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.
Edward VIII's abdication broadcast from Windsor Castle, 11 December 1936
Edward VIII
parents: George V and Mary of Teck
date and place of birth: 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park
wife: Wallis Simpson
date of marriage: 3 June 1937 at the Château de Candé, France
children: none
reign: 20 January 1936 to 11 December 1936 (326 days)
coronation: none; he abdicated before it took place
date and place of death: 28 May 1972 in Paris
place of burial: Royal Burial Ground, Frogmore, Windsor
Edward VIII was christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, the last four names for the patron saints of the four nations of the United Kingdom. His family called him David. He was the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of York, later George V and Queen Mary, and he spent his childhood with a father who ruled his children like a ship's crew and a mother who found it hard to show them affection. He was sent to the naval colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth, and in 1910, when his father became king, he became Prince of Wales. At his investiture at Caernarfon Castle in July 1911 he wore a costume of white satin breeches and a purple velvet surcoat, which he found humiliating.
The Great War
When war broke out in 1914 the prince joined the Grenadier Guards and asked to serve at the front. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, refused: if the heir to the throne were killed that would be bad enough, but if he were captured it would be a disaster. Edward served on the staff in France instead and visited the trenches as often as his minders allowed. In 1915 a shell killed his driver shortly after the prince had left the car. The war left him restless and uneasy with his privileged position, and it gave him a lasting sympathy for ex-servicemen.
The Most Famous Man in the World
In the 1920s the Prince of Wales became the first royal celebrity of the modern age. He toured Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, India and South America, drawing enormous crowds wherever he went. He was slim, boyish and good-looking, he danced, played golf and flew aeroplanes, and he set fashions: the Prince of Wales check, the Windsor knot and the Fair Isle sweater all owe their popularity to him. Newspapers and newsreels followed everything he did.
His father despaired of him. The prince disliked the routine of royal duty, preferred nightclubs to state banquets, and formed attachments to married women, first Freda Dudley Ward and then Thelma, Lady Furness. In 1930 he took over Fort Belvedere, a Gothic folly near Windsor Great Park, and made it his private retreat. George V told the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that after his death "the boy will ruin himself in twelve months."
Wallis Simpson
In January 1931, at a house party in Leicestershire, Thelma Furness introduced the prince to an American woman living in London, Wallis Simpson. Born Bessie Wallis Warfield in Pennsylvania in 1896, she had divorced her first husband, a US Navy pilot, and married Ernest Simpson, an Anglo-American shipbroker. By 1934 she had replaced Thelma in the prince's affections. He became devoted to her, and the people around him noticed that he deferred to her in everything. Society knew about the affair, and so did the government, but the British press, by an informal agreement among the newspaper owners, printed nothing.
A Short Reign
George V died on 20 January 1936, and the prince became Edward VIII. He broke with tradition from the start: he watched his own proclamation from a window at St James's Palace with Wallis beside him, and became the first British monarch to fly in an aeroplane. He cut costs at Sandringham, put the clocks there back to normal time after decades of "Sandringham time", and grew impatient with the red boxes of state papers, which ministers began to suspect he left lying around at Fort Belvedere. That summer he chartered the yacht Nahlin for a cruise along the Dalmatian coast with Wallis. American and European newspapers printed photographs of the couple. British newspapers cropped her out.
On 27 October 1936 Wallis obtained a preliminary divorce decree at Ipswich, which would become final six months later. The king intended to marry her. In November he visited the depressed mining villages of South Wales and told the unemployed men at the Dowlais steelworks that "something must be done" to find them work. The remark won him public affection and alarmed ministers, who read it as criticism of the government.
The Abdication Crisis
On 16 November Edward told Baldwin that he meant to marry Wallis, and that if the government opposed it he was prepared to go. Baldwin's view, which the cabinet shared, was that the public would not accept a queen with two living former husbands, and the Church of England, of which the king was Supreme Governor, did not then allow the remarriage of divorced people whose former spouses were still alive. Edward suggested a morganatic marriage, in which Wallis would be his wife but not queen and any children would have no claim to the throne. Baldwin consulted the cabinet and the prime ministers of the Dominions, and they rejected it.
The press silence ended on 3 December, after the Bishop of Bradford made a speech about the king's need of God's grace that the newspapers took as their cue. Wallis fled to the south of France to escape the crowds. Churchill and a group of supporters, dubbed the "King's Party," urged Edward to play for time. He refused to split the country. On 10 December 1936, at Fort Belvedere, he signed the instrument of abdication, witnessed by his three brothers. Parliament passed His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act the next day, and at that moment his brother Albert, Duke of York, became George VI.
That night, introduced as "His Royal Highness Prince Edward," he broadcast to the nation from Windsor Castle. He said he could not carry out his duties as king without "the woman I love," and that the decision was his alone. Then he drove to Portsmouth and crossed the Channel on a destroyer. He had reigned for 326 days, and he was never crowned.
The Duke of Windsor
His brother created him Duke of Windsor. He married Wallis on 3 June 1937 at the Château de Candé in the Loire valley, with no member of his family present. Shortly before the wedding, George VI issued letters patent restricting the style of Royal Highness to the duke alone; Wallis would never be "Her Royal Highness." The duke took it as an insult and never forgave it.
In October 1937 the Windsors toured Germany as guests of the Nazi government and met Hitler at the Berghof. The duke gave a modified Nazi salute on at least one occasion. When France fell in 1940 they fled to Spain and then Portugal, where German agents tried to persuade the duke to stay in Europe, apparently hoping to use him as a puppet king after an invasion of Britain. Captured German documents later suggested that he had spoken of peace with Germany. The British government sent him out of harm's way as Governor of the Bahamas, where he served from 1940 to 1945.
After the war the Windsors lived in Paris, in a house in the Bois de Boulogne that the French government provided at a nominal rent. They spent their years on travel, society and golf, estranged from the royal family, who would not receive Wallis. Queen Elizabeth II visited her uncle in Paris on 18 May 1972, when he was dying of throat cancer. He died ten days later. His body was flown to England, lay in state at St George's Chapel, and was buried in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore. Wallis died in 1986 and was buried beside him.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "King Edward VIII" https://englishhistory.net/20th-century/king-edward-viii/, September 30, 2026