Edward VIII

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward VIII, King of the United Kingdom, ended his reign with a voice on the radio. On the night of the 11th of December 1936 he spoke to listeners around the world. He told them he had found it "impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility" without "the woman I love." His time as king had lasted just 326 days, and no British monarch has abdicated since.

  How does a man raised for the throne, and adored by crowds on several continents, decide to give it up? Why did the leaders of Britain and its Dominions line up against his choice? And what did he do with the decades of life that remained?

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• 2. A Royal Nursery

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  Edward was born at ten at night on the 23rd of June 1894, at White Lodge in Richmond Park on the outskirts of London. Queen Victoria, his great-grandmother, was still on the throne. His parents were the Duke and Duchess of York, who would later reign as George V and Queen Mary. At birth he stood third in line to the throne, behind his grandfather and his father.

  Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, baptised him in the Green Drawing Room of White Lodge on the 16th of July. He received seven names: Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. Edward honoured a late uncle, Prince Albert Victor, whom the family called Eddy. Albert was added at Queen Victoria's request, in memory of her late husband. Christian honoured King Christian IX of Denmark. George, Andrew, Patrick and David came from the patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Family and close friends always called him David.

  Charlotte Bill took over the royal nursery after an earlier nanny was dismissed for cruelty. That nanny used to pinch the boy before he was brought down to see his parents. His crying would make the Duke and Duchess send both child and nanny away. Upper-class families of the period usually left daily care to nannies, and the York children were no exception.

  Tadpoles on toast, served as a prank to the children's French master, made their mother laugh. The Duchess had a playful side that her austere public image hid, and she encouraged the children to confide in her. Their father was a harsh disciplinarian, yet he was openly affectionate.

  Hélène Bricka was Edward's first tutor, teaching him at home. In 1901, after Queen Victoria died, his parents spent almost nine months touring the British Empire. Edward and his siblings stayed in Britain with their grandparents, Queen Alexandra and King Edward VII, who showered them with affection. When the parents returned, two men, Frederick Finch and Henry Hansell, virtually raised the children through the rest of their nursery years. Hansell kept Edward under strict tutorship until he was almost 13, and private tutors taught him German and French.

  The Royal Naval College, Osborne, took him in 1907 after he sat the entrance examination. Hansell had wanted him to start school sooner, but his father disagreed. Edward did not enjoy his two years at Osborne. He then moved to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where a two-year course and a career in the Royal Navy were planned.

  Those plans ended when Edward VII died and Edward's father became George V, which made Edward the heir apparent. Preparations for kingship began in earnest. Edward left the naval course before graduating, served three months as a midshipman aboard a battleship, and went straight to Magdalen College, Oxford. His biographers judge that he was intellectually unprepared for it. He learned to play polo with the university club and left after eight terms without a single academic qualification.

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• 3. Prince Of Wales

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  Letters patent created Edward Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester on his 16th birthday in 1910. A month earlier, on the 6th of May, he had automatically become Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay. The formal investiture came on the 13th of July 1911 at Caernarfon Castle. The Welsh politician David Lloyd George, who was Constable of the Castle and Chancellor of the Exchequer, pressed for it to be held in Wales. Lloyd George designed an elaborate pageant in Welsh style and coached Edward to say a few words in Welsh.

  Edward had joined the Grenadier Guards in June 1914, and when the First World War broke out he was old enough to serve and eager to do so. Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, refused to let him fight on the front lines. He feared the harm to Britain if the heir apparent were captured. Edward still visited frontline trenches several times, and in 1916 he received the Military Cross. His limited role earned him the affection of veterans. In 1918 he made his first military flight, and he later gained a pilot's licence.

  In 1919 Edward agreed to preside over the organising committee for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park, Middlesex. He wanted it to include a great national sports ground, and so he had a hand in creating Wembley Stadium.

  The 1920s turned the Prince of Wales into the most photographed celebrity of his time and a setter of men's fashion. His rank, travels, good looks and unmarried status drew constant attention. Men's Wear magazine took note during his 1924 visit to the United States. It said young Americans were "more interested in the clothes of the Prince of Wales than in any other individual on earth."

  Sixteen tours of the Empire between 1919 and 1935 took him far from London, and he also visited poverty-stricken areas of Britain. On his 1919 tour of Canada he acquired the Bedingfield ranch near Pekisko, Alberta, which he kept until 1962. He named it the E. P. Ranch, for Edward, Prince. His attempts to breed Shorthorn cattle, Dartmoor ponies and Clydesdale horses there did not succeed. In 1920 the train carrying him through Australia was derailed outside Perth, and he escaped unharmed. His November 1921 visit to India coincided with the non-cooperation movement's protests for Indian self-rule, and riots broke out in Bombay.

  A letter from Australia in 1920 shows a darker side of his outlook. Like many people of his day, Edward believed that white people were inherently superior to foreigners and to many of the Empire's subjects. Writing of Indigenous Australians, he called them the lowest known form of human beings and compared them to monkeys.

  Sir Alexander Leith, a leading Conservative in the north of England, persuaded Edward in 1929 to spend three days in the County Durham and Northumberland coalfields, where unemployment was widespread. From January to April 1931 he and his brother Prince George covered eighteen thousand miles on a tour of South America. They went out by ocean liner and came back through Paris, finishing with an Imperial Airways flight from Paris-Le Bourget that landed specially in Windsor Great Park.

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• 4. Romance And Reproach

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  Prince John, Edward's youngest brother, died on the 18th of January 1919 at the age of 13, after a severe epileptic seizure. Edward was eleven years older and had hardly known him. He treated the death as "little more than a regrettable nuisance." In a letter to his mistress of the time, he wrote that the boy had become "more of an animal than anything else." He also sent his mother a letter that has since been lost. She did not reply, and he wrote again to apologise. In that apology he called himself a "cold hearted and unsympathetic swine."

  George V had a grim forecast for his heir. "After I am dead," the king said, "the boy will ruin himself in twelve months." The king was disappointed that his son would not settle down, and disgusted by his affairs with married women. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin shared the worry about Edward's womanising and reckless behaviour in the 1920s and 1930s. The king preferred his second son Albert, known as Bertie, and Albert's daughter Elizabeth, known as Lilibet. He told a courtier that he prayed his eldest son would "never marry and have children." He also hoped nothing would "come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne."

  In 1929 Time magazine reported that Edward liked to tease Albert's wife, also named Elizabeth and later the Queen Mother, by calling her "Queen Elizabeth." The magazine asked whether there was truth in a story that he had said he would renounce his rights when George V died. That would have made her nickname come true.

  Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, Edward's second cousin, was once suggested as his bride before the First World War. Nothing came of it, and she married Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick. In 1934 Adolf Hitler, hoping to forge a link between the British and German royal houses, asked her to arrange a marriage between the 40-year-old Edward and her 17-year-old daughter Frederica of Hanover. Frederica was then at boarding school in England. Her parents refused, citing the age gap, and she later married Paul of Greece.

  By 1917 Edward liked to spend leave from the Western Front partying in Paris. There he met Marguerite Alibert, a Parisian courtesan, and became infatuated. He wrote her candid letters, which she kept. After about a year he ended the affair. In 1923 Alibert was acquitted in a spectacular murder trial after shooting her husband at the Savoy Hotel. The Royal Household made desperate efforts to keep Edward's name out of the trial.

  Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, youngest daughter of the 4th Duke of Sutherland, also entered his life in 1917. According to her friends, Edward proposed to her. The King and Queen disapproved of certain relatives of hers, namely Daisy, Countess of Warwick, a maternal aunt, and the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, a maternal uncle. The relationship ended.

  In 1930 the King gave Edward the lease of Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park. There he kept up relationships with married women, including Freda Dudley Ward and Lady Furness, the American wife of a British peer. Lady Furness introduced him to her friend Wallis Simpson, a fellow American. Simpson had divorced her first husband, the U.S. Navy officer Win Spencer, in 1927. Her second husband, Ernest Simpson, was a British-American businessman.

  It is generally accepted that Edward and Simpson became lovers while Lady Furness was travelling abroad. Edward adamantly told his father that Simpson was not his mistress. His parents met her at Buckingham Palace in 1935 but later refused to receive her. The relationship further strained his bond with his father.

  Government and establishment figures grew anxious about an American divorcée with a questionable past and so much influence over the heir apparent. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch followed the couple and secretly examined the nature of their relationship. An undated report described a visit to an antique shop. The proprietor later noted that Simpson seemed to have the prince "completely under her thumb."

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• 5. Abdication Crisis

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  George V died on the 20th of January 1936, and Edward ascended the throne as Edward VIII. The next day, with Simpson beside him, he watched the proclamation of his own accession from a window of St James's Palace. That broke with custom. He also became the first monarch of the British Empire to fly in an aircraft, travelling from Sandringham to London for his Accession Council.

  During a tour of depressed villages in South Wales, Edward remarked that "something must be done" for the unemployed coal miners. Politicians read it as an attempt to steer policy, although he proposed no remedy. Ministers also hesitated to send confidential papers to Fort Belvedere. Edward paid them little attention, and they feared that Simpson and other house guests might read state secrets.

  Only a handful of test coins bearing Edward's portrait were ever struck before the abdication. Tradition held that each monarch's profile faced the opposite way to the predecessor's. Edward insisted on facing left, as his father had, so that the parting in his hair would show. All the test coins are very rare. George VI also faced left when he took the throne, to keep the tradition going. That implied Edward's coins would have shown him facing right.

  On the 16th of July 1936, George Andrew McMahon pulled out a loaded revolver as Edward rode on horseback at Constitution Hill, near Buckingham Palace. Police spotted the weapon and pounced, and he was arrested quickly. At his trial McMahon claimed that "a foreign power" had approached him to kill Edward. He said he had told MI5 and was merely seeing the plan through to help catch the real culprits. The court rejected this and sentenced him to a year in prison for "intent to alarm." It is now thought that he had indeed been in contact with MI5, but the rest of his claims remain debatable.

  In August and September 1936 Edward and Simpson cruised the Eastern Mediterranean on a steam yacht. By October it was clear he planned to marry her, especially once divorce proceedings between the Simpsons were brought at Ipswich Assizes. Gossip about the affair was widespread in the United States. British newspapers voluntarily kept silent, and the British public knew nothing until early December.

  On the 16th of November 1936 Edward invited Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to Buckingham Palace. He said he wanted to marry Simpson once she was free to remarry. Baldwin replied that his subjects would find it morally unacceptable. The Church of England opposed remarriage after divorce at the time, and the king was its titular head. The clergy expected him to uphold its teaching. Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was vocal in insisting that Edward must go.

  Winston Churchill supported in principle a morganatic marriage, and some historians suggest he conceived the idea. Under it Edward would remain king while Simpson held a lesser title instead of becoming queen consort. Any children would not inherit the throne. The British Cabinet rejected the plan, and so did the Dominion governments. Their views counted because the Statute of Westminster 1931 required the assent of every Dominion parliament, as well as Britain's, to any change in the succession or the royal style and titles.

  Joseph Lyons of Australia, Mackenzie King of Canada and J. B. M. Hertzog of South Africa all made clear that they opposed the king marrying a divorcée. His Irish counterpart, Éamon de Valera, expressed indifference and detachment. Michael Joseph Savage of New Zealand had never heard of Simpson and vacillated in disbelief. Edward at first responded that there were "not many people in Australia" and that their opinion did not matter.

  Baldwin laid out three options: give up the idea of marriage, marry against his ministers' wishes, or abdicate. Edward had already told him he would relinquish the throne if he could not marry Simpson. He knew that marrying against advice would make the government resign and cause a constitutional crisis. He chose to abdicate.

  On the 10th of December 1936, at Fort Belvedere, Edward signed the instruments of abdication. His younger brothers were present: Albert, Duke of York, next in line for the throne; Henry, Duke of Gloucester; and George, Duke of Kent. The document declared his "irrevocable determination to renounce the throne for myself and for my descendants." The next day he gave royal assent to His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936, the last act of his reign. All the Dominions had already consented, as the Statute of Westminster required.

  Edward left Britain for Austria on the 12th of December 1936. He could not join Simpson until her divorce became absolute several months later. The Duke of York succeeded as George VI, and George's elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth, became heir presumptive.

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• 6. Duke In Exile

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  George VI announced on the 12th of December 1936, at the accession meeting of the Privy Council, that he would make his brother Duke of Windsor with the style Royal Highness. He wanted this to be the first act of his reign. The formal documents were not signed until the 8th of March 1937, and Edward was known as the Duke of Windsor in the interim. Making him a royal duke meant he could not stand for election to the House of Commons or speak on political subjects in the House of Lords.

  Letters Patent dated the 27th of May 1937 re-conferred the style of Royal Highness on the Duke but said his wife and descendants would not hold it. Ministers disagreed about whether this was even necessary. Some said Edward had kept the style automatically, so Simpson would automatically become Her Royal Highness. Others held that he had lost all royal rank and should be called simply "Mr Edward Windsor."

  On the 14th of April 1937, Sir Donald Somervell, the Attorney General, sent Home Secretary Sir John Simon a memorandum. It summarised the views of Somervell, Lord Advocate T. M. Cooper and Parliamentary Counsel Sir Granville Ram. They thought the Duke could not have claimed the style after abdicating. They also concluded that his wife had no legal claim to it, because the style lay within the king's prerogative.

  The bride had changed her name by deed poll to her birth surname, Wallis Warfield, before she married the Duke on the 3rd of June 1937 at Château de Candé, near Tours, France. The Church of England refused to sanction the union. Robert Anderson Jardine, Vicar of St Paul's, Darlington, in County Durham, offered to perform the ceremony, and Edward accepted. George VI forbade members of the royal family to attend, which the Windsors resented for years. Edward had particularly wanted his brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent, and his second cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten. The French organist and composer Marcel Dupré played at the wedding.

  About £300,000 changed hands when George VI bought Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle from Edward. Both were Edward's personal property, inherited from his father, so they had not passed to George automatically. Edward received the money in yearly instalments. The government declined to put the Duke or Duchess on the Civil List, so George VI paid the Duke's allowance personally. Edward compromised his position by hiding his full financial worth when the brothers informally agreed the amount. Over twenty-six years he had accumulated wealth from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, paid to him as Prince of Wales.

  In the early days of George's reign, Edward telephoned daily, pressing for money and urging that Wallis receive the style Royal Highness. The harassed king finally ordered that the calls not be put through.

  A year or two of exile in France was all Edward had expected. George VI, backed by Queen Mary and his wife Queen Elizabeth, threatened to cut off his allowance if he returned to Britain without an invitation. In 1939 Edward wrote bitterly to his mother that her last letter had destroyed "the last vestige of feeling I had left for you." By then the couple were making their home in Paris, where they leased a mansion from late 1938.

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• 7. Nazi Questions

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  In October 1937 the Duke and Duchess of Windsor travelled to Nazi Germany against the advice of the British government. They met Adolf Hitler at his Berghof retreat in Bavaria, and German media publicised the visit widely. Edward gave full Nazi salutes during the trip. The royal biographer Andrew Morton told the BBC in 2016 that the couple were "treated like royalty." He said aristocrats bowed and curtsied to Wallis, giving her the dignity and status the Duke had always wanted for her.

  Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, a former Austrian ambassador and a friend of George V, believed that Edward favoured German fascism as a bulwark against communism. He even thought Edward at first favoured an alliance with Germany. The Duke himself said that "the unending scenes of horror" in the First World War had led him to support appeasement. Hitler thought Edward friendly to Germany. Albert Speer quoted him as saying that "His abdication was a severe loss for us."

  In May 1939 NBC commissioned Edward to give a radio broadcast, his first since abdicating, during a visit to the First World War battlefields at Verdun. He spoke as "a soldier of the Last War" whose most earnest prayer was that "such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind." Millions heard it worldwide. Many saw it as support for appeasement. The BBC refused to broadcast it, but it went out beyond the United States on shortwave radio, and British broadsheet newspapers reported it in full.

  When the Second World War began in September 1939, Louis Mountbatten brought the Windsors back to Britain by ship. Edward held the rank of field marshal but was made a major-general attached to the British Military Mission in France. In February 1940 the German ambassador in The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, claimed that Edward had leaked Allied plans for the defence of Belgium. The Duke later denied it.

  Germany invaded northern France in May 1940, and the Windsors fled south, first to Biarritz and in June to Francoist Spain. In July they moved to Portugal, staying at first in the home of Ricardo Espírito Santo, a banker with both British and German contacts. Under the code name Operation Willi, Nazi agents led by Walter Schellenberg plotted to persuade the Duke to return to Spain, kidnapping him if necessary. The plot failed. Lord Caldecote warned Winston Churchill, now prime minister, that the Duke was well known to be pro-Nazi and might become "a centre of intrigue." Churchill threatened Edward with a court-martial if he did not return to British soil.

  In July 1940 Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas. The Duke and Duchess left Lisbon on the 1st of August aboard the American Export Lines steamship Excalibur. The ship was diverted from its usual direct course to New York City so that it could drop them at Bermuda on the 9th. On the 15th of August they sailed for Nassau aboard the Lady Somers, arriving two days later. Edward did not enjoy being governor and privately called the islands "a third-class British colony."

  The British Foreign Office strenuously objected when the couple planned a cruise on a yacht belonging to the Swedish magnate Axel Wenner-Gren. British and American intelligence wrongly believed he was a close friend of Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. Edward earned praise for his efforts to combat poverty on the islands. He was considerably more enlightened than most white Bahamians, and he had an excellent relationship with Black individuals such as the jazz musician Bert Cambridge, later elected to the Bahamian House of Assembly. His valet Sydney Johnson stayed with him for thirty years and was said to be loved like a son.

  Étienne Dupuch, editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune, was the target of a long-standing dispute and of a racist private remark by Edward. Even so, Dupuch praised the way Edward resolved civil unrest over low wages in Nassau in 1942. Edward blamed that trouble on "mischief makers" and on communists.

  Sir Harry Oakes, a wealthy entrepreneur and friend of the Duke, was violently murdered on the 8th of July 1943. He was the richest man in the Bahamas and possibly in the British Empire. Instead of following the usual Bahamian or British procedures, Edward brought in two American detectives from Miami whom he knew personally. Within 36 hours Oakes's son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, was charged after a single fingerprint was reported at the scene. The preliminary investigation was described as botched, and the fingerprint was found to have been planted. The Duke stayed away from the island during the trial. De Marigny was acquitted, and the case remains unsolved.

  Many historians have suggested that Hitler was prepared to reinstate Edward as king, hoping to set up a fascist puppet government in Britain after Operation Sea Lion. It is widely believed that the couple sympathised with fascism, and that they were sent to the Bahamas to limit their chances of acting on it. In 1940 Edward said that in ten years Germany had totally reorganised its society. During the occupation of France he asked the German Wehrmacht to guard his homes in Paris and on the Riviera, and they did.

  Fulton Oursler of Liberty magazine interviewed Edward at Government House in Nassau in December 1940. Oursler described it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House on the 23rd of December 1940. The interview appeared on the 22nd of March 1941. It reported Edward saying that "Hitler was the right and logical leader of the German people." Edward protested that he had been misquoted and misinterpreted.

  In April 1941 President Roosevelt ordered covert surveillance of the Windsors during a visit to Palm Beach, Florida. Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, then a monk in an American monastery, had told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Wallis had slept with the German ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in 1936. He also claimed she had kept in constant contact with him and had continued to leak secrets.

  US troops recovered documents at Marburg, Germany, in May 1945 that bear directly on theories of Edward's Nazi sympathies. They became known as the Marburg Files. British authorities suppressed them for more than a decade, and they were published in the late 1950s. A separate story involves Anthony Blunt, an MI5 agent and Soviet spy. The author Charles Higham claimed Blunt retrieved sensitive letters between the Duke and Hitler. What is certain is that in March 1945 George VI sent the Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, with Blunt to Schloss Friedrichshof to secure papers relating to Victoria, German Empress.

  Edward resigned as governor on the 16th of March 1945. In his memoirs he admitted that he admired the Germans but denied being pro-Nazi. He wrote that Hitler struck him as "a somewhat ridiculous figure." In the 1950s the journalist Frank Giles heard him blame Anthony Eden for helping to bring on the war, and then add a antisemitic remark about Roosevelt and the Jews. During the 1960s, according to a report, he told his friend Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross, "I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap."

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• 8. Café Society Years

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  Letters from Kenneth de Courcy to the Duke, dated between 1946 and 1949 and published in extract form in 2009, suggest a scheme for a regency. The health of George VI was failing, and de Courcy worried about the Mountbatten family's influence over the young Princess Elizabeth. He proposed that Edward buy a working agricultural estate within easy reach of London, to win favour with the public and be ready if the King became incapacitated. De Courcy also floated the idea of the British occupation zone in Germany becoming a kingdom with Edward as monarch. The Duke hesitated, the King recovered from his surgery, and nothing came of any of it.

  At the end of the war the couple returned to France, and Edward never again held an official role. The City of Paris gave him a house at 4 route du Champ d'Entraînement, on the Neuilly-sur-Seine side of the Bois de Boulogne, for a nominal rent. The French government exempted him from income tax, and the couple could buy goods duty-free through the British embassy and the military commissary. His allowance was also supplemented by illegal currency trading. In 1952 they bought and renovated Le Moulin de la Tuilerie at Gif-sur-Yvette, the only property they ever owned. In 1951 he published a memoir, A King's Story, ghost-written by Charles Murphy, and its royalties added to their income.

  Gore Vidal met the Windsors socially in the 1950s and reported on the vacuity of the Duke's conversation. The couple belonged to café society, hosting parties and shuttling between Paris and New York. They doted on the pug dogs they kept.

  In June 1953, Edward and Wallis watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on television in Paris instead of attending in London. Edward said it was contrary to precedent for a sovereign or former sovereign to attend another's coronation. He was paid to write articles on the ceremony for the Sunday Express and Woman's Home Companion, and he also wrote a short book, The Crown and the People, 1902-1953.

  In 1955 the couple visited President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House. They appeared on Edward R. Murrow's television interview show Person to Person in 1956. In 1966 Edward gave the journalist Georg Stefan Troller an interview for ZDF in German, answering questions about his abdication. A 50-minute BBC television interview followed in 1970. On the 4th of April of that year President Richard Nixon made them guests of honour at a White House dinner. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Charles Lindbergh, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Arnold Palmer, George H. W. Bush and Frank Borman also attended.

  The royal family never fully accepted the Duchess, and Queen Mary refused to receive her formally. Queen Mary remained angry with Edward and indignant over his marriage. "To give up all this for that," she said. Edward attended George VI's funeral in 1952. In 1965 the Duke and Duchess returned to London, where his niece Elizabeth II, his sister-in-law Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, and his sister Mary, Princess Royal, visited them. A week later the Princess Royal died, and they attended her memorial service.

  In 1967 the Duke and Duchess joined the royal family for the centenary of Queen Mary's birth. The last royal ceremony Edward attended was the funeral of Princess Marina in 1968. In 1969 he declined Elizabeth II's invitation to the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales, replying that Charles would not want his "aged great-uncle" there. Charles briefly visited the Duke at his Paris residence on the 4th of October 1970.

  Edward's health deteriorated in the 1960s. Michael E. DeBakey operated on him in Houston for an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta in December 1964. Sir Stewart Duke-Elder treated a detached retina in his left eye in February 1965. A smoker from an early age, Edward was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1971 and underwent cobalt therapy. In September 1971 he hosted Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako of Japan at his Paris residence. He had first met Hirohito fifty years earlier.

  On the 18th of May 1972 Queen Elizabeth II visited the Duke and Duchess while on a state visit to France. She met Edward alone for 15 minutes. For the photocall only Wallis appeared with the royal party, which included Prince Philip and Prince Charles, because Edward was too ill.

  Edward died at his home in Paris on the 28th of May 1972, aged 77, ten days after the Queen's visit. His body was returned to Britain and lay in state at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The funeral service took place there on the 5th of June, with the Queen, the royal family and the Duchess of Windsor present. The Duchess stayed at Buckingham Palace during her visit. He was buried in the Royal Burial Ground behind the Royal Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Frogmore. The couple had no children. Until a 1965 agreement with the Queen, they had planned burial in a plot they had bought at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, where Wallis's father lay. Wallis, frail and suffering increasingly from dementia, died in 1986 and was buried alongside her husband.

  Philip Williamson, writing in 2007, argued that the popular view of the abdication as political rather than religious is false. He said it arises because divorce has become far more common and acceptable. To modern sensibilities, the religious restrictions that kept Edward from remaining king while marrying Simpson "seem, wrongly, to provide insufficient explanation."

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