On 12 December 1936, at the accession meeting of the
British Privy Council, George VI announced his intention to make his brother the "Duke of Windsor" with the style of
Royal Highness. He wished this to be the first act of his reign, although the formal documents were not signed until 8 March the following year. During the interim, Edward was known as the
Duke of Windsor. George's decision to create Edward a
royal duke ensured that he could neither stand for election to the
British House of Commons nor speak on political subjects in the
House of Lords.
Letters Patent dated 27 May 1937 re-conferred the "title, style, or attribute of Royal Highness" upon the Duke, but specifically stated that "his wife and descendants, if any, shall not hold said title or attribute". Some British ministers advised that the reconfirmation was unnecessary, since Edward had retained the style automatically, and further that Simpson would automatically obtain the rank of wife of a prince with the style
Her Royal Highness; others maintained that he had lost all royal rank and should no longer carry any royal title or style as an abdicated king, and should instead be referred to simply as "Mr Edward Windsor". On 14 April 1937,
Sir Donald Somervell, the
Attorney General for England and Wales, submitted to
Sir John Simon, the
Home Secretary, a memorandum summarising the views of
Lord Advocate T. M. Cooper, Parliamentary Counsel
Sir Granville Ram, and himself:
Wedding , the Windsors' wedding venue, south of
Tours in France The Duke married Simpson, who had changed her name by
deed poll to Wallis Warfield (her
birth surname), in a private ceremony on 3 June 1937, at
Château de Candé, near
Tours, France. When the
Church of England refused to sanction the union, a
County Durham clergyman,
Robert Anderson Jardine (Vicar of St Paul's,
Darlington), offered to perform the ceremony, and Edward accepted. George VI forbade members of the royal family to attend, to the enduring resentment of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Edward had particularly wished his brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent, and his second cousin
Lord Louis Mountbatten, to attend the ceremony. The French organist and composer
Marcel Dupré played at the wedding. The denial of the style Royal Highness to the Duchess of Windsor caused further conflict, as did the financial settlement. The Government declined to include the Duke or Duchess on the
Civil List, and the Duke's allowance was paid personally by George VI. Edward compromised his position with his brother by concealing his full financial worth when they informally agreed upon the amount of the annual allowance. Edward had accumulated wealth over the previous twenty-six years from the revenues of the
Duchy of Cornwall, paid to him as Prince of Wales, which was ordinarily at the disposal of the incoming monarch. George also purchased
Sandringham House and
Balmoral Castle from Edward; both were Edward's personal property, inherited from
his father, and thus did not automatically pass to George VI on his accession. Edward received approximately £300,000 (equivalent to between £23.8 million and £173 million in 2024) for both residences, which was paid to him in yearly instalments. In the early days of George VI's reign, Edward telephoned daily, importuning for money and urging that Wallis be granted the style of Royal Highness, until the harassed king ordered that the calls not be put through. Relations between the Duke of Windsor and the rest of the royal family remained strained for decades. Edward had assumed that he would settle in Britain after a year or two of exile in France. King George VI (with the support of Queen Mary and his wife Queen Elizabeth) threatened to cut off Edward's allowance if he returned to Britain without an invitation.
1937 tour of Germany In October 1937,
the Duke and Duchess visited Nazi Germany, against the advice of the British government, and met
Adolf Hitler at his
Berghof retreat in
Bavaria. The visit was widely publicised by the German media. During it, Edward gave full
Nazi salutes. In Germany, "they were treated like royalty ... members of the aristocracy would bow and curtsy towards her, and she was treated with all the dignity and status that the duke always wanted", according to royal biographer
Andrew Morton in a 2016 BBC interview. The former Austrian ambassador
Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, who was also a second cousin once removed and friend of George V, believed that Edward favoured German
fascism as a bulwark against
communism, and even that he initially favoured an alliance with Germany. According to the Duke of Windsor, the experience of "the unending scenes of horror" during the First World War led him to support
appeasement. Hitler considered Edward to be friendly towards Germany and thought that
Anglo-German relations could have been improved through Edward had it not been for the abdication.
Albert Speer quoted Hitler directly: "I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us." The Duke and Duchess settled in Paris, leasing a mansion in from late 1938.
Second World War In May 1939, Edward was commissioned by
NBC to give a radio broadcast It was widely regarded as supporting appeasement, and the
BBC refused to broadcast it. It was transmitted outside the United States on
shortwave radio and was reported in full by British broadsheet newspapers. On the outbreak of the
Second World War in September 1939, the Duke and Duchess were brought back to Britain by Louis Mountbatten on board , and Edward, although he held the rank of
field marshal, was made a
major-general attached to the British Military Mission in France. which the Duke later denied. When Germany
invaded northern France in May 1940, the Windsors fled south, first to
Biarritz, then in June to
Francoist Spain. In July they moved to
Portugal, where they lived initially in the home of
Ricardo Espírito Santo, a Portuguese banker with both British and German contacts. Under the code name
Operation Willi, Nazi agents, principally
Walter Schellenberg, plotted unsuccessfully to persuade the Duke to leave Portugal and return to Spain, kidnapping him if necessary.
Lord Caldecote wrote a warning to Winston Churchill, now prime minister, that "[the Duke] is well-known to be pro-Nazi and he may 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 1 August aboard the
American Export Lines steamship
Excalibur, which was specially diverted from its usual direct course to New York City so that they could be dropped off at Bermuda on the 9th. They left Bermuda for
Nassau on the
Canadian National Steamship Company vessel
Lady Somers on 15 August, arriving two days later. Edward did not enjoy being governor and privately referred to the islands as "a third-class
British colony". The
British Foreign Office strenuously objected when Edward and Wallis planned to cruise aboard a yacht belonging to Swedish magnate
Axel Wenner-Gren, whom British and American intelligence wrongly believed to be a close friend of
Luftwaffe commander
Hermann Göring. Edward was praised for his efforts to combat poverty on the islands. He was "considerably more enlightened in his attitudes than the majority of Bahamian whites, or either of his predecessors", and had an "excellent relationship" with Black individuals such as jazz musician Bert Cambridge (later elected to the
Bahamian House of Assembly, to Edward's delight) and valet
Sydney Johnson, whom Edward retained for thirty years and was said to have "loved as a son". Edward maintained a long-standing dispute with
Étienne Dupuch, the editor of the
Nassau Daily Tribune, writing privately at one point that Dupuch was "more than half
Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium". But even Dupuch praised Edward for his resolution of civil unrest over low wages in Nassau in 1942, though Edward blamed the trouble on "mischief makers – communists" and "men of
Central European Jewish descent, who had secured jobs as a pretext for obtaining a deferment of
draft". He resigned from the post on 16 March 1945. It is widely believed that the Duke and Duchess sympathised with fascism before and during the Second World War, and were moved to the Bahamas to minimise their opportunities to act on those feelings. In 1940 he said: "In the past 10 years Germany has totally reorganised the order of its society ... Countries which were unwilling to accept such a reorganisation of society and its concomitant sacrifices should direct their policies accordingly." During the
occupation of France, the Duke asked the German
Wehrmacht forces to place guards at his Paris and
Riviera homes; they did so. In December 1940, Edward gave
Fulton Oursler of
Liberty magazine an interview at
Government House in Nassau. Oursler conveyed its content to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in a private meeting at the
White House on 23 December 1940. The interview was published on 22 March 1941, and in it Edward was reported to have said that "Hitler was the right and logical leader of the German people" and that the time was coming for President Roosevelt to mediate a peace settlement. Edward protested that he had been misquoted and misinterpreted. The
Allies became sufficiently disturbed by German plots revolving around Edward that President Roosevelt ordered covert surveillance of the Duke and Duchess when they visited
Palm Beach, Florida, in April 1941.
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; had remained in constant contact with him; and had continued to leak secrets. Author
Charles Higham claimed that
Anthony Blunt, an MI5 agent and
Soviet spy, acting on orders from the
British royal family, made a successful secret trip to
Schloss Friedrichshof in
Allied-occupied Germany towards the end of the war to retrieve sensitive letters between the Duke of Windsor and Hitler and other leading Nazis. What is certain is that George VI sent the
Royal Librarian,
Owen Morshead, accompanied by Bluntthen working part-time in the
Royal Library as well as for British intelligenceto Friedrichshof in March 1945 to secure papers relating to
Victoria, German Empress, the eldest child of Queen Victoria. Looters had stolen part of the castle's archive, including surviving letters between mother and daughter, as well as other valuables, some of which were recovered in Chicago after the war. The papers rescued by Morshead and Blunt, and those returned by the American authorities from Chicago, were deposited in the
Royal Archives. Documents, since titled the
Marburg Files, recovered by US troops in
Marburg, Germany, in May 1945, include key material that relates directly to theories of Edward's Nazi sympathies. After more than a decade of suppression by the British authorities, they were published in the late 1950s. After the war, Edward admitted in his memoirs that he admired the Germans, but he denied being pro-Nazi. Of Hitler he wrote: "[the]
Führer struck me as a somewhat ridiculous figure, with his theatrical posturings and his bombastic pretensions." In the 1950s, journalist
Frank Giles heard the Duke blame British foreign secretary
Anthony Eden for helping to "precipitate the war through his treatment of
Mussolini ... that's what [Eden] did, he helped to bring on the war ... and of course Roosevelt and the Jews". During the 1960s, in private, Edward reportedly said to a friend,
Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross, "I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap." == Later life ==