“The King abdicates”

If the monar­chy is not a con­ven­tional in­sti­tu­tion, is the monarch en­ti­tled to con­ven­tional be­hav­iour, like mar­ry­ing for love as op­posed to mar­ry­ing for duty or “pro­fes­sional” arrange­ments? Can he lose his tem­per in a heads-of-state gath­er­ing? Can he di­vorce, fall in love with a di­vorced for­eign woman and other things that we, con­ven­tional peo­ple, are en­ti­tled to do and take for granted?

These ques­tions were rel­e­vant at the end of 1936 when the British monar­chy suf­fered one of its sea­sonal se­ri­ous crises. On De­cem­ber 10, King Ed­ward VIII shook the coun­try, the Em­pire and the world with the an­nounce­ment that he would re­nounce the throne after only 10 months and 21 days in the job. To put it ro­man­ti­cally, he ab­di­cated for love of a woman. A twice di­vorced Amer­i­can, woman. A cer­tain Mrs Wal­lis Simp­son, who was “slim, dark, pe­tite, grace­ful, vi­va­cious and witty, and with ex­cel­lent taste in dress”, as this news­pa­per de­scribed her.

For a monarch bound to tra­di­tion, dat­ing, not to say falling in love with this woman was a very un­con­ven­tional be­hav­iour. The very con­ser­v­a­tive Church of Eng­land, of which he was the head, put it bluntly in its news­pa­per: “We feel bound to point out that this grave cri­sis has arisen from ig­nor­ing the widely ac­cepted moral law which is the fun­da­men­tal basis of all Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion. Any­thing that un­der­mines the sanc­tity of fam­ily life is cal­cu­lated ul­ti­mately to de­stroy the rock upon which the struc­ture of the na­tion is built. We do not hes­i­tate to say that if Par­lia­ment and the na­tion agreed to the King of Eng­land mar­ry­ing a woman who has al­ready two hus­bands alive, the British Em­pire would re­ceive its death sen­tence.”

No won­der the pres­sure was too much to bear for the King. And in a radio speech he told the na­tion: “I have 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.”

Was this the by-prod­uct of a weak per­son­al­ity? Was he an un­pro­fes­sional monarch? Or a vic­tim of a coun­try stuck in pu­ri­tan­i­cal tra­di­tion? Or per­haps it was the tri­umph, the vin­di­ca­tion of love? Your pick.

BREAK­ING NEWS Front Pages through His­tory

United King­dom, Not­ting­ham Evening News