When a British King Stunned the Royal Family by Abdicating the Throne to Marry a Divorced American Socialite

Just days before making the most consequential decision of his short reign, Edward VIII paced around Fort Belvedere, his stately royal country house in Surrey, England, a home the Daily Mirror wrote had “been changed from a bachelor’s warm, comfortable, modern home into a battlemented memorial to happier days and more joyous times.”

As the king stewed, millions of his subjects across country and empire waited with bated breath for his solution to what the Mirror called “a problem more vexatious than any that has confronted a British monarch.” 

Would Edward abdicate his throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite whose two divorces would have made her an unacceptable queen?

On December 11, 1936, the king broadcast his decision to the nation on BBC radio. “A few hours ago, I discharged my last duty as king and emperor,” Edward announced. “You all know the reasons which … have impelled me to renounce the throne.”

Colourised: King George VI Proclaimed & King Edward VIII's Abdication Speech (1936) [British Pathé]

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On the surface, the reason was clear: The monarch wanted to marry Simpson, a desire that sparked a constitutional crisis.

But, in fact, the factors leading to Edward’s abdication were complex and fueled by flurries of media coverage, fanning the flames of a scandal that led the outbound monarch to publicly claim he “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 had only taken up that burden 325 days earlier, when his father, George V, died and passed the throne on to his eldest son. But his controversial affair with Simpson, the wife of an American-born British shipbroker, had its roots in their first meeting at a house party in 1931.

Simpson had already divorced her first husband, a Navy pilot named Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., in 1927, after 11 years of marriage. She and her second husband moved around the elite circles of British society, where she and Edward met and became friends.

Their affair likely began in 1934, when they took a cruise together while her husband stayed home.

“Often the prince and I found ourselves sitting alone on deck, enjoying the soft evening air, and that unspoken but shared feeling of closeness generated by the immensity of the sea and the sky,” Simpson wrote in her bombshell 1956 memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons. “Perhaps it was during these evenings off the Spanish coast that we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love.”

That love affair was set on a collision course with Edward’s birthright to the British throne. When he ascended in January 1936, he was unmarried, and Simpson secured her divorce within the year.

Edward’s widely known intention to marry Simpson sparked a royal crisis. At that time, members of the royal family were not allowed to marry divorced people. Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the Church of England, Edward’s family and widespread public opinion all ran against the potential marriage, forcing the king to decide between the throne and Simpson.

In the end, Edward renounced the throne and attempted to defuse the crisis, projecting an image of national unity. “I should never have allowed any such issue to arise,” he told his subjects in his radio address.

Albert, Duke of York, took the throne as George VI upon his older brother’s abdication. After protracted negotiations regarding the nature of his future relationship with his family and the nation he was leaving, Edward was demoted to Duke of Windsor, and he moved to the European continent with Simpson. In 1937, they married in France. “No man could look happier than did the duke,” wrote a Reuters reporter who attended the ceremony.

In 1940, the new king appointed the duke governor of the Bahamas, in part to get his brother, a suspected Nazi sympathizer, away from Europe during World War II.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor returned to France after the war, where they died in 1972 and 1986, respectively. Although a reputation of drama and scandal dogged the pair throughout the remainder of their extremely public lives, they never seemed to doubt their decision.

“They have been … years great in happiness,” Edward reportedly reflected after three decades of marriage and exile from the throne, “years of no regret, years when we preferred to look to the future rather than over our shoulders into the past.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.