King Edward VIII

King Edward VIII of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland abdicated in 1936, giving up his position as head of the British Empire in order to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.

In a tearful radio broadcast before his marriage to Wallis, King Edward VIII referred to her as "the woman I love".

It has been widely suspected ever since that Edward VIII was actually a Nazi sympathiser, and that this was the real reason why he was hounded out of office. Certainly he made a number of widely publicised visits to Nazi Germany after his abdication, and photographs exist of him shaking hands with Adolf Hitler. There are even reports that the Nazis, if their attempted conquest of Britain had been successful, were planning to restore him to the throne as a puppet. To remove him from Europe, Winston Churchill appointed him Governor of the Bahamas. After the war the Duke of Windsor, as he was now known, returned to Paris with his wife and eventually died in 1972, forsaken by all his relatives. Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor, survived until 1986.