Edward VII, Duke of Windsor

King of the United Kingdom (r. 1936)

• Born: June 23, 1894
• Birthplace: Richmond, Surrey, England
• Died: May 28, 1972
• Place of death: Paris, France

By abdicating the throne to marry a twice-divorced American commoner, Edward VIII, the duke of Windsor, seriously tested the resilience of the British monarchy and created a modern romantic myth known the world over as “the love story of the century.”

Early Life

The duke of Windsor was born His Royal Highness Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, the first son of the duke and duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary). Four more sons and a daughter would eventually be born to the couple, but from the beginning, “David” (as he was known to his family and later to his wife), as heir apparent to the throne then occupied by his grandfather, King Edward VII, was given the special treatment and saddled with the special responsibilities unique to the person who will someday reign. He enjoyed a privileged childhood at his family’s various official residences (York Cottage at the royal estate of Sandringham, Frogmore House at Windsor, and Marlborough House in London), but he seems never to have had a particularly close relationship with either of his parents, both of whom were traditionalists who placed duty to king and country ahead of personal happiness. From early childhood he showed signs of being temperamentally unsuited to the position that he was destined to occupy.

Prince Edward never showed great scholastic promise, and, like most young men in the royal family, he was prepared very early for a career in the military. In 1907, he was enrolled in the Naval College at Osborne, where an atmosphere of stern and even brutal militarism ensured that the young prince was treated no differently than were the other boys. From there he was sent to the Naval College at Dartmouth, and during his time there King Edward VII died, making way for the young prince’s father to ascend the throne as King George V. In the summer of 1911, Prince Edward was officially invested by his father as Prince of Wales in a ceremony at Caernarvon Castle in Wales.

After serving briefly as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, the Prince of Wales was sent to Oxford University to complete his formal education, but his undergraduate career was interrupted in 1914 by the outbreak of World War I. It was during his service in this war that the prince’s immense international popularity first began. Rather than taking advantage of his privileged position by assuming a comfortable desk job in England, the prince insisted on being sent to the front in France and later saw action in the Middle East and in Italy. He behaved with unquestionable bravery throughout the war, and for the rest of his life he would be approached by grateful veterans who remembered his selfless and valorous service.

After the war, the prince undertook a series of state visits that established him as the most popular Prince of Wales in history. During highly publicized visits to Canada, India, Australia, and the United States, cheering crowds greeted him wherever he went, and the press followed him everywhere. He seemed to many the embodiment of the “flaming youth” of the 1920’s, with his incomparable social skills, his easygoing, unaffected manner, his modish clothes, and his weakness for tennis matches and cocktail parties. Throughout the 1920’s and the early 1930’s, his photogenic smile and his attractiveness to women earned for him the title “The World’s Most Eligible Bachelor.” Not only did he garner the type of press attention usually reserved for film stars, but also he knew how to use it to his and his family’s advantage. This genius for public relations was thought by some to foreshadow a new image for the British monarchy, a “democratic” kingship uniquely suited to the twentieth century, but other observers (including, for the most part, his parents) found this latter-day Prince Charming shallow and irresponsible, more concerned with late nights and polo matches than with his hereditary duties as the future king of England.

Life’s Work

The Prince of Wales had met Wallis Warfield Simpson, an American socialite then living in London with her second husband, as early as 1930, but it was not until King George V died in January of 1936 that the relationship became troublesome to the government and to the royal family. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, King Edward VII, the prince had had a series of love affairs with married women, each of which had run its course without causing scandal. However, the new king showed no signs of ending his relationship with Simpson; in fact, he privately announced his intentions to marry her as soon as she could obtain a divorce from her husband. Even in the more liberal years to come, a commoner with two living husbands would be deemed unsuitable as queen of England, but in the 1930’s, following so closely on the reign of the traditional and popular King George V and Queen Mary, it was unthinkable. Though the British press maintained a “gentlemanly” silence on the issue, American newspapers and wire services were full of the story when Simpson filed a divorce petition against her husband in May of 1936.

The carefree disregard for propriety that had been so attractive in the young Prince of Wales began to seem tiresome and immature in the forty-one-year-old King Edward VIII. In the late 1930’s, Europe was on the brink of World War II: In Spain, Germany, and Italy, fascist dictators were consolidating their power, and the island nation of Great Britain seemed imperiled as never before. England more than ever needed the continuity and sense of duty symbolized by the monarchy, but the new king discharged his official duties with alarming haphazardness, looking bored and behaving boorishly when circumstances forced him to be separated from Simpson. In addition, it was suspected in some quarters that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany had a potential ally in King Edward. The king, though constitutionally prohibited from meddling in politics, let it be known that he wanted to avoid war at all costs, even if it meant instituting a policy of appeasement with Nazi Germany.

To the end of his life, the duke of Windsor would blame then-prime ministerStanley Baldwin for plotting against him, but there is little evidence that Baldwin had anything but the national interest in mind during the ensuing abdication crisis. The British parliament, the majority of the leaders of the British Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and Ireland), and even Queen Mary and the rest of the royal family were united in their opposition to Simpson’s being crowned queen. The possibility of a morganatic marriage, under the terms of which Simpson could marry the king without becoming queen, was proposed but deemed unacceptable by the cabinet. On December 2, the British press broke its long silence on the issue, and on December 3, Simpson, disturbed by popular resentment and frightened by threats against her life, left England for France. At length, it became clear to the increasingly self-absorbed king that he faced a choice between the Crown and marriage to Simpson. His once-enormous popular support had eroded, and his only two influential allies were Winston Churchill and the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook. On December 10, King Edward VIII officially abdicated in favor of his younger brother, the duke of York, who ascended the throne as King George VI. That evening, after making a now-famous radio broadcast to his former subjects, the former king left England for Austria, having been made duke of Windsor by his brother. He married Simpson in France on June 3, 1937, soon after her divorce became final.

Even after his abdication, the duke of Windsor continued to attract unfavorable press attention and to bring embarrassment on the British monarchy. His political naïveté made him easy prey for the political apparatus of Nazi Germany, and in 1937 he and the duchess undertook a tour of Germany that culminated in an audience with Hitler. In 1940, the Windsors again became the subject of Nazi intrigue. Hitler was still convinced that a bloodless takeover of Great Britain was possible, and there were rumors of a Nazi plan to kidnap the Windsors and to restore the duke to the throne as an ally of the Third Reich. This plan was abandoned only when, in August of 1940, the Germans realized that Britain would not under any circumstances capitulate without a fight.

The duke of Windsor’s final official station was as governor of the Bahamas from August, 1941, to April, 1945. Though he was still as adept as ever at ceremonial functions, his insistence on meddling in political matters that he but vaguely understood offended many of the islands’ leading residents and led to charges of racism and incompetence. He resigned his post several months before his term ended and never again sought employment in the spheres of government or international relations.

Significance

When the duke of Windsor died of throat cancer in Paris in 1972, his body was flown back to Britain to be interred in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle. The duchess, invited by Queen Elizabeth II to stay at Buckingham Palace, was flown to and from England in a jet belonging to the Queen’s Flight, the queen’s personal fleet. In death, the duke received all the ceremonial honors due a former king of England. To many observers, however, this official recognition came too late. For some thirty-five years, the British royal family had snubbed the Windsors, and not until 1966 had the duchess been officially recognized by her niece-in-law, the queen. Though the duke had been allowed to keep the designation of “His Royal Highness” after the abdication, his wife had never been granted royal status (though the case against the legality of withholding it from her is strong), and the duke was never able to forgive or forget his family’s treatment of the wife to whom he was truly devoted. Especially in the United States and in France, the two republics where the Windsors had spent most of their time for the last quarter of a century and where their romance had long been mythologized as the “love story of the century” the unyielding attitude of the British royal family seemed reactionary and coldhearted.

Still, many observers in Britain remembered the blow that the duke had dealt the fragile institution of the constitutional monarchy by refusing to put his duty to country before the considerations of personal happiness. As it happened, King George VI and his wife (later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother) and their daughter Queen Elizabeth II, were in all respects more suited to the Crown than was the duke and were to bring the monarchy to new heights of popularity. The resentment fostered in 1936 died hard, however, especially in the light of the high press visibility that the Windsors enjoyed to the end of their lives. They seemed always to be on the move, traveling with thirty pieces of luggage and an army of servants to Palm Beach, to Biarritz, to New York, international socialites whose sole purpose in life seemed to be attending parties and nightclubs.

On one hand, the story of the duke of Windsor is one of wasted potential, of a natural genius for public relations squandered in a life of imposed exile. One can see, however, how to some it remains a love story with a happy ending: the story of a king who gave up his empire for love.

Bibliography

Beaverbrook, Lord. The Abdication of King Edward VIII. New York: Atheneum, 1966. Completed by the powerful newspaper magnate toward the end of his life and published posthumously, this account is written almost wholly from memory and is thus less than scrupulously accurate in places. Still, extremely valuable as an insider’s record of the events leading up to the abdication crisis.

Donaldson, Frances. Edward VIII. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1974. The most authoritative biography available, exhaustively researched and documented. Donaldson writes with detachment and honesty, refusing to sentimentalize her subject. Very little attention given to the last twenty-five years of the duke’s life, but invaluable in its treatment of his early life and of his reign as King Edward VIII.

Inglis, Brian. Abdication. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Though partially outdated and only sketchily documented, this is still the best book-length study of the abdication crisis. Especially useful is the background information on Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the cabinet ministers.

Lacey, Robert. Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Essential to the understanding of the British monarchy in the twentieth century, especially for American readers mostly unfamiliar with the subject. Though it is primarily concerned with Queen Elizabeth II, it links the abdication of Edward VIII both with the manner in which Elizabeth has conducted her reign and with such later royal crises as the affair between Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend.

Thornton, Michael. Royal Feud. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. A fascinating study of the enmity between Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the duchess of Windsor, this carefully documented book chronicles the personal side of the abdication, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath. Particularly useful is the information on the later years of the Windsors’ marriage.

Williams, Susan. The People’s King: The True Story of the Abdication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Recounts the events of the six weeks leading up to the duke’s abdication.

Wilson, Christopher. Dancing with the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Gossipy but entertaining story of the duchess’s affair with Donahue, a wealthy, gay playboy nineteen years her junior.

Windsor, Prince Edward. A King’s Story. London: Michael Joseph, 1956.

Windsor, Wallis. The Heart Has Its Reasons. London: Cassell, 1951. Though these memoirs of both the duke and the duchess are highly opinionated and factually inaccurate, they deserve to be read for the insights they provide into the couple’s temperaments and personalities. Both books provide highly idiosyncratic coverage of the abdication crisis; both were runaway best sellers when first published.