The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, gave the King three options as crisis loomed in late 1936: give up any hope of marrying Mrs. Simpson, who as an American divorcee was anathema to most aristocratic Brits; marry her against the advice of his ministers, thereby causing the Government to fall; or abdicate.
Edward chose to abdicate, of course, but Winston Churchill and others urged him to stand his ground. What if he had? What would have happened the day after Edward and Mrs. Simpson tied the knot? The day after that? The next week, month, etc.?
Could he have kept his Crown? Would Wallis ever have been accepted by Britons as their Queen?
And what impact would all this have had on Great Britain during World War II, as both were at least somewhat sympathetic to Fascism?
I’ll lurk to see what more learned folks than I say.
I’d have said, “Screw you, I’m the King”, which is probably like Ludwig II of Bavaria instructing his government to print more money when he’d spent it all.
Not an historian, but, if push had come to shove, I think steps would have been taken to formally depose him, as was done with Edward II and James II. The Act of Settlement and the Bill of Rights would certainly have been sufficient legal grounds.
Whether the monarchy would have survived is debatable. We could have gone to a Protectorate, and, after the war, to a proper constitutional republic. Or George VI could have taken the throne and events developed much as they actually did.
Based on what my various grandparents told me, there was no way that the British people would have accepted Wallace as Queen.
“Hark, the herald angels sing
Mrs Simpson’s stole our King…”
The Government would certainly have resigned en masse and beyond that …
My WAG is the ultimate outcome would have depended on the press and how Edward spun it (or was allowed to spin it – he was prevented from giving his own version of the Abdication speech and, before that, from taking his case to the people).
If we believe the that Simpson was sexually involved with at least two other men at the time she was with Edward, if we believe some of the lurid stuff relating to her life in Baltimore and if, as Hoover and the FBI believed, she was indeed a Nazi spy – if we believe any of these things and the press in the UK carried the stories – I doubt she could ever be Queen/accepted or that Edward could remain King.
If he had a HUGE fight with his ministers, hung on by the skin of his teeth, only to die a death of a thousand cuts as one horrific story about Simpson after another was leaked into the press … I wonder if the Monarchy itself could have survived.
Especially the paragraph above and the Simpson-Nazi stuff. I always thought Edward’s own fondness for the Nazi’s grew out of a childish hatred and anger at the British establishment and not real political acceptance of their beliefs - I think he would have done just as his brother did re WWII without his axe to grind.
For the few I know about Ludwig, I suspect he has been unjustly slandered, and that his main sin was to not be supportive enough of Prussia’s policies.
He was pretty…fruity. They kept his brother locked up because je barked like a dog in church.
I’m basing this on The Mad Monarch and would be interested in any other works on the subject. He spent a great deal of money on castles and my favorite composer, Richard Wagner.
After Baldwin’s government resigned, the King could have attempted to find new ministers who would support his marriage and could command the support of a majority of Parliament. The evidence is pretty clear, though, that he would have been unable to do so. He would have had to dissolve Parliament and call a new election.
The primary, and perhaps only, issue in the campaign would have been the King’s choice of a consort. This wouldn’t be fun for the King. (Who among us would want politicians debating his or her choice of a mate?) Since the Sovereign can’t interfere in political campaigns, he couldn’t even have taken his own case to the people, and would have had to rely on someone like Churchill to form a “King’s Party” and carry his water for him.
If the King’s Party won the election, well and good. But if Baldwin or someone of like mind had been re-elected, he again would have advised the King not to marry. If the King still persisted, he would be acting against the advice of his ministers with the ministers backed by an unequivocal public mandate.
At that point, the constitutional system moves into terra incognita. It’s like asking what would happen if the President sent the Army against Congress. It’s against the rules. Most likely we would today have the Republic of Great Britain.
Interestingly enough, if it hadn’t been for Wallis, he probably would have found some other excuse to abdicate-by most accounts, Edward did NOT want to be King, at all.
Would it if have been an armed revolution, do you think? Or would the military have backed parliament? If Britian disolves into internal strife, would they have been able to stand against Germany? It would have been a very ugly time for England to have a civil war.
I’ve always heard the opposite. That Edward was too enthusiastic about being the King. He wanted to be a real ruler and not just a symbol, and this was the real reason that Parliament pushed for his abdication rather than a compromise over his marriage plans.
It’s hard to say, because no monarch since the Restoration has acted that way. I’m sure Parliament would have tried every device to bring Edward to his senses–denying Wallis the title of Queen, barring any children from the succession, slashing the Civil List. But ultimately, Parliamentary supremacy is a pretty important thing. If one has to fight for it, so be it. Frankly, it’s hard to picture anybody taking up arms for Edward and Wallis!
It would have been a major crisis, but war would have been extremely unlikely. The government would have resigned and there would have been a new election on ths issue. It’s unlikely Edward would have won a mandate to stay on the throne. A new government would have been installed and Edward would have been informed that, like James II in 1688, he was being replaced as King. Edward would have found that refusing to abdicate would mean very little, if Parliament, the armed forces, and the people put the crown on somebody else and declare him to be the real King.
With the relatively strange relationships between Germany and Britain at the time, do you think Edward and Wallis would have gone into exile to Germany at that point (the “last straw” point for Parliament in Little Nemo’s post above) and formed a rallying point for the Fascists within Britain in hopes to have Hitler carry him back across the channel as the “true king of GB”?
My guess is that if push came to shove and Edward tried to actually rule Britain instead of reigning over he would have had an “accident”. Didn’t Baldwin once say the best thing the King could do was to fall and break his neck?
I’ve read that he told several people close to him that he wanted to retire to his estate in Canada rather than assume the crown. A part of me thinks Wallis was just an excuse for him to resign from a responsibility he didn’t want in the first place.
Everything I’ve read confirms **Guinastasia’s ** view. Edward didn’t want to be King and everyone (his family, his friends, his staff) knew that he didn’t have the personality necessary to stick it out.
