Would he still have been forced to abdicate, later, just for being a Nazi sympathizer, as war with Germany approached? If not, how could he possibly have worked with Churchill?
There’s no reason to believe he would have been forced to abdicate. He would likely have been carefully managed to avoid doing too much damage. It’s becoming increasingly common to think Edward was forced to abdicate for reasons other than the marriage (and there were lots of reasons why he was a horrible King) but they’re not true. It was the marriage, full stop.
Edward VIII was not so much a Nazi sympathizer as he was just stupid. (Wallis Simpson, you have a stronger case there, but you’re theorizing she never meets Edward.) His stupidity was manageable.
It’s hard to ascertain what effect this would have had on the war, but my guess is little to none. George VI and Elizabeth were inspiring, but their impact can be a bit overstated, and after all had Edward been king, you’d have had the services of Prince Albert and Lady Elizabeth, whom people already admired.
If he hadn’t met Wallis Simpson then his personal self destruct may have directed him to some other, equally unsuitable woman. OTOH if he didn’t fall into any such relationship then I think he would have been pushed into marriage with someone both suitable and able to manage him (if such a woman existed in the ver limited pool available).
Actually, there is every reason to believe that Edward VIII would have had an easier relationship with Churchill than George VI had. Churchill and George VI were initially very wary of each other, partly because Churchill had so strongly supported Edward during the Abdication Crisis and partly because George had publically welcomed the Munich Agreement. It was only because they had to work together once Churchill became Prime Minister that a close friendship developed between them.
A further factor complicating their relationship was that Churchill had remained on such friendly terms with Edward even after the latter had abdicated. Churchill even stayed with the Windsors while on holiday in the south of France in early 1938. That was after the Windsors had made their notorious visit to Germany. But that’s not all - the Windsors had been accompanied to Germany by none other than Churchill’s son, Randolph, who had gone with his father’s full support. Churchill, whose views on the matter perhaps ought to carry some weight, didn’t think Edward was pro-Nazi.
Suppose Edward VIII hadn’t met mrs. Simpson, didn’t abdicate, and obstructed the government seriously during the war. That could not have been a reason for forcing him to abdicate beforehand. Compare the Belgian king Leopold III, to whom this happened: not beforehand but afterwards.
Did he even really want to be King?
I still don’t see how marrying Wallis would force the King to abdicate. I mean, The Windsors are not like the Romonovs that had very strict rules on who can marry whom. I look at it more as the House of Commons flexing their muscles and itching for a fight. It was just 25 years previous that the Commons had manged to castrate the House of Lords and even today there will apparently a recreation of the Roundheads vs Cavaliers were the monarch withold Royal Assent.
While there may have been technical reasons why Edward shouldn’t marry Wallis, it boiled down to basically “The People (read The House of Commons) do not approve of her so we forbid you to marry her.” Why should the Commons be involved at all with who the King chooses to marry? I think it was the arrogance and ultimately cowardice of Edward along with opposition to an unpopular woman that created a perfect storm that allowed the Commons to show that their dominance over the monarchy.
My question is what if Edward told Baldwin to fuck himself, go ahead and resign and I’ll marry Wallis and still be King. Would the Commons really have tried to force Edward out over his choice of Queen?
Edward would have been out on his ear. Parliament has demonstrated its supremacy over the monarchy a number of times. Evicting the Stuarts twice, for instance.
While RickJay apparently disagrees, I’m one of the people who feel that the marriage was not the real reason why Edward was forced to abdicate. It just gave the British government a handy non-political excuse.
Nor was Edward’s supposed sympathy for Nazism necessarily a deal breaker. There were plenty of other Britons who had had an early enthusiasm for Hitler that later became embarrassing after 1939.
Edward’s real problem was political. He could not accept the fact that the British monarchy’s power had become mostly symbolic. He wanted to assert real power as King. And Parliament, which had assumed the power formerly held by the monarchy, was not going to see it taken back.
In normal times, a struggle between the Monarch and Parliament over who was supreme would have been a nasty political battle. But in this case, if it had occurred, it would have happened during the crisis of the early years of World War II. A domestic political divide during this period probably would have caused Britain to drop out of the war and allowed a Nazi victory in Europe.
We forget just how scandalous and taboo divorce was in high society back then. Wallis Simpson was an American divorcee who was thought by most of the British establishment to be entirely unsuitable as a wife for a British king. Edward VIII knew, or should have known, that he would need the consent of the Government when it came time to choose his wife and queen. As a constitutional issue in 1936, it was a no-brainer. I agree with RickJay, the abdication really was all about the marriage.
(Much as I enjoyed The King’s Speech, it omitted the fact that Churchill was very much in the King’s camp during the Abdication Crisis. He was an ardent monarchist, liked Edward personally, and was a romantic at heart).
As to the OP: I see no reason why Edward VIII would not have remained on the throne until his death in 1972, to then (presuming he had no children of his own by whoever he ended up marrying) be succeeded by his niece Elizabeth. Plenty of others in the British upper classes said admiring things about the Nazis before the invasion of Poland, and still were able to get behind the war effort. He would have been no exception.
What does this mean? Would they have literally imprisoned Edward VIII and chopped off his head? Would they have unilaterally declared Albert the King and have them gather armies and fight it out?
I know the Brits say that they would toss Edward out or Elizabeth if she dare withhold Royal Assent but no one actually explains how Parliament would do that. Do they vote on it? Will it be Royalists versus Parliamentarians? What if the person they invite (assuming next in line) doesn’t take the Throne or rather would they get rid of the Monarchy entirely? Does the Commons actually have the fortitude to depose the monarch or is it an idle threat?
I don’t see what the problem would be. If the Parliment says he’s not the King, then he’s not the king. I don’t see why there’d be any need for further action.
I mean, I can say I’m the King of England all I want. No ones going to come chop my head off for it, or gather an army to come dispose me. They’ll just ignore me. Presumably if Parliment said George was the King and not Edward, people would just ignore Edward and treat George as the King.
That’s a very civilized, English way of looking at it.
It wasn’t only the government that wanted him out the arch bishop of Canterbury (yet another quaint English post, Cosmo Gordon Lang,) also pretty much wanted him gone. In a broadcast speech after the abdication he said that the Ex king had sought happiness…" “in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage”… His speech intended to deal a blow to an Ex king instead “dealt a disastrous blow to religious feeling throughout the country” according to Compton Mackenzie
Edward’s Nazi sympathies, I think, are overplayed. He was a German-sympathiser; he served in France during WW1 and felt very guilty about the enormous sacrifices of the ordinary soldier in the bloody campaigns on the Somme and elsewhere, and when the war ended he felt the Germans was too severely and unfairly punished. He therefore saw Hitler as an understandable reaction to a horrific defeat in a horrific war followed by a horrific 15 years of division, depression and civil strife.
I think he felt similar to people such as Baldwin and Chamberlain: we screwed them over in 1918 and they want redress; if we give them what they want and show we consider them equals and no harm done, they’ll calm down.
You just have to read up a historical account of the matter. It wasn’t just Westminster; the rest of the Empire, for the most part, was bitterly opposed to it and threatened resignation. The fact that the publci welcomed Simpson about as much as they welcomed rabies certainly had something to do with it, but their opposition to Simpson and her status as a divorcee were intertwined; there was no other publically known reason to dislike her. What we now think of as normal celebrity behaviour was then considered outrageous.
I realize it seems weird today to think that the King marrying an already-married woman would be a huge deal, but it WAS a huge deal. It was considered literally illegal and most people could not stomach it.
The entire government would have resigned.
While this is literally true, I don’t see why it’s a problem with the movie. Churchill barely appears in it. The movie is about George VI and his problem with public speaking; it doesn’t go into all the details of the abdication crisis for the same reason it doesn’t go into the details of the Munich crisis. It isn’t relevant to the story. All you need to know is that Edward (or David, as he was, confusingly, known to his family) was a dimwit who quit his job for a floozy.
The other candidates for “Romance of the 20th Century” would be those of Emperor Akihito and his Empress, Boris Pasternak and his real life Lara mistress, and a romance that never happened: Jobim and that blond bombshell who inspired him to write “Girl from Ipanema.”
Well, none of the Windsors are mental giants, are they?
Heck, when Nelson Rockefeller divorced his first wife and remarried he was called an adulterer and his new wife was called a homewrecker. When she had a baby during Rockefeller’s 1964 presidential campaign, it may have led to his losing the California primary and dropping out of the race. That was less than 50 years ago, and in the U.S.