December 10, 1936—King Edward VIII of Great Britain turned away from the burdens of monarchy, unable, he would tell an audience of rapt radio listeners 24 hours later, to carry out his duties “without the help and support of the woman I love.” That last phrase would echo down the generations and give the speech a romanticism at sharp variance with the emotional messiness and profoundly political ramifications of the crisis he precipitated.Seventy-five years after Edward abdicated so he could marry a twice-divorced American commoner, Wallis Simpson, there can be no doubting the price he paid for his love. But even the speech that won him a measure of sympathy lacked candor in describing how the people around him influenced his decision.
“During these hard days,” he told the nation, “I have been comforted by her majesty my mother and by my family. The ministers of the crown, and in particular, Mr. [Stanley] Baldwin, the Prime Minister, have always treated me with full consideration. There has never been any constitutional difference between me and them, and between me and Parliament. Bred in the constitutional tradition by my father, I should never have allowed any such issue to arise.”
Virtually nothing in that last paragraph was true. His family was aghast at the pass to which he had brought himself, the institution of the monarchy, and his country; Stanley Baldwin, when not urging him to keep Mrs. Simpson as a mistress, as royals before (and since) have been wont to do, framed the political options in such a way that Edward could never make her his queen; ministers and Parliament had indeed made known their profound “constitutional difference” with him; and his own father, before dying the year before, had predicted, “When I am gone, the boy will ruin himself in six months." (In the event, it turned out to be closer to a year.)
Here in the U.S., we have witnessed an enormous change in perception of the man who became the Duke of Windsor. In 1972, the TV movie The Woman I Love, with Richard Chamberlain and Faye Dunaway as, respectively, Edward and Mrs. Simpson, portrayed the couple’s romance and anguish over the abdication with deepest sympathy. Last year, however, The King’s Speech depicted him as a mean fop who ridiculed his painfully stammering brother who succeeded him to the throne, George VI, as well as a man in helpless thrall to an adventuress who had learned an astonishing sexual skill in a Shanghai brothel.
Much of this altered image reflects an effort by the House of Windsor and its friends to chip away at Edward’s image that turned out to be far more successful than their later one to prove Princess Diana a nincompoop. The friends of the Windsors had an unwitting ally in Edward himself, who disappointed millions of well-wishers. Blessed with good looks, charm, and wit galore (sample one-liner: “The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children"), he eventually proved so embarrassing that he had to be sent away as governor of the Bahamas during World War II, lest he be seized by Adolf Hitler and placed on the throne as a pliant enabler of Nazi anti-Semitism.
Nearly 40 years after Edward’s death and a quarter century after his wife’s, much remains unknown about the circumstances of their relationship. Some of the wilder claims made about her, notably by biographer Charles Higham (e.g., spying for the Nazis), appears to be overstated. But Edward and Wallis evidently wrote enough indiscreet things that art historian Anthony Blunt was dispatched to German shortly after the war to retrieve their correspondence before it caused a major scandal--and Blunt’s knowledge of these secrets might have guaranteed him more than a decade of safety after it became known in British intelligence he had been a member of the Cambridge spy ring.
But put aside any hypothetical impact that Edward and Wallis might have had on the exposure of one of the most sensational intelligence secrets of the 20th century. We know for a fact that they affected history in even more astonishing ways.
First, Edward’s wish to marry Wallis in the face of opposition from his family, the Church of England, and the government proved to be the gravest threat to the prestige and stability of the British monarchy in two centuries, back to when the madness of King George III required that his son serve as regent in the 1810s. Any hope that Edward cherished that Wallis would become queen was quickly dashed when Baldwin advised Edward that the country would not accept this. Edward’s counter-proposal--new legislation installing Wallis as his consort but not queen--was rejected by both Baldwin’s Cabinet and the governments of Britain’s dominions. Furthermore, Baldwin ditched a last-ditch effort by Edward to appeal directly to his subjects to rally support.
As bad as the controversy over the Windsors’ treatment of Princess Diana became in the 1990s— to the point where many wondered if the monarchy was even worth preserving at all— it pales in comparison with the great might-have-been involved in Edward’s case. Had he pushed matters as far as he wished, the nation would have been split between what can best be described as the King’s party and those opposed to him. A country torn by party and class divisions did not need another.
Second, the abdication crisis distracted Winston Churchill from rallying forces within the government against Adolf Hitler. In the first volume of his World War II memoir, The Gathering Storm, the future Prime Minister— who, throughout most of the 1930s, was in his “wilderness years,“ a back-bencher not in any ministerial capacity--related how the imbroglio broke amid “a great drawing-together of men and women of all parties in England who saw the perils of the future, and were resolute upon practical measures to secure our safety and the cause of freedom, equally menaced by both the totalitarian impulsions and our Government’s complacency.” The campaign was set to climax at a meeting at the Albert Hall on December 3 that would include representatives of all parties who hoped to take the initiative against Baldwin and his governmental allies in appeasement.
Instead, upon hearing the cry at the meeting, “God save the king,” Churchill replied that he hoped that “a cherished and unique personality may not be incontinently severed from the people he loves so well.” He immediately became known as the King’s supporter, a position formalized when Baldwin permitted Edward to consult with Churchill.
But the problem was that this had become a politically untenable position, so much so that Churchill--who seldom quailed at saying anything out of the mainstream--admitted in his memoir that “there were several moments when I seemed to be entirely alone against a wrathful House of Commons.” As bad, for the future of his country, was the impact on the cause he championed: “All the forces I had gathered together on ‘Arms and the Covenant’…were estranged or dissolved, and I myself was so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.”
It was not, of course, but Edward’s role as head of state was over— and, for all practical purposes, so was his contact with his people. Never officially crowned, he stepped down after 10 months in favor of his brother Albert, who assumed the throne as George VI. After Edward and Wallis (now given the titles of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, respectively) married in 1937, they toured Germany. The duke and duchess were kept at arm’s length by the royal family through the war and after, when they settled in France. He died in 1972 and his wife 14 years later.
It did not have to turn out like this. As a prince, Edward had won the hearts of his countrymen. He had what so many royals wish they could possess--the ability to relate to their subjects--and his calls for better treatment of veterans and decent housing for all won him many supporters who felt that he could make the ancient institution of the monarchy relevant for the 20th century.
The affair with Wallis Simpson, though, brought to the surface faults that had led his family to fear, rightly, that he was not suited for the responsibilities he was about to inherit. His drinking, loathing of being under a media microscope, shirking of duties, and series of affairs spelled potential trouble. The best summary judgment about Edward, made by biographer Philip Ziegler, feels absolutely right in weighing the would-be monarch's great potential against what he did with his life: "There is so much he could have done; he did so little.''
As for Wallis, the relationship seems to have begun strictly as delight in being in the company of celebrity and power, then, when the relationship became intimate (after Edward’s previous mistress made the mistake of requesting that Wallis look after him while she was away), as assurance to an aging flirt that she could still attract men. Especially after Edward threatened to commit suicide if she ever left him, she did not know how to terminate the relationship. We also now know, from a cache of surprisingly friendly letters she wrote to Ernest Simpson even as she began divorce proceedings against him, that she was terrified that legal discovery of her own adultery would mean that not only would her divorce from Ernest not be granted, but she would then be unable to marry Edward--thereby increasing the vilification to which she was subjected by the British public.
As much as is known about the case of Edward and Mrs. Simpson, it will probably be a few decades hence before anything close to the complete story will come out. The case was more than the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of forbidden love perceived by Americans; it also involved constitutional and even geopolitical issues that nearly everyone--including Edward, in his “Woman I Love” speech--did their best to obscure.
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