovereign to attend the coronation of another. He was paid to write articles on the ceremony for the Sunday Express and Woman's Home Companion, as well as a short book, The Crown and the People, 1902–1953.

Death and legacy

Edward died at his home in Paris on 28 May 1972, aged 77, ten days after Elizabeth's visit. His body was returned to Britain, lying in state at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The funeral service took place in the chapel on 5 June in the presence of the Queen, the royal family, and Wallis, who stayed at Buckingham Palace during her visit. He was buried in the Royal Burial Ground behind the Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Frogmore. Until a 1965 agreement with the Queen, Edward and Wallis had planned for a burial in a cemetery plot they had purchased at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, where Wallis's father was interred. Frail, and suffering increasingly from dementia, Wallis died in 1986 and was buried alongside her husband.

In the view of historians such as Philip Williamson, writing in 2007, the popular perception in the 21st century that the abdication was driven by politics rather than religious morality is false and arises because divorce has become much more common and socially acceptable. To modern sensibilities, the religious restrictions that prevented Edward from continuing as king while planning to marry Wallis "seem, wrongly, to provide insufficient explanation" for his abdication.

Titles, honours and arms

Edward's coat of arms as the Prince of Wales was the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, differenced with a label of three points argent, with an inescutcheon representing Wales surmounted by a coronet. As Sovereign, he bore the royal arms undifferenced. After his abdication, he used the arms again differenced by a label of three points argent, but this time with the centre point bearing an imperial crown.