The Reign and Abdication of Edward VIII by Michael Bloch

 My mother had no time for Edward VIII, partly because he told the Welsh miners, enduring high unemployment and desolation,  that he’d help them when he had absolutely no intention of doing anything for them. This is not quite true. He did have an adamant discussion with the officials of the depressed region about the derelict pits, and what could be done to revive them. 

When some of the papers reported his remarks, and implied that he was criticising the government, even a Labour minister was upset. He asked whether we wanted a fascist King, because, of course, it’s unconstitutional for a monarch to play any part in politics. Little did he know! 

This book was published in 1989, so presumably before new evidence of the former King’s treason. A sympathetic look at Edward VIII, it paints him as an intelligent and thinking man, but frantically obsessed with Wallace Simpson, who did everything she could to get away from him, once she knew that he was considering marriage. He apparently didn’t favour the idea of a morganatic marriage, because he knew the suffering that it could involve, and he was determined to abdicate, and marry Wallace. Some of his advisers tried to make him take his time to decide, thinking that the relationship would fade, but he wouldn’t do that, regarding being on the throne while knowing that he wanted to marry Wallace as a ‘lie’.

The machinations of the abdication are complicated, but Bloch manages to be fair-minded, and sympathetic to all parties. Edward VIII seems to have been unduly impossible to deal with, and extremely selfish towards Wallace, with his toxic obsession for her. I did wonder about Bloch’s research, however, when he calls Australia’s Joseph Lyons a ‘socialist premier’. By that time, he was a conservative Prime Minister!

I’ll have to read Andrew Lownie’s book now! 

I read this book for Rose City Reader’s TBR 26 in ‘26 Challenge.