King Edward VIII

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Like his predecessor Edward V, Edward VIII was fated never to be crowned as king, but for a very different reason. Born in 1894 as the eldest son of the future King George V, Edward was a popular Prince of Wales whose career came to a juddering halt when he became infatuated with a divorced American socialite named Wallis Simpson (she was technically still married to her second husband). As a royal match she was quite unsuitable at that time and Edward was forced to choose between being king or the husband of Wallis Simpson. He chose the latter. As a result, despite Edward being declared king on the death of his father in January 1936, he abdicated the throne and passed the crown to his younger brother (who reigned as King George VI) in December of the same year. Edward and Wallis married in 1937 when Wallis’s second divorce came through. Edward was granted the title Duke of Windsor and the couple moved to Paris. Shortly after this move they visited Adolf Hitler in Germany, which made many people wonder if Edward harboured Nazi sympathies. In 1940 Edward was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, a post that he held for the rest of World War Two. He spent the rest of his life in France, dying in 1972 at the age of 77. Edward simply did not appreciate that being King did not give him free rein to do as he pleased. A monarch of the United Kingdom is also the supreme head of the Church of England, which has been the case ever since King Henry VIII wrested this power from the Pope in the 16th century. As such, the monarch’s coronation oath includes a promise to uphold the Church and its teachings, which include a ban on divorced people being married in church. Edward simply could not have it both ways – if he had had a civil marriage it would have caused immense damage to his image as a constitutional monarch. The marriage of Edward and Wallis did not turn out to be a particularly happy one. For one thing, the infatuation seemed to have been almost entirely on Edward’s part – Wallis would almost certainly have walked away from the relationship if Edward had asked her to. The marriage was childless, as had been her two previous marriages. Both Edward and Wallis were happiest when involved in intense short-term love affairs – in short, neither of them was suited to the concept of marriage for life, and their actual marriage to each other was not what either of them really wanted. Edward must also take the blame for placing his younger brother Albert in the invidious position of having to become king (as George VI) when he really did not want to. The country had to be grateful that George ended up taking his responsibilities far more seriously than Edward had done.