Why Queen Mary Hated Her Son Edward VIII So Much

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:03]Some letters never get framed. The one we're talking about today comes from July 1938, written by a 71-year-old widow in Marlborough House to her firstborn son, a man who, 18 months earlier, had been king emperor of the largest empire in human history and was now living in France with a woman she refused to receive, acknowledge, or forgive. One sentence inside it explains the rest of her life. "I have put my country before everything else." This is not, especially, a story about love.

[00:00:38]It's a story about a mother who watched her son detonate a monarchy, chose the crown over him, and never quite looked at him the same way again. So, today, we're going to find out what was going on inside the head of Queen Mary of Teck, the most disciplined, most formal, most institutionally faithful royal consort of the modern age, and why she spent the last 17 years of her life treating her own child like a polite stranger she happened to be related to.

[00:01:14]To understand the mother, you have to understand the girl beneath [music] the queen. Born in 1867 inside Kensington Palace, Mary of Teck came from a family that sounded impressively royal until you found out it was minor German aristocracy with a long pedigree and an embarrassing absence of cash. Her father, the Duke of Teck, came from a morganatic branch of the Württemberg royal house, which is a fancy way of saying that one of his ancestors had married down and the family had been politely demoted ever since. Her mother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, was a granddaughter of King George III and weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 250 lb, [music] which the Victorian press reported on with all the discretion you'd expect, [music] which is to say none. The family ran broke, so broke they had to leave the country for a while in the 1880s to escape their creditors. They lived in Florence on the cheap, recovered their dignity, then came home and tried to marry off young Mary, who was known in the family as May, to anyone respectable who would take her. Image this, you are a teenage princess, not pretty [music] in the fashionable sense, not rich, not flirtatious, you do not sparkle, books fill the hours, museums interest you, royal genealogies live in your memory, and the high necks and tight buns become a uniform. By the time you are 16, you have learned that your only currency in this world is being utterly, completely, ferociously correct in every detail of your behavior. In 1891, she was engaged to Prince Albert Victor, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the British throne. The family called him Eddie.

[00:02:56]Eddie died of influenza six weeks after the engagement during the 1891 to '92 pandemic that swept Europe, and the question of what [music] to do with the bereaved fiance hung awkwardly over the entire royal household for about a year.

[00:03:13]The name would later become tragically familiar in this family. The answer was to marry her to the next brother-in-law.

[00:03:20]So, in 1893, she became engaged to Prince George, Duke of York, and they were married that July. [music] By all accounts, the marriage worked. George was rigid, disciplined, obsessed with stamp collecting and naval punctuality, and emotionally constipated in the specific way that English upper-class men of his generation cultivated as a national art form. He suited Mary perfectly.

[00:03:45]>> [music] >> They wrote each other letters when they were in the same house, produced six children, and as a couple did not do warmth. They did duty beautifully, with the precision of a Swiss railway.

[00:03:57]Nothing private would ever be allowed to embarrass anything public, no matter what it cost the people inside the marriage. By the time George became king in 1910, Mary had completed her transformation into the platonic ideal of a queen consort.

[00:04:13]Erect posture, permanent tiara, impossible patience for ceremony, and a wardrobe frozen almost permanently in the styles of 1912, because she had decided those styles flattered her, and the public expected continuity. She didn't flirt with modernity or smile much in photographs. The walk stayed two steps behind her husband on state occasions, and in any document we have, she never once complained. Years later, this same woman would receive the news that her eldest son was going to throw it all away.

[00:04:54]The eldest son was christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. His family called him David.

[00:05:00][music] The public eventually called him a disaster, but that took 30 years to crystallize into the verdict it eventually became. He was born in 1894 at White Lodge in Richmond Park, and from infancy, he was treated as the property of the institution rather than as a member of his own family. The royal nursery of that era was a strange contraption, half military academy and half kennels, run by paid staff with eccentric ideas about discipline. The nannies were given enormous power.

[00:05:33]One of David's nannies, according to family lore and Pope-Hennessy's careful biography, used to pinch him before presenting him to his parents, so that he would cry and be quickly removed, sparing her the work of entertaining him during the afternoon visit. You cannot make this kind of detail up. His parents loved him, probably. We have to assume this on the available evidence, because the available evidence does not include very much warmth. George V was a stern father who believed children should be afraid of him on the theory that fear produced discipline [music] and discipline produced kings. Mary was Mary, kissing her children on the forehead and inspecting their schoolwork. Letters left her hand regularly, but there were no hugs by any account we have of the kind that even Victorian sentimentalism would have permitted. David grew up sensitive, intelligent, slightly built, and desperate for affection of a kind his parents could not produce. By his teens, he had developed the personality that would define his entire adult life.

[00:06:37]Charm and vanity ran in equal measure.

[00:06:40]He could light up a room, but routine bored him senseless and protocol made him chafe. He felt things deeply and badly, like a man who had never been taught what to do with his own emotions.

[00:06:51]He served in the First World War, sort of. The army wouldn't let the heir to the throne anywhere near actual combat, which infuriated him in ways that, to his credit, were genuine. He visited the trenches and met the soldiers.

[00:07:05]Industrial workers, unemployed miners, and veterans had his attention in his way. And the press loved him for it. By the 1920s, he had become the most photographed man in the world. Tours took him to Canada, Australia, and India. Drinking ran heavy, dancing ran late, and the bedroom filled up with women he wasn't supposed to be sleeping with. His parents watched all of this with mounting dread. The father grew bitter, the mother grew silent, and the heir to the throne kept dancing through Berlin nightclubs and South American polo grounds as if nothing they did or said had any bearing on what he was going to do next. George V remarked on more than one occasion that he hoped the boy would never marry and never have children, so that the throne would pass to his sober younger brother Bertie.

[00:07:58]This is one of the most famous quotations attributed to George V, and it survives because aides remembered it and wrote it down, which is itself an indication of how openly the king was talking about his own succession by the early 1930s. The wish was clear. He was, in effect, hoping his eldest son would simply die unmarried so the institution could be spared. Mary, characteristically, never said anything that dramatic out loud because she didn't have to. Her silences, throughout David's young adulthood, did the work.

[00:08:31]She would write to him about his duties, mention his unsuitable companions gently in her letters, and never say a word about the married women because saying something would have made her complicit in a conversation she didn't want to be having in the first place. The mother and son lived on different planets by the time he was 30. He thought she was cold, she thought he was reckless, and both of them were, in their way, completely correct about the other.

[00:09:04]Wallis Warfield Simpson entered the Prince of Wales's life in January 1931 at a country house weekend at Borough Court in Melton Mowbray. She came with a complicated history. Already divorced once from a violent alcoholic Navy pilot named Win Spencer, she was now married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson, a half-American shipping broker who lived in London and was, by all accounts, a perfectly decent man who deserved none of what was about to happen to him. She was not beautiful in in conventional Hollywood sense. Her jaw was hard, her hair was dark, her eyes were sharp, and the chest she dressed brilliantly to flatter was flat. What she had was the thing nobody can teach, which is presence.

[00:09:49]Funny and wickedly observant, she remembered every guest's preferences, >> [music] >> and the trick was to make a man feel like he was the only person in the room, and then to turn around and do exactly the same thing to his wife. David was, frankly, captured the moment he met her.

[00:10:06]By 1934, she had displaced his previous mistress, Lady Furness, and become the central woman in his life. By 1935, he was sending her jewelry, holidaying with her on the Mediterranean, and ignoring his official duties in ways the household could no longer paper over.

[00:10:23]His mother knew, naturally. The household ran on gossip. The press, by gentleman's agreement, was not reporting on the affair inside Britain, but every newspaper in America and continental Europe was running pictures of the Prince of Wales on a yacht with a married American woman, and those papers were arriving on every breakfast table in Marlborough House. Mary said nothing publicly. Her position came across privately, in the way she had perfected over 50 years of royal life, which was simply to never acknowledge Mrs. Simpson's existence at all. Then George V died. The date was 20 January 1936, and he had been ill for months. His final hours have become the subject of historical debate because his doctor, Lord Dawson, later admitted that he had hastened the king's death with morphine and cocaine, so that the news would make the morning edition of The Times, rather than the evening papers, which Dawson considered vulgar. The King of England was, in effect, [music] euthanized on a publication schedule. David became King Edward VIII at the age of 41. He was the first British sovereign to have been a working royal in the age of mass media, the first to be more famous than his own country's prime minister, and the first to enter the role with a serious girlfriend nobody was allowed to discuss. He lasted 10 months.

[00:11:52]The summer of 1936 became, for the British political establishment, an exercise in steadily mounting horror.

[00:12:00]The new king had no intention of behaving. Whatever the household had hoped for, whether restraint or distance or a [music] discreet sunset of the relationship, turned out to be exactly the opposite of what was about to happen. Edward chartered a yacht called the Nahlin and sailed it through the Adriatic with Wallace. The American and European press photographed every stop.

[00:12:22]British papers, still bound by the convention of silence, said nothing. But everybody in Westminster knew what was happening. And the new king was conducting a private life that could not be contained much longer. In October, Wallace filed for divorce from Ernest Simpson at [music] Ipswich Assizes and a decree nisi followed on 27 October, 1936. Under English law, the divorce would not become absolute for another 6 months. So, throughout the crisis that followed, the woman the king intended to marry was not yet legally free to marry anyone. Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, finally called on the king on 16 November, 1936, and told him that the British public, the Church of England, >> [music] >> and the governments of the dominions would not accept Mrs. Simpson as queen.

[00:13:12]Three options existed. Edward [music] could give her up. He could marry her and accept that the marriage would force his abdication. Or he could attempt a morganatic marriage in which she would be his wife, but not queen, a proposal that would require the consent the cabinet and the dominion governments and was [music] in practice dead on arrival the second he proposed it. Edward chose the second option. He would marry her and he would abdicate. The decision was final the moment he reached it even though everybody around him kept hoping he would change his mind during the days of frantic negotiation that followed.

[00:13:48]Queen Mary learned the full scope of his decision during a series of meetings at Marlborough House in late November and early December 1936. She had known about Wallace for years.

[00:14:00]The hope, with the disciplined patience that defined her entire personality, was that he would come to his senses, end the relationship, and accept the throne with the dignity she believed his position required. He didn't. When he told her he was prepared to give up the crown, she experienced something that her closest friends and ladies in waiting later described as a kind of frozen shock. There was no screaming and there was no weeping. [music] In her stiff Edwardian way, she tried to reason with him by laying out the duty to the dynasty, to the church, to the empire in cold sentences. Bertie, [music] painfully shy and afflicted with a stammer, was being asked to take on a job he had never wanted and was not prepared for. She pointed out the damage that would be done to a monarchy that had, only 19 years earlier, been carefully repackaged from a German dynasty into a [music] British one during a war that had killed 20 million people. He didn't budge. The arguments she made, the duty she invoked, the wound she could not quite bring herself to speak about openly, all of it bounced off him because he had already decided before walking into the room. Mary's biographer, James Pope Hennessy, who had access to her papers [music] and to people who had known her, recorded that she was utterly unprepared for the possibility that her son would simply choose Wallace. The choice itself, more than the woman, was what wounded her. A king with a discreet mistress she could imagine just about. A king who would walk out of the building rather than give the mistress up she could not imagine at all. On 10 December 1936, in his country house at Fort Belvedere, Edward VIII signed [music] the instrument of abdication. His three younger brothers, Bertie, Henry, and George, signed as witnesses. The next day, 11 December, His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act received royal assent. [music] That evening, the man who was no longer king made a radio broadcast from Windsor Castle in which he told the empire that he could not carry the heavy burden of his responsibilities without the help and support of the woman he loved. Mary listened to that broadcast at Marlborough House with her ladies.

[00:16:10]According to one account, she sat perfectly still throughout. Then, when it was over, said only, "It is a terrible moment for us." The word us carried weight. She meant the family, the dynasty, the institution.

[00:16:25]Conspicuously, she did not say "for him." And that omission was the public confirmation of a private rupture that would last [music] until the day she died 17 years later. The next morning, her second son, Bertie, became King George VI. The new king's wife, Elizabeth, who later became the Queen Mother, had despised the entire situation from the beginning and would carry that resentment toward Wallace Simpson to her grave 70 years later. Two queens, mother and daughter-in-law, became the central female axis of the new reign. Both women, the old king's widow and the new king's wife, united around a single uncompromising principle, which was that Wallace Simpson would never be allowed near the throne again.

[00:17:17]You might think, at this point that the worst was over. The crisis had passed. A new king was on the throne and the old king had been demoted to Duke of Windsor and shipped to France. Everyone could exhale. Nobody exhaled. Because there was still a fight to be had and the fight was about three letters of the alphabet, H R H, Her Royal Highness, the style and title that Wallis Simpson would or would not hold once she became the Duchess of Windsor, was about to consume the next 35 years of every relationship inside the family. The legal question was technical. Under the 1917 Letters Patent issued by George V, the children and grandchildren of the sovereign in the male line were entitled to the style of Royal Highness. Edward had been born a prince and remained one even after abdicating. And by an explicit grant from George VI, he retained the title of Royal Highness.

[00:18:13]The question was whether his wife shared that style as wives of royal princes traditionally did. The cabinet, the new king, and the royal household decided she did not. On 27 May 1937, less than two weeks before Edward and Wallis married in France, Letters Patent were issued [music] declaring that the Duke of Windsor was a Royal Highness for himself only and that his wife and any future descendants would not share the title. This was, to put it gently, unprecedented.

[00:18:45]A duke who was also a prince had always handed his style to his wife. The legal logic offered by the government was that Edward had renounced his place in the succession and that the dignity of the crown required a public distinction [music] between him and any royal princes still in the line. Underneath the legal language was the political logic which everybody understood and nobody wrote down, [music] which was that Queen Mary, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth had decided that Wallis would never under any circumstances be curtsied to.

[00:19:16][music] Edward was destroyed by this.

[00:19:18]He could absorb, perhaps, his own loss of the throne because he had chosen it.

[00:19:23]He could not absorb the public humiliation of his wife. For the next 35 years, until his death in 1972, he would fight an exhausting and futile campaign to have Wallis recognized as a royal highness.

[00:19:38]And the answer would always be the same.

[00:19:41]And the answer would always come back to one person at Marlborough House, which was his mother. Queen Mary's specific legal involvement in the drafting of the 1937 Letters Patent has been debated by historians. Lawyer she was not, and Prime Minister she was not. As far as the surviving documents show, she did not sit down with the Lord Chancellor and write the text. But every memoir, every biography, and every internal household account agrees on the same point. The new king did nothing on the HRH question without consulting his mother. And his mother regarded the exclusion of Wallis as both correct and necessary. She wanted the door closed and the door slammed shut. Edward and Wallis were married at the Château de Candé in France on 3 June 1937. No member of the British royal family attended. None had been invited because none would have come because Queen Mary had given clear instructions that none could come. The wedding photographs show a small group of friends, a hired Anglican vicar who had defied his bishops to perform the ceremony, and a bride and groom who had won everything they wanted and nothing they needed. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at a borrowed castle in Austria, where Wallis discovered that the senior staff had been instructed to address her as your grace rather than your royal highness.

[00:21:02]She wept and Edward raged. Six months they had been outside the United Kingdom, and the institution they had run from was still telling them, in the language of forms of address, exactly where they now stood, which was very precisely outside.

[00:21:23]>> [music] >> You would think, having lost everything and gained the love of his life, the Duke of Windsor might have spent the next few years quietly. He had the time, painting watercolors in Antibes, riding horses in the Loire Valley, sending the occasional polite Christmas card to Marlborough House, and waiting for the day everyone forgave him, which was, in the way these things go, never going to come, but might at least have been allowed to feel possible. He did not do this. In October 1937, four months after his wedding, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Nazi Germany on what was billed as a fact-finding tour of labor conditions. They met Hitler at the Berghof. The photographs and footage survive. Wallace curtsied to the Führer, who kissed her hand. Edward gave what onlookers later described as a Nazi-style salute on at least one occasion. Though, there has been arguments since about whether it was a full salute or a partial wave, in the way that historians argue about exactly which kind of disastrous [music] thing a man did. The visit became a propaganda gift to the Third Reich. German papers, naturally, treated the former King-Emperor of Britain as evidence that the great Anglo-Saxon democracy was sympathetic to National Socialism. The British government was horrified, and everyone in the royal family was horrified, and Queen Mary, as far as we can reconstruct her reaction from the surviving correspondence, was particularly horrified. Her horror had a personal history. She had spent her entire adult life inside a dynasty that had nearly been destroyed by anti-German feeling during the First World War, the royal family was, in genetic [music] fact, German with an original family name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha that the Kaiser's war had made suddenly intolerable. In 1917, George V had been forced by mounting public pressure during the war against the Kaiser to change the family name to Windsor, to renounce all German titles, and to publicly demonstrate that the British royal house was British first and German not at all. Mary had lived through this and supported her husband through it.

[00:23:33]Her own German relatives she had personally cut ties with during the war, which had been emotionally and personally costly to her. Two decades had been spent helping reposition the monarchy as the symbolic head of a constitutional, democratic, British nation that had defeated German militarism at enormous human cost. Now her son was shaking hands with a new German dictator and accepting hospitality from a regime that her younger son's government regarded with increasing clarity as a future enemy.

[00:24:03]When war broke out in September 1939, the question of what to do with the Duke of Windsor became urgent. He was a serving officer in the British military by virtue of his rank as a former king and member of the royal family, and he had been living in France. France would fall by June 1940. Edward and Wallis fled south, then to Spain, then to Portugal, where they spent the summer of 1940 in a villa outside Lisbon, while German intelligence officers attempted to persuade them through various intermediaries to remain in Europe and make themselves available for a possible peace settlement after Britain's expected [music] defeat. This episode is known in the historical record as Operation Willie. The documents about it, which were captured by the Allies at the end of the war and later partially released as the Marburg files, are an embarrassment that the British establishment has been politely managing for 70 years. The papers show that German diplomats believe the Duke of Windsor might be useful in a post-war settlement, that they were prepared to offer him generous inducements, and that he made statements during this period that were politically catastrophic, including remarks suggesting that heavy bombing of British cities might shorten the war and force Churchill out of office. The serious historians, including Philip Ziegler in his official biography, are careful about what these documents [music] prove and do not prove. What they prove is clear enough.

[00:25:31]Edward, at minimum, was politically reckless and morally obtuse in ways that are hard to defend, and the Nazis wanted to use him. The documents do not, on their own, prove that he formally agreed [music] to be a puppet king or committed any concrete act of treason, and the serious historians have been careful about that distinction since the files were first released, but they prove enough. In July 1940, Churchill solved the problem by appointing Edward governor of the Bahamas, which was, in effect, exile to a Caribbean colony where he could do no harm. The Duke and Duchess sailed for Nassau, and they served out the war thousands of miles from any front. [music] He complained constantly about the heat, the staff, the locals, the food, and the cocktails.

[00:26:17]She redecorated. We do not have a letter from Queen Mary to her son during this period that says, in so many words, that she now believed he had become a danger to the country. We do not need one. The behavior speaks. She never wavered in her support for George VI, and she never sought out her eldest son. On the question of Wallace, she never softened in any meaningful way. The war years, in her mind, simply confirmed what she had concluded in December 1936. He had been the wrong king, and he was now turning out to have been a wrong man, too.

[00:26:58]After the war, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor began the second act of their long and weird life. They settled in France. They became fixtures of cafe society with no children, no jobs, and no real role. The couple lived on the proceeds of Edward's personal fortune, the generous financial settlement George VI had negotiated as part of the abdication, and what they could earn from selling their story. Edward published his memoir, A King's Story, in 1951. It was ghostwritten with extensive help from Charles J. V. Murphy, an American journalist, and it presented the abdication as a noble sacrifice of a king for love. The book sold extremely well. As a historical source, it is useful chiefly for what it tells you about how Edward wanted to be remembered, which is not the same thing as how he [music] actually behaved at the time. Queen Mary read it, and we have no record of her reaction. She remained the figurehead matriarch of the new royal family. She attended George VI's coronation in 1937, breaking the convention that the widow of a previous sovereign did not attend the crowning of the next one. The royal archives describe her presence at the ceremony as a deliberate gesture of support, and contemporary photographs show her in her purple robes and circlet sitting in a separate gallery watching her son being anointed and crowned in the abbey, where 18 months earlier her eldest son was supposed to have stood.

[00:28:24]She continued her royal duties through the war by knitting for the troops and salvaging scrap metal. Her energy never flagged. [music] The war years passed at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, where her hosts, the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, found her formidably energetic, formidably tidy, and formidably uninterested in any topic relating to her exiled son. She corresponded with Edward occasionally.

[00:28:49]The letters that survive are not warm, nor are they cruel, but dutiful in the way Edwardian letters can be. She inquired about his health. His birthdays drew acknowledgement. In any letter we have, she did not write to him as her child in the way a grieving mother might, but as a former member of the family who needed to be handled politely, >> [music] >> and she never departed from that position for the remaining 15 years of her life. There were attempts at reconciliation. The Duke crossed the channel a handful of times after the war, usually for funerals. He attended George VI's funeral in 1952.

[00:29:26]He did not see his mother privately during that visit because she would not see Wallace, and he would not come alone in any way that suggested he was apologizing. Each side, by this [music] point, had calcified into a position from which neither could move without losing something they considered structural to their sense of self.

[00:29:45]George VI died on 6th February 1952 after years of illness.

[00:29:52]The strain of the war, the strain of the throne he had never wanted, >> [music] >> and a lifelong heavy smoking habit had worn him out at 56. His death broke Queen Mary in a way the abdication never had. By then, she had lost her husband, her father-in-law George V, her son George, her son John, who had died as a child in 1919, and now her second son Bertie, who had been her steadiest support for 15 years. The new sovereign was Princess Elizabeth, 25 years old, on safari in Kenya when the news reached her. Mary saw her granddaughter become queen. Her own health collapsed within the year, and the most disciplined consort of the modern age had only months left to live. She died at Marlborough House on 24th March 1953, [music] 10 weeks before her granddaughter's coronation. Her instructions were specific. The coronation was to proceed on schedule whether or not she lived to see it. She had also very specifically indicated that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were not to attend, an instruction that George the VI's daughter, the new queen, would respect to the letter.

[00:31:06]There is one detail from Queen Mary's funeral in 1953 that historians come back to.

[00:31:12]He came. The Duke of Windsor flew in from Paris and stayed at Marlborough House for a few days, then attended the funeral at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, [music] where his mother was buried beside her husband George V in the Royal Vault. After the service, he gave a small dinner for the family and sat at the head of the table where she had once presided.

[00:31:34]He cried during the service and didn't speak much afterward.

[00:31:38]According to the staff who served him those evenings, he looked like a man who had outlived not just his mother, but also any possibility of being understood by her ever.

[00:31:48]His younger brother had been king for 16 years and was already buried.

[00:31:53]His younger sister lay ill, his niece was queen, and the Duke of Windsor remained the only adult member of his generation left, a stranger in the house where he had been raised.

[00:32:03]He flew back to Paris alone because Wallace had not been invited and would not have come. The visit ended as it had [music] begun.

[00:32:11]Nothing was resolved, nothing was discussed, and nothing was said that could have closed the gap that had opened in December 1936.

[00:32:20]Her son went to his grave 19 years later believing she had been cruel.

[00:32:26]Maybe she had been. A less institutional mother would have driven to Paris in 1937, folded her son's wife into her arms, and let the throne take care of itself, but the woman who could have done that would not have been the woman who held the British monarchy together for half a century.

[00:32:44]Her great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, would reign for 70 years.

[00:32:49]The institution Mary had refused to compromise for would survive two more world wars, a cold war, a media revolution, several prime ministerial crises, and a string of family scandals that would have made the 1936 abdication look like a parking ticket.

[00:33:09]The crown that Mary chose over her son outlived not only her son, but her son's century.

[00:33:15]In her bedroom at Marlborough House after her death, >> [music] >> the staff found a small framed photograph of David as a young man tucked inside a drawer where she had kept it for years.

[00:33:27]The photograph had never been displayed publicly. As far as we know, she had not taken it out and looked at it in front of anyone.

[00:33:35]But it had been there the whole time, kept and dusted [music] and preserved beside the rosary she had been given as a child and the prayer book she used at her husband's funeral.

[00:33:44]She had not displayed it and had not destroyed it, but had simply kept it in a drawer for 17 years.