Edward VIII

Edward VIII (1894–1972), king of Great Britain and Ireland, emperor of India (1936). Edward was the eldest son of George, duke of York, later King George V. His parents were strict disciplinarians, and his private tuition was seriously deficient. But an easy-going manner and outward-looking personality more than counterbalanced these disadvantages. A brief period at Oxford was followed by non-combatant but arduous service in the British Expeditionary Force in France. As heir to the throne he was not permitted to serve in the front line, but none the less courted danger—and achieved genuine popularity—in visiting the troops, sharing their cigarettes, and listening to their stories. Edward, much like his grandfather Edward VII, was ‘one of the boys’, able to communicate with ordinary people at their level—a refreshing antidote to the austere George V and the prudish Queen Mary. In 1919, at Lloyd George's suggestion, he undertook a tour of Canada and the USA; in 1920 he visited Australia and New Zealand, and toured India and the Far East in 1921–2; in 1925 and 1931 he journeyed to South America. All these voyages were resounding successes, demonstrating that the British monarchy took its imperial role seriously. But Edward had two weaknesses. Each, by itself, need not have been constitutionally fatal: together, they cost him his throne.

Edward was a notorious ‘ladies' man’, engaging in a succession of sexual liaisons with married women, one of whom, Lady Furness, introduced him to Mrs Wallis Simpson, with whom he became infatuated. He also revelled in his assumed role as the champion of the common man. He made it his business to visit the depressed areas, and his public statements, though they could be construed as nothing more than sympathy for the plight of the deprived, might also be interpreted as critical of current social and economic policy, and thus as political pronouncements. Most famous, or infamous, in this category was a donation of £10 he made to a relief fund set up for the miners after the collapse of the General Strike (1926) had left them at the mercy of the coal-owners. The donation was made (the covering letter explained), because ‘it would be an unsatisfactory end to any dispute that one side should have to give in on account of the sufferings of their dependants’. Never before—or since—has the heir to the throne made such a blatant intervention in a matter of public controversy. The altruism and generosity of the donation may be applauded, but it made Edward many enemies within the Conservative Party (then in office), and marked him out as a future monarch whose judgement (as they saw it) could no more be trusted in matters of constitutional propriety than in matters pertaining to the sanctity of the marriage contract.

Edward's infatuation with Mrs Simpson was not reported in the British press, but within ruling circles was a matter of common knowledge. Wallis came from humble stock in Baltimore. Her first marriage, to an American naval officer, had ended in divorce; she married again, to an English businessman, Ernest Simpson, and lived in London. She lacked beauty, but compensated with sophistication, charm, and measured informality. Edward was not content to have her as a mistress. He determined to make her his wife. Mr Simpson acquiesced in a divorce, which was granted nisi, at Ipswich, at the end of October 1936.

By then Edward had been on the throne for nine months. His brief reign was dominated by ‘the King's matter’. Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, advised that a marriage to Mrs Simpson would not be popular. Whilst it is impossible to test the truth of this statement, and whilst the king could certainly have married his mistress and insisted on retaining his throne, had he wished, it is equally true that some of those who supported him, such as the British Union of Fascists, were peripheral elements in British public life, whilst others, such as Winston Churchill, were mavericks. It was not so much that Mrs Simpson was a commoner: rather, she was an American, twice-divorced commoner. Edward's suggestion that a morganatic marriage be contracted—she would be his wife but not his queen—was counter-productive, since it implied that she was unfit to be queen. Rank-and-file Conservatives regarded the king's morals as an affront to Christian values; but unlike his grandfather, he now proposed to compound sin by marrying the mistress whose bed he shared. They were reminded, too, of his embarrassing political interventions. During a visit to south Wales, in mid-November 1936, the king fuelled this prejudice by remarking, in relation to the unemployed, that ‘something must be done to find them work’—a comment widely interpreted as an attack on Conservative economic policy.

Baldwin was not prepared to countenance a morganatic marriage; neither was Attlee, the Labour leader, nor were the dominion prime ministers. On 10 December Edward signed the instrument of abdication, and ceased to be king the following day, when he and Wallis travelled to France, where they were married by a Church of England parson acting without his bishop's authority.

The new king, Edward's younger brother George, agreed to confer on him the title duke of Windsor; but Wallis was not permitted officially to call herself HRH. Relations between Edward and the royal family were, and remained, bitter. It was said that he had brought the monarchy into disrepute, and it was also feared that he would be regarded as a king in exile, and a threat to his brother. Edward's much publicized visit to Hitler (October 1937) was not so much sinister as naïve. None the less, when Edward and Wallis fled to fascist Spain after the fall of France, Churchill, now prime minister, packed them off to the Bahamas, of which Edward became governor. His wartime meetings with American President F. D. Roosevelt caused further embarrassments. But when, following his death in Paris, he was buried in the royal mausoleum at Frogmore, Wallis was permitted to be present at the interment.

Edward was a weak and in some important respects a selfish man. His political judgement was unsound, but there is probably some truth in the view that during the inter-war period he gave the British monarchy the human face so lacking in his austere, class-prejudiced parents.

Geoffrey Alderman

Bibliography

Bolitho, H. H. , King Edward VIII—Duke of Windsor (1954);
Sencourt, R. , The Reign of Edward VIII (1962);
Windsor, duchess of , The Heart has its Reasons (1956);
Windsor, duke of , A King's Story (1951);
Ziegler, P. , King Edward VIII: The Official Biography (1990).