Freddy the Pig is right. Once Edward had tried to appeal over the heads of the politicians, anything could have happened.
But there are several other factors that need to be borne in mind.
The first is whether Wallis Simpson would ever have let him marry her on those terms. As it was, she developed a very severe case of cold feet once the scale of the crisis became apparent. Her preference for a morgantic marriage is the most obvious indication that her instinct was to pull back from the brink. What probably made the difference was the realisation that she would become the object of intense public vilification. That scared her. Agreeing to marry Edward in defiance of his ministers would only have made it all even worse.
Then there is Baldwin’s position. It is easy with hindsight to see him as the person who forced Edward to abdicate. But that is because Edward went so easily. Would Baldwin have been so steadfast if Edward had held out? What needs to be remembered is that Baldwin had already decided that he would retire in 1937, using the coronation as the pretext. So, on the one hand, he had nothing to lose. That might actually have made him more willing than most of his colleagues to take the gamble of risking everything. But he did have something to lose: his reputation. Resigning over the king’s marriage would probably have been the worst possible way of ending his career, ruining his carefully cultivated image as the statesmanlike political broker. His instinct to do a face-saving deal might therefore have reasserted itself had events gone differently. In fact, in a sense, he did end up doing a face-saving deal, albeit one in which Edward abdicated.
Moreover, any marriage (in England) could only have been a civil one. Which would only have raised exactly the same legal issues as Prince Charles encountered earlier this year. And just because those issues did not prevent Prince Charles marrying does not mean that those same issues would not have been seized on by those wishing to prevent Edward VIII marrying. It would have been very tempting for Edward’s opponents to argue that, without a change in the law, any marriage by him to Mrs Simpson could not be valid under any circumstances.
While Edward probably did think that the potential powers he retained as king were rather greater than was realistically the case, he made no attempt to use them. Quite the opposite. The criticism made by those around him was instead that he wasn’t playing enough of a role in government business.
But that’s not the same as saying that,
What he did not want to be was a king in the style of his father. Nor is it obvious that his father’s style was the only way of doing the job. What Edward had come to dislike was the constant round of worthy, humdrum public appearances that the Royal Family - and George V, in particular - had discovered as a substitute for their declining political influence. Instead, what Edward seems to have wanted to be was a royal celebrity. Which, in its own vaguely thought-out way, was sort of prescient. He had shown that he do the glamour and that made the stuffy, boring bits irrelevant, didn’t it? Why did he have to show himself to his subjects when the new media could do that for him?
Of course, as his brother and niece were to show, concentrating instead on the stuffy, boring bits was actually the better formula for winning medium-term popularity.
