On the afternoon of October 22nd, 1937, a man [clears throat] and a woman stepped off a special train at the Berchtesgaden station in the Bavarian Alps. They were greeted on the platform by an SS honor guard. They were driven up a winding mountain road to a private residence called the Berghof, perched on a cliff with a view of three countries.
The host who came out to receive them was Adolf Hitler. The man on the platform in a homburg hat and overcoat was the former King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, until 10 months earlier the sovereign of the British Empire and the supreme governor of the Church of England. The woman beside him was the American divorcee he had given up the throne to marry.
Her name was Wallis Simpson. The photographs of the meeting are still in the public record. The Duke of Windsor, as Edward was now called, can be seen returning the Nazi salute on Hitler’s front step. The Duchess can be seen smiling. They drank tea inside the Berghof for 2 hours.
They discussed, by Hitler’s later account, the political situation in Europe. They came down off the mountain that evening and continued a tour of Nazi Germany that included visits to munitions factories, Hitler Youth gatherings, and a model concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, where the Duke was reported to have been favorably impressed by the discipline of the inmates.
11 months earlier, in the most famous radio broadcast of his life, this same man had told the British public that he was abdicating the throne because, these were the exact words he chose, he had found it impossible to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love. The story that came out of that broadcast became one of the most famous love stories of the 20th century.
A king who gave up the most powerful throne in the world for the woman he could not live without. The story was repeated everywhere in newspapers and films, in airport bookstore biographies. For the better part of 90 years, most of it was a lie. The real story of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson is not principally a story about love.
It is a story about a politically dangerous man, a politically compromised woman, a foreign intelligence service that had assembled files on both of them, and a British establishment that, in December 1936, used a marriage scandal as the legible public reason for removing a sovereign it considered unfit to govern. The romance was the cover.
The cover held rest of both their lives, and for most of the lives of everyone who knew the truth. This is what was actually happening behind it. Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, known inside his family as David, was born in 1894 to the future King George V and Queen Mary.
He was the eldest son. From the day of his birth, the entire structure of the British monarchy assumed that he would, in due course, become its head. He didn’t want it. This was not a teenage phase. By every account that has come down through his tutors, his courtiers, and the senior staff of Buckingham Palace, Edward was visibly and consistently uninterested in the work of being king from the time he was old enough to understand what the work actually consisted of.
He was small, slight, and unusually charming when he chose to be. He could turn the charm on at the door of a public engagement and turn it off again the moment the camera left the room. The crowds adored him. His own staff did not. What he liked were nightclubs, golf, the occasional drug, a Benzedrine prescription has surfaced in declassified medical records, and married women.
The married women were the part the palace could never get under control. From his early 20s through his early 40s, Edward conducted a series of affairs with women whose existence was an open secret in London society, but whose details never made the British newspapers. The British press in those years did not report on the love lives of the royal family.
The American press did. American papers regularly covered Edward’s affairs in detail. British editors, by gentleman’s agreement, kept it out of print at home. The most consequential of those women before Wallis was Freda Dudley Ward, the wife of a liberal MP, with whom Edward conducted an emotionally dependent relationship for the better part of 15 years.
After Mrs. Dudley Ward came Thelma Furness, the American-born Viscountess Furness, who became his lover in the late 1920s. It was Thelma Furness who, in late 1930 or early 1931, introduced him to a friend visiting from Baltimore, a friend named Wallis Simpson. By the time Wallis entered the picture, Edward was 36 years old, and his private secretary, Alan Lascelles, had been writing in his diary for over a decade about the private conviction inside Buckingham Palace that the heir to the throne was fundamentally unsuited for the role. Lascelles’ diaries were published after his death. They are extraordinary. They describe a man who, more than a decade before the abdication crisis, was already understood at the top of British government to be incapable of doing the job he had been
born to do. Lascelles wrote in 1927, almost 10 years before Edward came to the throne, that he could see no future for the monarchy with this man at its head. He was not alone in that view. He was, in fact, the polite version of it. The senior figures inside the royal household, several archbishops, the police commissioner, and the prime minister’s office had all formed the same opinion well before 1936.
What this meant in practice is that the abdication of December 1936 did not come as a surprise to the people whose job it was to think about such things. It came as a relief. The relief was carefully concealed. The stories the government and Edward himself agreed to put out was a story the British public would find more sympathetic, a love story.
It bought a generation of credibility. It also concealed the more serious set of problems the British state had been monitoring for over a year by the time Edward came to the throne. Bessie Wallis Warfield was born in June 1896 in a small mountain hotel in Pennsylvania, where her parents had gone for her father’s tuberculosis.
The father died when she was 5 months old. Wallis, she preferred her middle name from childhood, grew up in modest circumstances in Baltimore, dependent on the goodwill of relatives who were polite about it, but not generous. She was not poor. She was not, by the standards of the American South, even particularly disadvantaged.
She was conscious, however, from a young age, of being adjacent to wealth without quite touching it. The condition would shape the next 30 years. She was not classically beautiful. The men who knew her invariably described her as compelling rather than pretty. A sharp dresser, a sharp talker, a sharp judge of who was important in any given room. She was a good shot.
She played hard at cards. She was, when she chose to be, an exceptional listener. She had married twice before she met the Prince of Wales. The first husband in 1916 was a US Navy aviator named Earl Winfield Spencer. He was an alcoholic. The marriage was short and miserable. Wallis spent part of it in China, where Spencer had been posted, and the exact details of her time there have been the subject of speculation for the better part of a century.
There is a long-running story about a so-called China dossier, allegedly compiled by British intelligence, supposedly containing material about her sexual conduct in Asia, supposedly used as private leverage during the abdication. No copy of any such dossier has ever surfaced. Most serious biographers consider the story unproven, possibly invented, and durable mainly because the people repeating it have wanted it to be true.
She divorced Spencer in 1927. Within a year, she had married a second time to Ernest Simpson, an American shipping executive who was working in London. The Simpsons settled into a comfortable expatriate life among the Anglo-American community in 1930s London. They went to dinner parties. They met people.
In late 1930 or early 1931, at a country house weekend organized by Thelma Furness, they were introduced to the Prince of Wales. The Prince did not at that point find Wallace particularly interesting. They were introduced. They made polite conversation. He went home. Over the next 18 months, however, his existing relationship with Lady Furness began to fray.
And Wallace, who was now a regular fixture at the same weekends, began to occupy more and more of his attention. By 1934, the affair was on. By 1935, it was the most discussed open secret in London’s political class. Edward had begun appearing in public with Wallace in ways that even his older mistresses had been careful to avoid.
Taking her to nightclubs, taking her on a Mediterranean cruise on the yacht Nahlin, giving her jewelry that had previously belonged to royal women. The British press did not write about it. The American and European press did. The British public in 1935 was watching a king in waiting move through a relationship the rest of the world was already discussing on the front pages.
What changed in 1936 was that on January 20th, his father died. Edward, at 41, became king. He would remain king for less than 11 months. The British state, by the early months of 1936, had a problem it had not had to manage in living memory. The new king was carrying on a public affair with a married American woman, a divorcee once already, soon to be twice, and was making no attempt to conceal the relationship from foreign press, foreign diplomats, or the courtiers around him.
The senior officials of the British state, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, the senior royal secretaries, initially assumed that Edward’s affair with Mrs. Simpson would, like his previous affairs, run its course. By the summer of 1936, that assumption had collapsed. In August, Edward took Wallace on the cruise of the Eastern Mediterranean aboard the Nahlin.
The cruise was extensively photographed by the international press. Pictures of the King of England in shorts on the deck of a private yacht with the soon-to-be twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson at his side ran in newspapers from Paris to New York to Sydney. The British press, still bound by the gentleman’s agreement not to cover royal personal life, printed nothing.
The British public went on assuming, in the autumn of 1936, that they had a more or less normal new king. The senior officials of the British state knew otherwise. The MI5 file on Wallace Simpson, declassified portions of which have been released since the 1990s, was substantial by the autumn of 1936. The security service had been monitoring her movements, her correspondence, and her social contacts.
The file recorded her connection, and the precise nature of the connection has been debated by every biographer since, with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain. Wallace [clears throat] and Ribbentrop met repeatedly during 1935 and 1936. Several biographers, drawing on the MI5 surveillance, have argued that the relationship was sexual.
Others have argued that it was social and political only. What is documented with no remaining ambiguity is that the British Foreign Office in 1936 considered Wallace Simpson a probable conduit of British political information into the German embassy. This is the part of the abdication crisis that the official narrative has consistently understated.
The British state was not merely concerned that the king had fallen for a divorcee. The British state was concerned that the king had fallen for a divorcee whose private connections to the regime in Berlin, a second concern, also predating the divorce question, had to do with Edward himself.
In the months after his accession in January 1936, the new king had been observed by his private secretaries to be careless with his official red boxes, the locked dispatch cases in which classified state communications were sent to him for review. Boxes were left open in his country house. Papers were seen by guests. Mrs.
Simpson, on at least one documented occasion, had access to them. The German embassy, on at least one other occasion, was reported to have received information that could only have originated in those papers. Whether the leak was direct, indirect, or accidental was never definitively established. It did not need to be.
By the autumn of 1936, the senior figures of the British state had concluded that they had a security problem at the top of the government. The marriage question gave them a way to solve it. In October 1936, Wallace filed for divorce from Ernest Simpson. The decree nisi, a provisional ruling, the first stage of an English divorce, was granted at Ipswich on October the 27th.
By November, it was clear inside government that Edward intended to marry her once the divorce became absolute the following spring. The cabinet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Baldwin himself privately concluded that this was incompatible with his role as head of the Church of England, head of state, and sovereign of an empire whose senior dominions, Canada, Australia, South Africa, had already signaled, through diplomatic back channels, that they would not accept Mrs.
Simpson as queen. The British press broke its silence on December 1st, 1936. The Bishop of Bradford, in a speech probably misinterpreted by the reporters who covered it, alluded to the king’s spiritual deficiencies. Provincial newspapers ran the story. Within 48 hours, the photographs from the Mediterranean cruise that had been suppressed for 4 months were on the front pages of every Fleet Street paper.
The British public learned about Mrs. Simpson at the same moment they learned about the constitutional crisis. Edward had 10 days. On December 10th, 1936, he signed the instrument of abdication. On the evening of December 11th, he delivered his famous radio broadcast, read out by him from a script that had been drafted partly by Winston Churchill, and told an audience of an estimated 40 million people that he could not continue without the help and support of the woman I love. He left the country that night on a royal navy destroyer for France. The broadcast established in the public imagination a single, durable narrative. Edward as the love-struck king, Wallace as the woman he loved, the establishment as the unbending obstacle, the abdication itself as a noble, personal
sacrifice. The narrative was, at most, a fifth of the truth. What the broadcast did not say was that the cabinet had concluded, well before the divorce of Mrs. Simpson, that Edward was unsuitable for the throne on grounds that had very little to do with whom he wanted to marry. It did not mention the security concerns about the red boxes.
It did not mention the Foreign Office’s view that Mrs. Simpson was a likely channel of British political information into Berlin. And it did not mention that Edward himself, far from being driven by passion to abandon his throne, had spent the previous month negotiating for a so-called morganatic marriage, an arrangement that would have allowed him to keep the throne while marrying Mrs.
Simpson without making her queen. The cabinet rejected the proposal. So did the dominions. Edward, presented with a choice between losing the woman or losing the throne, chose to keep the woman, but only after he had spent several weeks attempting to keep both. The famous line, the woman I love, was a rhetorical climax in a speech that had been carefully drafted to make the abdication palatable to its listeners.
It worked. It is still working. 90 years after the broadcast, the line is repeated in films and biographies and tabloid retrospectives as if it were the central historical fact of the abdication. It was not. The central historical fact of the abdication was that the British state had successfully removed a sovereign it considered politically unreliable, and had managed to do it in a manner that did not require any public discussion of why he was actually unreliable.
The romance was the cover. The cover was elegant. It would hold for the next 85 years. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as Edward and Wallace became after their wedding at the Château de Candé in France in June 1937, spent the months following the abdication trying to figure out what to do with themselves.
They were rich, they were famous, they were unwelcome in Britain. King George VI, Edward’s younger brother, and the man who had reluctantly taken the throne on Edward’s exit, had decided that the new Duchess of Windsor would not be granted the formal style Her Royal Highness. It was a deliberate slight, a signal that the Windsor family did not consider Mrs.
Simpson, >> [clears throat] >> even now married to a former king, a member of the royal family in any full sense. Edward took the denial as a wound that never healed. He raised it with biographers, with friends, and with his wife for the next 35 years. In the autumn of 1937, looking [clears throat] for a project that would restore some of the public importance he had lost in December, Edward and Wallace announced an unofficial 12-day visit to Nazi Germany.
The visit was billed as a tour to study labor conditions and worker housing. The actual itinerary was something else entirely. The Duke and Duchess were received by every major figure in the Nazi political and military hierarchy. Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Speer.
They attended a luncheon hosted by Robert Ley, the leader of the German Labor Front. They visited Hitler Youth installations and a Krupp munitions plant. On October 22nd, they traveled to Berchtesgaden and were received at the Berghof. The conversation with Hitler, by the surviving accounts, lasted about 2 hours. The Duke and Duchess took tea.
Hitler later told his staff that he had been impressed by the Duke, and that the Duchess would have made a good queen. The Duke’s own later accounts, in interviews and in his memoir, described the visit as an act of personal diplomacy aimed at preventing a war between Britain and Germany. The German government’s contemporary internal documents, which would surface a decade later, described it differently.
To the German Foreign Office, the visit was a propaganda victory and a confirmation that the former King of England was, at minimum, sympathetic to the Nazi project. Whether Edward was an active Nazi sympathizer or merely a politically naive aristocrat with a romantic attachment to German culture has been argued by historians ever since.
The question is, in some ways, unanswerable. Edward’s private opinions tended to vary with the audience he was addressing. But the question is also, in another sense, beside the point. Whatever was inside his head, his behavior in 1937 placed him exactly where the Nazi propaganda apparatus wanted him, shaking hands with the Führer on camera, less than a year after the British government had taken him off the throne.
The British government, by the autumn of 1937, had stopped privately pretending that it had been wrong to remove him. Three years later, with the war underway, the same government would have to act on that conclusion in a far more dangerous setting. The war started in September 1939. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had been living in France, had to be evacuated.
By the spring of 1940, they were in southern France. By June, with German forces sweeping through France toward the south, they had crossed into Spain. From Spain, they moved on to Lisbon, the capital of neutral Portugal, where they took up residence in a villa near the coast.
What happened in Lisbon between July and August 1940 has been documented by historians of British and German wartime intelligence in considerable detail. The German government, by July 1940, had identified Edward as a potential asset. Joachim von Ribbentrop, by then Foreign Minister of the Reich, sent [snorts] a senior SS officer named Walter Schellenberg to Lisbon with instructions to either persuade or, if necessary, abduct the Duke.
The operation had a code name. It was called Operation Willy. The plan was to keep Edward in Spain or Portugal, away from the allies, and to position him as a possible alternative head of state in the event of a successful German invasion of Britain, or, failing that, as a senior figure who could be used to broker a peace settlement favorable to Germany.
The plan never came off. Schellenberg arrived in Lisbon. He made discreet contact with Spanish and Portuguese intermediaries. He tried at various points to convince the Duke that the British Secret Service was planning to assassinate him. He bribed Portuguese servants in the Duke’s villa to delay his departure.
None of it worked. Edward, whatever his private sympathies, did not in the end allow himself to be detained on the Iberian Peninsula. The reason it didn’t work was not primarily Edward’s loyalty, it was Winston Churchill. Churchill, who had become Prime Minister in May 1940, had been monitoring the Lisbon situation closely.
He understood that the longer the Duke remained in Europe, the higher the chance of a serious diplomatic incident or a defection, or of Edward being kidnapped. Churchill arranged a posting for Edward as Governor of the Bahamas, a colony in the Caribbean of essentially no strategic importance, and personally instructed him to leave Lisbon and take the post.
When Edward hesitated, he and Wallace had no interest in spending the war on a remote tropical island, Churchill threatened him with court-martial for desertion. Edward took the post. He served as Governor of the Bahamas from August 1940 until March 1945. The posting was widely understood inside the British government as exile, and Edward understood it the same way.
He was furious, on and off, for the entire war. He gave occasional interviews suggesting that a peace settlement with Germany was both possible and desirable. He met with American businessmen with German commercial connections in ways that the FBI in Washington found worth surveying. The FBI’s wartime file on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, declassified portions of which were released in the 1990s, is not flattering.
But for the duration of the war, Edward was contained. He was on a small island, monitored, with limited communication with Europe. The British state, having taken the throne back from him in 1936, had now succeeded in taking him out of strategic play in 1940. The system that had handled his earlier exit was, broadly speaking, the same system. It worked twice.
In April 1945, with the German government in collapse and Allied troops moving into central Germany, an American military intelligence team conducting a search of Schloss Marburg, a 13th-century castle in the German state of Hesse, recovered approximately 400 metric tons of captured German Foreign Office documents.
The papers had been removed from Berlin in early 1945 to keep them out of Soviet hands and hidden across central Germany in mine shafts, country estates, and castle vaults. Marburg was one of the last caches to be recovered. Among the materials in the Marburg cache were the German Foreign Office files relating to Operation Willy and the broader question of contact between the Duke of Windsor and the German government during the war.
The files included diplomatic cables in which German officials reported in detail on conversations with the Duke. Several of those reports described Edward as having said, in private, that he believed Britain should make peace with Germany, and that he might, in the right circumstances, be willing to return to the British throne to lead such a settlement.
The files were, in 1945, an enormous problem. They were a problem first for the British royal family. King George VI had spent the war establishing himself, with considerable personal courage, as the steadfast public face of British resistance to Nazism. The publication of files showing that his predecessor had been negotiating, however informally, with the German Foreign Office during the war, would have been a public catastrophe.
Not merely for Edward, but for the institution itself. They were a problem second for the British government. Churchill, as wartime Prime Minister, had committed enormous personal capital to the management of the Duke of Windsor problem. The publication of files documenting Edward’s wartime contacts would, in 1945, raise difficult public questions about why the Duke had been allowed to operate as freely as he had.
What happened next is documented in the declassified British and American Foreign Office archives. Churchill personally appealed, through diplomatic channels, to General Eisenhower and to US Secretary of State James Byrnes for the Marburg materials to be suppressed. The appeals were partially successful.
The most damaging documents were withheld from publication. The State Department in 1945 agreed to delay release of the relevant Windsor files. A decade of diplomatic delay followed, during which the British royal family also recovered a separate cache of German papers at Friedrichshof, the former home of Edward’s German cousins.
A recovery operation conducted on behalf of the royal family by an art historian named Anthony Blunt, who would later be exposed as a Soviet spy. The Marburg files were eventually published in 1957 as part of an academic series on captured German diplomatic documents. The publication received almost no press attention, and the Windsor materials, buried in a multi-volume scholarly compilation, were read at the time by a small number of specialists.
The general British and American public, who had been reading the love story version of the abdication for two decades, did not learn that an alternative version existed. The narrative was, by 1957, too well established to be displaced by a footnote in a State Department compilation. For the rest of his life, Edward continued to deny the substance of the Marburg material. He gave interviews.
He published a memoir. He cultivated the public image of a wronged romantic figure. The Marburg files remained on library shelves. The interviews were on television. The interviews won. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived in Paris for the rest of their lives. They had a house on the Bois de Boulogne, a property leased to them at a nominal rent by the city of Paris that became, over the post-war decades, a destination for a particular kind of English-speaking traveler.
American socialites stayed there. Hollywood directors paid courtesy calls. Visiting columnists came for the gossip. The interior was famously overdecorated, full of objects collected during the abdication and the years after it. Silver, jewelry, royal memorabilia, a desk with a cipher stamp, a small portrait of Queen Mary on a side table that the Duchess had hated but could not get her husband to move.
The Duke insisted on being addressed as sir. Servants who failed to use the title were dismissed. The marriage itself, by every account that has surfaced through the published correspondence and the memoirs of close friends, was less straightforward than the abdication broadcast had implied. The relationship had moments of devotion.
It also had, over the long post-war years, the shape of two people who had attached themselves to each other for reasons neither of them had ever entirely been honest about. Wallace, in private letters to friends, indicated more than once that she had not, in 1936, particularly wanted to marry Edward.
She had wanted the relationship she already had. The wealth, the attention, the social position, the company of an attentive royal lover. And she had not, in her own words at the time, expected him to abdicate. When he did, she felt, in part, that she had been trapped. It is not a flattering picture of the love story the broadcast had described.
It is, however, the picture that emerges from her own letters, much of which was published after her death. Edward, for his part, gave interviews well into the 1960s. He published a memoir, A King’s Story, in 1951, extensively ghostwritten and unwavering in its commitment to the romantic version of the abdication.
He attempted repeatedly to be granted some kind of official role inside the British royal family. An honorary appointment, a return to public function. The requests were politely declined. He attended his brother George VI’s funeral in 1952 and his mother, Queen Mary’s funeral, in 1953. He was not invited to either coronation, not George VI’s in 1937, not Elizabeth II’s in 1953.
Until the end of his life, he was a member of the royal family in name only and a tourist in his own former country. He died at the Bois de Boulogne house on May 28th, 1972, of throat cancer. He was 77. Queen Elizabeth II, his niece, George VI’s daughter, flew to Paris in the days before his death and visited him at his bedside.
Wallace, by then in her 70s, sat with him during the visit. The Queen returned to London. Edward died 10 days later. His body was flown back to Britain and buried at Frogmore, the private royal burial ground at Windsor. Wallace was permitted to attend the funeral, the only formal royal occasion she would ever attend at Windsor after 35 years of waiting for one.
She returned to Paris that evening. She lived another 14 years, increasingly reclusive, eventually bedridden, in the same house on the Bois de Boulogne. She died there on April 24th, 1986, at 89, after several years in which she had been unable to speak. She is buried beside Edward at Frogmore. The love story version of Edward and Wallace has held, in the popular imagination, for almost 90 years.
It has held through declassifications, through serious biographical work, through the publication of MI5 files, FBI files, the Marburg documents, and the personal correspondence of both of its principal figures. It is still the version most people are first told. It is still the version that appears in airport bookstore biographies, in television dramas, in tabloid retrospectives marking each new royal anniversary.
There are reasons for that. The first reason is that the love story is a more attractive narrative than the truth. A king who gave up his throne for love is a story that flatters everyone, the king, the woman, the listener, the institution that lost him. A king who was politically dangerous, who was sympathetic to the regime that killed 40 million people, and who was removed by the British state under cover of romance, is a story that flatters no one.
The second reason is that the love story was actively promoted immediately after the abdication by Edward himself. He commissioned the ghostwritten memoirs. He gave the paid magazine interviews. He cooperated with the films. Wallace published her own memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in 1956. The promotion of the love story was an industry that lasted from 1936 until the deaths of both principals and was carried on after that by the people who had built careers writing about them.
The third reason is that the British royal family found the love story useful. It was easier for the institution to acknowledge that the abdication had been about a marriage than to acknowledge that the abdication had been about a man whom the state could not trust with the throne. The institution preferred the romantic version.
>> [clears throat] >> It said almost nothing publicly to contradict it. What changed slowly was the documentary record itself. By the 1990s, declassifications had begun to fill in the missing pieces. Several historians, Andrew Morton, Sarah Bradford, and Sebba, more recently Andrew Lownie, published books drawing on the new documents.
The picture that emerged is roughly the one this script has been describing. It is a picture in which the romance was real but secondary, in which the political danger was real and primary, and in which the abdication itself was an act of the British state, conducted by the state in the interests of the state. The historical record now exists.
The popular narrative continues in the dramas and the magazine features and the airport books to be the older one. The older narrative sells more copies. It makes for better drama. It has, for nearly a century, allowed the British public not to think too hard about what its monarchy almost became in the winter of 1936.
That is, in the end, the lie that the palace told. It was not a lie about love. There was love of an unhealthy and complicated kind between two people who could not entirely give each other up. The lie was about what the abdication was for. The lie was that a king had given up a throne for a woman.
The truth was that a state had taken a throne back from a man and had used a woman, a marriage, and a love story to do it. The state was right. The man it removed had, 3 years later, been photographed shaking hands with Adolf Hitler at the door of the Berghof. Edward and Wallace are buried side by side at Frogmore in the private royal cemetery, a mile and a half from Windsor Castle.
The graves are simple. The headstones carry their names. Edward, Duke of Windsor. Wallace, Duchess of Windsor. The dates of their lives and nothing else. There is no marker on either stone explaining how either of them got there. A few hundred yards away, also at Frogmore, lies Edward’s brother, King George VI, the man who took the throne when Edward gave it up, and who held it through the war Edward had been removed in time to avoid losing for Britain.
>> [clears throat] >> George VI is buried inside St. George’s Chapel with full royal honors. Edward is buried outside in the open air. The distance between them, across the grass, is the distance the British royal family decided in 1936 it had to put between its two brothers and has never, in any subsequent decade, decided to close.
Tourists who come to Windsor are not generally directed to the spot. The graves are well maintained. The grass is cut. The version of the story that the visiting public is told, when it is told anything at all, is the romantic one. It is the version the British state agreed on in 1936. The state has never had any serious reason to revise it.
The man it removed turned out to be exactly the kind of man it had thought he was. The cover story it used to remove him turned out to be exactly the kind of cover story it had needed. The cover held. It is still holding. The grass is still cut.
