The abdication of Edward VIII

On the afternoon of 11 December 1936 the act of abdication of King Edward VIII received royal assent, given in his name by royal commission under letters patent he had signed. It was the last act of a reign that had lasted less than eleven months. The day before, at his residence of Fort Belvedere near Windsor, in the presence of his three younger brothers, the King had signed a document declaring his “irrevocable determination” to renounce the throne for himself and his descendants. In the evening he spoke by radio to the peoples of the Empire. The new king was his brother Albert, Duke of York, who took the name George VI. Edward gave up the crown because he wanted to marry the American Wallis Simpson, who was divorced from her first husband and in the process of divorcing her second, and the government, the Church and the Dominions would not accept her as queen. Formally it was the King’s own decision, but in practice he had no other choice if he did not want to provoke a constitutional crisis. The date of the abdication is usually taken to be the day on which it came into effect.

The King and Mrs Simpson

Edward, then Prince of Wales, met Wallis Simpson in January 1931. She was the wife of the Anglo-American businessman Ernest Simpson, and before that, until 1927, had been married to an American naval officer. From 1934, it is generally accepted, she was the heir to the throne’s mistress. His father, George V, made no secret of his distaste for the relationship. When the old king died in January 1936, Edward had no intention of giving her up. Mrs Simpson appeared at official receptions, and in the summer of 1936 the King took a cruise with her in the eastern Mediterranean aboard the yacht Nahlin. American and European newspapers wrote about the affair without restraint, but the British press, at the initiative of the proprietors themselves, kept silent. Most Britons knew nothing.

This was not the only thing troubling the politicians. The new king was bored by state papers, which he sent back late and with visible signs that they had also been read by guests at Fort Belvedere. He expressed opinions on matters that belonged to the government: he made no secret of his dislike of the sanctions imposed on Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia and, according to some biographers, did not want to receive Emperor Haile Selassie, who had taken refuge in England after the fall of Addis Ababa. His sympathy for Germany was known in London and in Berlin. After the Wehrmacht marched into the Rhineland in March 1936, stories circulated in Germany that it was the King who had restrained the government from an armed response. Historians have found no evidence of this in British documents and treat it as rumour, but the stories capture well the hopes Hitler placed in Edward. The British services also feared that Mrs Simpson was in contact with the German Ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who arrived in London in October 1936. These suspicions were never proved.

The crisis

On 27 October 1936 a court in Ipswich granted the Simpsons a decree nisi. It was to become absolute after six months – just before the coronation planned for May 1937. On 13 November the King’s private secretary, Alexander Hardinge, warned him in writing that the silence of the press would not last long. On 16 November Edward summoned the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and told him that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson as soon as she was free. Baldwin replied that the nation would not accept her as queen. A few days later the King visited the impoverished coalfield of South Wales and uttered words the miners remembered for years: “Something must be done.” Ministers regarded this as a further intrusion into politics.

The obstacles were serious. The King was by virtue of his office Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which did not recognise the remarriage of divorced people while their former spouses were alive – and both of Wallis Simpson’s previous husbands were alive. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, was implacable. In the ministers’ view, a woman twice divorced could not become queen, and if the King married against their advice the government would resign. Edward therefore proposed a morganatic marriage: Wallis would become his wife but not queen, and any children they might have would not inherit the throne. British law knew no such institution, so legislation would have been needed in London and, under the Statute of Westminster of 1931, in the parliaments of the Dominions. The Cabinet rejected the idea, and the prime ministers of Australia, Canada and South Africa came out against the marriage. New Zealand’s Michael Savage hesitated, and Éamon de Valera of the Irish Free State kept his distance. The leader of the Labour opposition, Clement Attlee, backed the government.

On 1 December the Bishop of Bradford, Alfred Blunt, said in a sermon that the King ought to show more signs of being aware of his need for God’s grace. The bishop later claimed that he had meant the King’s infrequent churchgoing, but the press took his words as a signal, and on 3 December the whole country learned of the crisis. That evening Wallis Simpson left for Cannes. The King was supported by the newspapers of Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, by some ex-servicemen and working people, and among politicians by Winston Churchill, the leader of the British fascists Oswald Mosley and the communists. There was talk of a “King’s party”, but no one formed one. Churchill, who on 7 December appealed in the House of Commons for delay, was shouted down. Most of Parliament, the Church and the serious press sided with Baldwin. In early December Edward still wanted to make a radio broadcast appealing to the nation over the heads of his ministers, but Baldwin considered this unconstitutional. On 5 December the King let the Prime Minister understand that he chose abdication. At the last moment Wallis Simpson offered by telephone to withdraw so that he could remain king. It was already too late.

The abdication

On 10 December Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication at Fort Belvedere. The witnesses were the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent. The same day Baldwin read the King’s message to the House of Commons and gave an account of the crisis. On 11 December both houses of Parliament passed His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act within a few hours, and in the afternoon it received royal assent, given by commission under the last letters patent signed by Edward VIII. The moment it came into force, he ceased to be King of Great Britain. Because of the Statute of Westminster, the abdication did not take effect everywhere on the same day. South Africa later held that it had come into force on 10 December, while the Irish Free State accepted it only on 12 December. De Valera’s government used the crisis to remove the King from the Irish constitution on 11 December, an important step on Ireland’s road to a republic and to neutrality in the Second World War.

On the evening of 11 December “His Royal Highness Prince Edward” spoke on BBC radio from Windsor Castle. He said that he found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge his duties as king as he would wish to do “without the help and support of the woman I love”, and stressed that the decision had been his alone. Millions of people around the world listened to the broadcast. That same night Edward sailed from Portsmouth to France and went on from there to Austria, where he waited for Wallis Simpson’s divorce to become absolute. On 12 December the new King, George VI, announced that his brother would receive the title of Duke of Windsor.

The Duke of Windsor and Hitler

The divorce became absolute in May 1937, and on 3 June Edward married Wallis in France. No member of the royal family attended the wedding, and George VI refused the Duchess the style of Her Royal Highness, which his brother never forgave him. In October 1937, against the advice of the British government, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor toured Germany. They were the guests of the head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, visited factories working for rearmament and workers’ housing estates, called on Hermann Göring at Carinhall, and on 22 October the Duke had a conversation with Hitler at the Berghof. German propaganda presented the visit as if it were a state visit, and photographs of the Duke greeting the crowds with the Nazi salute went round the world. According to Albert Speer, Hitler believed that through Edward lasting friendship with England could have been achieved, and that his abdication had been a heavy loss for Germany. Ribbentrop persuaded Hitler that Edward had been removed from the throne by Germany’s enemies. According to some historians, this interpretation reinforced Ribbentrop’s increasingly anti-British outlook, with which he took office as Reich Foreign Minister in February 1938.

Significance

The abdication crisis absorbed the attention of British politics in the months when Germany and Italy were becoming involved in the Spanish Civil War and Ribbentrop was signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. It ended, however, by strengthening rather than weakening the state. Baldwin steered the monarchy through the crisis without breaching constitutional principles, and six months later, after the new King’s coronation, he made way for Neville Chamberlain. George VI, shy and afflicted with a stammer, proved to be a monarch loyal to the government and resistant to pressure. Had Edward VIII remained on the throne, with his admiration for the new Germany and his disregard for his ministers, Britain in 1939–1940 would have had at its head a man on whom the Nazis pinned their hopes of a compromise peace. Indeed, in the summer of 1940 German intelligence tried to keep the Duke of Windsor in Spain and Portugal, and Churchill sent him to the Bahamas as governor to remove him from Europe. Whether Edward would really have become Hitler’s tool remains disputed, but what is certain is that, thanks to the abdication, it was George VI, and not he, who was king during the Battle of Britain.