Wallis, Duchess of Windsor

Wallis, Duchess of Windsor (born Bessie Wallis Warfield, later Spencer, then Simpson; 19 June 1896 – 24 April 1986) was the American wife of Edward, Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. Edward wanted to make Wallis his queen, but the British government would not allow it because she was a divorced person. Edward had to decide whether to give up Wallis for the crown, or the crown to marry Wallis. Edward decided to give up the crown, and he abdicated on December 11 1936. The couple spent most of their life in France.

Quotes

 * I am sure there is only one solution, that is for me to remove myself from the King's life. That is what I am doing now.
 * After the possibility of abdication was reported in the newspapers, she left for Cannes (3 December 1936).
 * Matthew, H. C. G., "Edward VIII [later Prince Edward, duke of Windsor] (1894–1972)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, January 2008 accessed 21 November 2008


 * You can never be too rich or too thin.
 * From The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed on 21 November 2008


 * I never wanted to get married. This was all his idea. [...] I remember like yesterday the morning after we were married and I woke up and there was David [i.e., Edward VIII] standing beside the bed with this innocent smile, saying, "And now what do we do?" My heart sank. Here was someone whose every day had been arranged for him all his life and now I was the one who was going to take the place of the entire British government, trying to think up things for him to do.
 * Quoted by Gore Vidal in Palimpsest: A Memoir

About Wallis Simpson

 * [A]n entirely unscrupulous woman who is not in love with the King but is exploiting him for her own purposes. She has already ruined him in money and jewels...
 * From an entry in the diary of Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, cited in Philip Ziegler King Edward VIII: The Definitive Portrait of the Duke of Windsor New York: Random House (1992), p. 271


 * Baldwin ruled out the traditional compromise of a morganatic marriage, the sort that Archduke Francis Ferdinand had made when he married Sophie Countess Chotek von Chotkova, whose family was not of royal blood. As Duff Cooper noted, however, the timing of events was not to the King's advantage. He waited until after his accession to the throne to raise the question of marrying Wallis Simpson. Nor did it help matters that he was stridently supported by both the Rothermere and Beaverbrook papers, to say nothing of Winston Churchill, at that time in the political wilderness.
 * Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 289