Farewell to a King

By the time the great west door of St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle swung open to the public last week, a mile-long queue of Britons waited outside. Many had been there through the night in order to pay homage to the Duke of Windsor, who had died at the age of 77 of throat cancer in his Paris home. For two days, while his body lay in state, the ordinary people of Britain turned out to pay their respects to the man regarded as a romantic hero during his brief, ten-month reign as Edward VIII in 1936 until he abdicated for "the woman I love." By the time the great door swung shut again, some 70,000 people from all over Britain had made the pilgrimage to Windsor.

The duke's widow arrived in London on a special plane sent for her by Queen Elizabeth II. She was driven directly to Buckingham Palace where, at the Queen's invitation, she planned to stay until after a private funeral early this week. It was a gesture that was welcomed by many Britons who felt that the royal family's ostracism of the Duchess of Windsor had lasted far too long. Only ten days before the duke's death, Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles had paid their first visit to the Windsors' home in Paris while on a state visit to France.

Inevitably, the Duke of Windsor's death evoked considerable nostalgia in Britain. To a new generation, grown up in a world of considerably freer social customs, Edward's abdication to marry a twice-divorced American woman named Wallis Warfield Simpson seems almost the stuff of storybooks.

Yet in retrospect his extraordinarily brief reign was less than momentous. As the daily Guardian observed last week: "The short reign of Edward VIII was sensational, but it had remarkably little effect on the course of the British monarchy. The traditional ways were resumed by George VI and have continued under Queen Elizabeth."

Prince Charming. Born in 1894 at the height of the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, as he was christened, grew up the golden-locked epitome of a Prince Charming. A series of world tours took the prince around the globe four times. Later, on visits to poor Welsh miners, he displayed a "common touch" he never lost and returned to London to plead for relief for the victims of the Great Depression.

But the handsome young prince also loved a good time. When he asked his father if he might have Fort Belvedere as his own residence, George V replied: "What could you possibly want that old place for? Those damn weekends, I suppose." It was on one of those weekends in 1931 that he met the vivacious, dark-eyed Mrs. Simpson, then the wife of a London ship broker. As Edward recalled later in his memoirs, "From the first, I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met."

As long as he was still a prince, the love affair with Mrs. Simpson was never really a problem. Not a word appeared in the British press--not in fact until one week before his abdication. Even when his father died in January 1936, and Edward, then 41, ascended the throne, he showed little inclination to marry. But when the two lovers took a much-publicized Mediterranean cruise together that summer, the romance created a worldwide scandal. When Mrs. Simpson got a divorce and moved into Fort Belvedere, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin forced Edward to make the choice: marriage or the throne.

Baldwin's point was simple: the King's position as titular head of the Church of England, which forbade divorcees to remarry, would not allow him to make Mrs. Simpson his Queen. Moreover, the constitution made no provision for a morganatic marriage. Beyond the question of divorce, there were reports that the government sought to rid the throne of a King it felt was all too friendly with Nazi Germany.

After the war, the duke and duchess continued to live in voluntary exile in Paris, when they were not on the Riviera, in Marbella or New York. An invitation to spend the weekend chez Windsor was the height of social success. Even so, the duke never lost his unassuming ways (and never conquered the French language). He devoured comic strips, tended his roses, and played a fair game of golf. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Paul Ress not long ago, he recalled that he had played golf with Emperor Hirohito when both were young men. "Oh yes, I beat him badly," admitted the duke.

He never showed regret over his decision. "Time has long since sanctified a true and faithful union," he wrote. In recent months, his neighbors noticed that the duke no longer took his two pugs for strolls in the Bois de Boulogne. It was the first public sign of his rapidly failing health. This week, in accord with arrangements worked out long ago with his brother King George VI, the duke will be buried at the small Frogmore cemetery at Windsor, near where he sailed boats and bicycled as a child. The duke chose that pastoral setting rather than St. George's Chapel itself, where English Kings are traditionally buried, so that his commoner widow might in time be buried at his side.

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