Edward VIII

Edward VIII: The King Who Chose Otherwise

On 22 October 1937, ten months after giving up the British throne, the former king of England spent more than an hour alone with Adolf Hitler at the Berghof. His wife was entertained by Rudolf Hess. They had already met Göring and Goebbels and toured an SS training school. The transcript of the conversation was lost, possibly destroyed. It is the single most damaging hour in the modern history of the British royal family, and it happened because a man who was briefly king could not stop being flattered.

The Golden Prince

Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David was born on 23 June 1894 at Richmond in Surrey, the eldest son of the future George V and Mary of Teck. He trained for the Royal Navy from 1907 to 1911, and became heir to the throne when his father acceded in May 1910. After the outbreak of war in August 1914 he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards and served as a staff officer, emerging, in the Royal Family's own careful phrase, with a good war record.

What followed was two decades as the most famous young man in the world. As Prince of Wales he toured the empire relentlessly and worked the domestic circuit with real skill, visiting regions flattened by the Depression and, in 1932, touring British workingmen's clubs and enlisting more than two hundred thousand men and women in occupational schemes. The Royal Family credits him with a genuine care for the underprivileged, and the credit is deserved. He was also the first monarch to qualify as a pilot, creating The King's Flight in 1936.

He was, in short, a modern celebrity before the category existed — glamorous, restless, photographed constantly, and adored.

Mrs Simpson

In the early 1930s he met Wallis Simpson, an American socialite then on her second marriage. Her first, to the naval aviator Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., had lasted eleven years until 1927; her second was to Ernest Simpson, an American-born British shipbroker. Accounts place their meeting at a house party in 1931 and the beginning of the affair on a cruise in 1934. Simpson herself wrote of evenings off the Spanish coast where "we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love."

Edward became king on 20 January 1936. When Simpson secured her divorce later that year, the crisis became unavoidable.

Three Hundred and Twenty-Five Days

The objection was not snobbery, or not only snobbery. As head of the Church of England the King could not marry a divorced woman with two living former husbands; the Church objected on principle, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin led the political opposition, the Dominion governments were alarmed, and the royal family was unanimously against it. A twice-divorced woman, as the Royal Family's own account puts it flatly, would not have been acceptable as Queen.

Edward chose Simpson. On 10 December 1936 he executed an Instrument of Abdication, which became law the following day, and on 11 December he broadcast to the empire on BBC radio. "A few hours ago," he said, "I discharged my last duty as king and emperor," and then delivered the sentence everyone remembers: that he had "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 had reigned 325 days and was never crowned. His brother became George VI, and on 12 December created him Duke of Windsor. He married Simpson in France on 3 June 1937.

Germany, and Operation Willi

Four months later came the German tour. Edward had form: in 1933 he reportedly told a German relative that "dictators are very popular these days. We might want one in England before long," and he took the view that it was "no business of ours to interfere in Germany's internal affairs." He later called Hitler privately "not such a bad chap" and blamed a range of parties, Jews among them, for causing the war.

In the summer of 1940, with the couple in Spain and then Portugal, German Foreign Ministry documents later recovered as the Marburg Files describe "Operation Willi" — a scheme to depose George VI and install Edward as a puppet king. On the documentary record the Windsors neither rejected the proposal nor reported it to London, and they delayed their departure from Portugal by nearly a month.

Churchill ordered him to the Bahamas as Governor in July 1940 to get him out of Europe. He went reluctantly in August and stayed until 1945, continuing to question whether Britain could win. MI5 had been watching him since 1936; his telephones were tapped, and the FBI sent memoranda to Roosevelt warning of the couple's pro-German allegiances.

Edward denied everything, calling the files a complete fabrication, and the British Foreign Office maintained that he never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause.

Why Edward VIII Is Called a Genius

He was not, by any definition, and the site would be lying to say otherwise. Edward VIII left no ideas, no writings of substance, no policy and no institution beyond a royal flight of aircraft. Modern historians largely agree he held pro-German views, and the kindest reading available to him — the one his defenders actually use — is that he was "weak-willed and easily swayed," a propaganda instrument rather than a conscious traitor. That is an acquittal on the charge of treason purchased at the cost of admitting he was not clever enough to be responsible.

There was one real talent, and it should be named. Edward understood publicity in a way no royal before him had: he grasped that the modern crown ran on visibility and sentiment, and he was superb at generating both. His empire tours and his walks through depressed industrial districts were genuine innovations in what a monarchy could do, and the feeling behind the workingmen's schemes appears to have been sincere. Had he possessed judgement to match his charm he might have been a significant modernising king.

He did not. He is on this list for pure historical consequence: his abdication is the hinge on which the twentieth-century British monarchy turns. It put George VI on the throne and Elizabeth II in the line of succession, and — as the record of 1937 to 1940 makes uncomfortably clear — it removed a man with pro-Nazi sympathies from the throne of Britain four years before the country fought for its life. The best thing Edward VIII ever did for his country was to leave it. That is a genuine historical importance. It is not genius, and the distinction matters.

Legacy

The Windsors lived out their exile mostly in Paris. Edward died there on 28 May 1972, aged seventy-seven, and was buried at Frogmore in the grounds of Windsor Castle, where Wallis later joined him.

He is remembered for a love story, and the love story is real — he gave up the greatest inheritance in the world and never took it back. But the more durable legacy is structural. The abdication forced the British monarchy to define what it was for, and the answer it arrived at, embodied by the shy brother who replaced him, was duty rather than personality. Every British sovereign since has been measured against that standard, which exists because Edward VIII failed to meet it.

Achievements

• Monarch of the United Kingdom (1936–1936)
• Emperor of India (1936–1936)
• monarch of Canada (1936–1936)
• monarch of the Union of South Africa (1936–1936)
• Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece — 1912
• Order of St. Olav — 1914
• Grand Cordon of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 1912
• Educated at Magdalen College and Britannia Royal Naval College