Edward VIII versus George VI

Participating in a documentary about the brothers prompted me to revisit their relationship and dig up some forgotten photographs

“He was a dangerous king. He was very irresponsible. He neglected his duties, and he was totally obsessed with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.” That encapsulated my view of the calamitous 326-day reign of King Edward VIII, one of a series of observations I made during a two-part documentary that concluded last night on Britain’s Channel 4. It was titled Edward vs George: The Windsors at War, and I’m glad I had an opportunity to offer my thoughts on the importance of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, especially as leaders during the Second World War. The program made clear that after Edward abdicated the throne in December 1936 to marry Wallis, they behaved badly as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by consorting with Nazis and other dubious characters. I was gratified to conclude by saying that George VI and Elizabeth represented “all the good qualities” while “you look at Edward and Wallis, and there is a lot of darkness in their life and a lot of superficiality.”

King Edward VIII (right) and the future King George VI in the funeral procession for their father, King George V, on January 28, 1936

Yet the experience of being interviewed for several hours last October and then watching the program’s two parts reminded me that I had only written twice about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor since I began my Royals Extra Substack in March 2023: Un Unnerving Movie at Sandringham on September 29, 2023, and The Times of London on my appearance at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 17, 2024, in which I compared the Windsors to Harry and Meghan. While working on George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy, I saw abundant evidence in letters and diaries of the heartache Edward and Wallis caused the royal family with their dishonesty and disloyalty.

King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at his Balmoral estate in Scotland in September 1936, less than three months before he gave up the throne

When doing research for my biography of George VI and Elizabeth, I spent three months in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, where I read the King’s diary during the Second World War. It contained plenty about his nettlesome brother Edward (known within the royal family as David), but I used a limited amount because he was not my primary focus.

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In addition to fleshing out the portrait of Edward that emerged from the diaries, I can share some unique photographs that help illuminate his life with Wallis after his abdication. The photos are contained in two twenty-one inch by eighteen-inch blue buckram photo albums in matching slipcases that had belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They had been sold by Sotheby’s (lot 1817) in the 1997 auction of the Windsor possessions. Somehow the two albums made their way to an antique shop in Anchorage, Alaska, where a friend of one of my sons bought them because he thought they would interest me. One album contains forty-two photos from 1945, the other forty-four photos from 1955 and 1956. A small selection of these private images from 1945, presented here for the first time, sets the idle life of Edward and Wallis against the stern purpose of George and Elizabeth in the final months of the war.

“Not be shown secret documents”

From September 4, 1939, the day after the war began, until November 4, 1946, George VI devoted fifty diary entries to his older brother, the Duke of Windsor. Edward was a chronic pest, issuing unrealistic demands and making complaints, many of them petty. During the eight-month “Phoney War” when Hitler readied his invasions and bombings of Western Europe and Britain, the King gave Edward a military appointment in France with strict instructions that he “not be shown secret documents.” Chief of the imperial general staff General Sir Edmund Ironside and other officials periodically reported to George their concerns about Edward’s unreliability, and that he refused to “do as told.” They were similarly suspicious about Wallis. Ironside simply “did not trust her.”

After France fell to the Nazis on June 22, 1940, the Windsors fled Chateau de la Croe, their luxurious villa in Cap d’Antibes. They bounced from Madrid to Lisbon, both cities formally neutral but hotbeds of German operatives keen to co-opt the Windsors, who were known for their Nazi sympathies. At that point, the pages of the King’s diary reflected rising alarm.