Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King Edward VIII

1894 – 1972 · Generation XXXVI · King of the United Kingdom (Jan–Dec 1936) · House of Windsor

Portrait of King Edward VIII

Edward VIII reigned for less than a year and remains the most recent British monarch to abdicate. He was born at White Lodge in Richmond Park on 23 June 1894, the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, later George V and Queen Mary. He was given seven names, and his family always used the last of them, David. He trained at the naval colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth, and after his father became king in 1910 he was created Prince of Wales on his sixteenth birthday and invested at Caernarfon Castle in July 1911. He then spent eight terms at Magdalen College, Oxford, and left without a degree.

When war came in 1914 he joined the Grenadier Guards, but Lord Kitchener refused to let the heir to the throne serve in the front line. He still visited the trenches, was awarded the Military Cross in 1916, and won lasting popularity among veterans. Between 1919 and 1935 he made sixteen tours of the empire on his father’s behalf, and he also visited depressed industrial areas at home. Charming, good-looking and unmarried, he was photographed more than any other public figure of his day, and what he wore set the fashion for men. He was also a qualified pilot, the first monarch to be one. His affairs with married women, however, worried both his father and the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin.

In the early 1930s he fell in love with Wallis Simpson, an American then married to her second husband. George V died on 20 January 1936 and Edward succeeded him. As king he was impatient with protocol, and his remark in South Wales that “something must be done” for unemployed miners was seen as straying into politics. By the autumn it was clear that he meant to marry Mrs Simpson once her divorce was final. Baldwin told him that the marriage would not be accepted. The Church of England then opposed remarriage after divorce, the king was its titular head, and the governments of the dominions also objected. A morganatic marriage, in which she would not become queen, was rejected. On 10 December 1936, at Fort Belvedere, he signed the instrument of abdication with his three brothers looking on, and the next day gave royal assent to the act that ended his reign. That night he told the world by radio that he could not carry his burden “without the help and support of the woman I love”. He had never been crowned, and his brother Albert succeeded him as George VI.

Created Duke of Windsor, he married Wallis at the Château de Candé near Tours on 3 June 1937. No member of the royal family attended, which the couple long resented, and the new duchess was denied the style of Royal Highness. In October 1937 the couple visited Nazi Germany against the British government’s advice and met Hitler at his Bavarian retreat, a trip that fed rumours of Edward’s sympathy for the regime. When war broke out in 1939 he was attached to the British Military Mission in France, and after the German invasion of 1940 the couple fled to Spain and then Portugal. In July 1940 he was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, a posting widely believed to have been chosen to keep him away from Europe, and he held it until 1945.

The Windsors spent the rest of their lives mainly in France, in a house on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris that the city let to them at a nominal rent, and they moved in fashionable society in Paris and New York. In 1951 he published a memoir, A King’s Story. Relations with his family remained cool, though he attended George VI’s funeral in 1952, and Elizabeth II visited him in Paris in May 1972, when he was already gravely ill. He died at his Paris home on 28 May 1972, aged 77, and was buried at Frogmore, Windsor. Wallis was buried beside him in 1986.

Place in the family

  • King Edward VIII was an uncle of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • King Edward VIII was the eldest of 6 children of King George V and Mary of Teck recorded in this archive.

Images

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → Edward Duke of Kent → Queen Victoria → King Edward VII → King George V → King Edward VIII.

Read more on Wikipedia

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Life

  • 1894 — Born
  • 1936 — Edward VIII succeeds his father, George V, as King on 20 January.
  • 1936 — On 10 December Edward signs the Instrument of Abdication over his wish to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson. Witnessed by all his brothers, it is a simple declaration of his intent to renounce the throne for himself and all his descendants. He is subsequently created Duke of Windsor.
  • 1937 — Married Wallis Simpson
  • 1972 — Died

Sources

  1. Edward VIII · Wikipedia
  2. Edward VIII (Jan–Dec 1936) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. Edward VIII · Westminster Abbey

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