Born as Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, at White Lodge in Richmond Park. Known to friends and family as David.
Reigned 20 January - 10 December 1936 when he abdicated in favour of marriage to the twice divorced Mrs Simpson, to the sound of Londoners singing "Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson's pinched our king". Also successfully introduced plus-fours to America. After the abdication he was given the title of Duke of Windsor, and his younger brother, Bertie, became King George VI. Thereafter the Windsors lived abroad and he died in Paris. The Guardian published a much more unusual picture of Edward, as the Prince of Wales in 1920, surfing in Hawaii.
More seriously, he was aged 42 when he succeeded as King and had already, as Prince of Wales since 1911, spent many years representing his father, King George V, on gruelling tours of the Empire, and unveiling what he described as a never-ending stream of foundation stones. The choice he had was: more of that, or the woman he loved?
2021: The Guardian ('Saturday', 9 October) published a review of 'The Secret Royals' - Aldrich and Cormac, by David Pegg in which he writes: "... nobody emerges from the book in a more unflattering light than Edward VIII. He is grasping, lazy, greedy, dishonest, unreliable, anti-Semitic, self-pitying, treasonous ...".
2023: Reading Patrick Hamilton’s 1935 ‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky’, we were interested to see, on page 254, a discussion that takes place in a pub about “His Majesty’s illness”. Bob hopes that he will be “more successful as an Edwardian than as a Georgian” and “The Governor had got it into his head that the Prince of Wales would Never Come to the Throne but that the Duke of York would be Elected instead.” No basis is given for this view but it was remarkably prescient.
