Was Edward VIII of England forced to abdicate?
Upvote:-2
There seems to be an avoidance of the question here. Britain does not have a written constitution, unlike the Netherlands where the monarch reigns by the will of the people. Suppose Edward decided not to abdicate. What law is there that would force him to do so? He was very popular in the country and monarchy still had a powerful mystique in the 1930s. I cannot imagine parliament sending the police around to Buckingham Palace to arrest him. If parliament had to back down what would have happened? There is an inherent danger in the British monarchical system which is not addressed. We simply rely on the common sense of the monarch to do the right thing. This should not be acceptable in a modern democracy
Upvote:4
No he wasn't.
He abdicated of his own free will choosing Wallis Simpson over the throne.
He abdicated because as a British Monarch he was the nominal head of the Church of England that did not allow divorcees to remarry. The Church strongly disapproved of Edward's intention to marry a divorcee in Wallis Simpson.
He was also viewed as a bit of playboy and held fairly naive views on Hitler's Germany which also didn't sit well with the English government. This doesn't mean they forced him to abdicate, but given they didn't view him as a particularly strong minded potential Monarch, they didn't help him either.
In 1936, a constitutional crisis in the British Empire was caused by King-Emperor Edward VIII's proposal to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who was divorced from her first husband and was pursuing a divorce of her second. The marriage was opposed by the governments of the United Kingdom and the autonomous Dominions of the British Commonwealth. Religious, legal, political, and moral objections were raised. As British monarch, Edward was the nominal head of the Church of England, which did not allow divorced people to remarry if their ex-spouses were still alive; so it was widely believed that Edward could not marry Wallis Simpson and remain on the throne. Simpson was perceived to be politically and socially unsuitable as a consort because of her two failed marriages. It was widely assumed by the Establishment that she was driven by love of money or position rather than love for the King. Despite the opposition, Edward declared that he loved Simpson and intended to marry her whether his governments approved or not.
The widespread unwillingness to accept Simpson as the King's consort, and Edward's refusal to give her up, led to his abdication in December 1936. He remains the only British monarch to have voluntarily renounced the throne since the Anglo-Saxon period.
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