zlacker

Wasn't he the guy who was pressured into abdicating for being a Nazi?

>>383629+(OP)
No, that has nothing to do with why he was pressured to abdicate. Really he was pressured not to marry Wallis Simpson, not pressured to abdicate.

>>383629+(OP)
No, he was pressured not to marry an American divorcee (with two living ex-husbands). That led to his abdication - doing otherwise would have led to a constitutional crisis. He was rumored to be a Nazi sympathizer, but that wasn’t the direct cause of his abdication.

>>383629+(OP)
Not directly, but for that reason it was a massive relief for the govt when he did abdicate and they could "exile" him and his wife and their Nazi sympathies somewhere far away.

Basically he never wanted to be King, and seemed totally unsuitable for it anyway.

>>antod+Pd
Edward VIII abdicated at the end of 1936, almost three years before the start of the second world war. At that time being a Nazi sympathizer was still perfectly respectable in much of British high society. I think possibly you are getting the timeline slightly mixed up.

>>foldr+qk
You're right I had the timeline between abdication and "exile" condensed in my head. But by govt relief I wasn't referring to High Society but the functional bureaucracy of govt and intelligence services etc.

I recall (possibly faulty memory) from a documentary I watched once, that the bureaucracy stopped providing him with certain daily government briefing documents out of fears for national security.

>>antod+Nq
Then again, the intelligence services were riddled with communist sympathisers so that probably explains it just as much :)

>>alista+v3
I feel like the timing is important in that story, and often underemphasized. Edward was pressured not to marry a married (and arguably not separated) American woman he was in some form of relationship with, who was willing to divorce her current husband in order to marry him. Simpson didn't file for divorce until after George died, and the cause of divorce is widely understood as having been orchestrated to allow her to marry Edward. The divorce was not finalized until well after the abdication.

While, technically, the constitutional crisis would have been caused by him marrying a divorcee and being the head of a state religion that didn't approve of remarriage with living ex-spouses, the circumstances were likely important in motivating a hard stance on the policy: it involved the sort of situation that an apologist might have given as an example of why remarriage should not be allowed. Even current Church of England rules would not allow the marriage.

It is interesting that the story is often simply portrayed as him wanting to marry a American divorcee, likely leading to the sense in many readers unfamiliar with the circumstances that he wanted to marry someone who simply had had prior marriages, quite possibly with ex-husbands who were still in the US.