After the war, his conduct began to give cause for concern; he engaged in a series of sexual affairs that worried both his father and the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin.

The prime ministers of the United Kingdom and the Dominions opposed the marriage, arguing a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands was politically and socially unacceptable as a prospective queen consort.

Edward knew the Baldwin government would resign if the marriage went ahead, which could have forced a general election and would have ruined his status as a politically neutral constitutional monarch.

He was withdrawn from his naval course before his formal graduation, served as midshipman for three months aboard the battleship Hindustan, then immediately entered Magdalen College, Oxford, for which, in the opinion of his biographers, he was underprepared intellectually.

[21] He had joined the Grenadier Guards in June 1914, and although Edward was willing to serve on the front lines, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener refused to allow it, citing the immense harm that would occur if the heir apparent to the throne were captured by the enemy.

[29] During his 1924 visit to the United States, Men's Wear magazine observed, "The average young man in America is more interested in the clothes of the Prince of Wales than in any other individual on earth.

In 1929 Sir Alexander Leith, a leading Conservative in the north of England, persuaded him to make a three-day visit to the County Durham and Northumberland coalfields, where there was much unemployment.

In 1934, Adolf Hitler, in his ambition to link the British and German royal houses, asked Victoria Louise to arrange a marriage between the 40-year-old Edward and her 17-year-old daughter, Frederica of Hanover, who was at boarding school in England.

Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales, it is generally accepted, became lovers, while Lady Furness travelled abroad, although Edward adamantly insisted to his father that he was not having an affair with her and that it was not appropriate to describe her as his mistress.

[51] Edward's affair with an American divorcée led to such grave concern that the couple were followed by members of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, who examined in secret the nature of their relationship.

Baldwin informed him that his subjects would deem the marriage morally unacceptable, largely because remarriage after divorce was opposed by the Church of England, and the people would not tolerate Simpson as queen.

B. M. Hertzog) made clear their opposition to the King marrying a divorcée;[69] their Irish counterpart (Éamon de Valera) expressed indifference and detachment, while the Prime Minister of New Zealand (Michael Joseph Savage), having never heard of Simpson before, vacillated in disbelief.

[79] On 12 December 1936, at the accession meeting of the British Privy Council, George VI announced his intention to make his brother the "Duke of Windsor" with the style of Royal Highness.

When the Church of England refused to sanction the union, a County Durham clergyman, Robert Anderson Jardine (Vicar of St Paul's, Darlington), offered to perform the ceremony, and Edward accepted.

[101] On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the Duke and Duchess were brought back to Britain by Louis Mountbatten on board HMS Kelly, and Edward, although he held the rank of field marshal, was made a major-general attached to the British Military Mission in France.

[13] In February 1940, the German ambassador in The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, claimed that Edward had leaked the Allied war plans for the defence of Belgium,[102] which the Duke later denied.

[104] Under the code name Operation Willi, Nazi agents, principally Walter Schellenberg, plotted unsuccessfully to persuade the Duke to leave Portugal and return to Spain, kidnapping him if necessary.

The Duke and Duchess left Lisbon on 1 August aboard the American Export Lines steamship Excalibur, which was specially diverted from its usual direct course to New York City so that they could be dropped off at Bermuda on the 9th.

[13] Many historians have suggested that Adolf Hitler was prepared to reinstate Edward as king in the hope of establishing a fascist puppet government in Britain after Operation Sea Lion.

[118] The interview was published on 22 March 1941 and in it Edward was reported to have said that "Hitler was the right and logical leader of the German people" and that the time was coming for President Roosevelt to mediate a peace settlement.

[119] The Allies became sufficiently disturbed by German plots revolving around Edward that President Roosevelt ordered covert surveillance of the Duke and Duchess when they visited Palm Beach, Florida, in April 1941.

Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg (then a monk in an American monastery) had told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Wallis had slept with the German ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in 1936; had remained in constant contact with him; and had continued to leak secrets.

[120] Author Charles Higham claimed that Anthony Blunt, an MI5 agent and Soviet spy, acting on orders from the British royal family, made a successful secret trip to Schloss Friedrichshof in Allied-occupied Germany towards the end of the war to retrieve sensitive letters between the Duke of Windsor and Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis.

Letters written by Kenneth de Courcy to the Duke, dated between 1946 and 1949, extracts of which were published in 2009, suggest a scheme where Edward would return to England and place himself in a position for a possible regency.

De Courcy suggested that Edward should buy a working agricultural estate within an easy drive of London in order to gain favour with the British public and make himself available should the King become incapacitated.

[13][130][131] The City of Paris provided the Duke with a house at 4 route du Champ d'Entraînement, on the Neuilly-sur-Seine side of the Bois de Boulogne, for a nominal rent.

On 4 April of that year President Richard Nixon invited them as guests of honour to a dinner at the White House with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Charles Lindbergh, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Arnold Palmer, George H. W. Bush, and Frank Borman.

Michael E. DeBakey operated on him in Houston for an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta in December 1964, and Sir Stewart Duke-Elder treated a detached retina in his left eye in February 1965.

[149] In the view of historians such as Philip Williamson writing in 2007, the popular perception in the 21st century that the abdication was driven by politics rather than religious morality is false and arises because divorce has become much more common and socially acceptable.

To modern sensibilities, the religious restrictions that prevented Edward from continuing as king while planning to marry Wallis Simpson "seem, wrongly, to provide insufficient explanation" for his abdication.