Wallis Simpson
June 19, 1896 – April 24, 1986
American socialite whose planned marriage to King Edward VIII caused the 1936 abdication crisis. She married him in 1937 and became Duchess of Windsor.
Biography
Wallis Simpson was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 at Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Baltimore. Her father died soon after her birth, and she and her mother relied partly on wealthier relatives. In 1916 she married Win Spencer, a US Navy officer; the marriage, broken by separations, ended in divorce in 1927, and in 1928 she married Ernest Simpson.
In 1931 she met Edward, Prince of Wales, and the two became close. After he became king in January 1936 she divorced Ernest Simpson so that she could marry him. The prospect of the king marrying a woman with two living former husbands provoked a constitutional crisis in Britain and the Dominions, and Edward abdicated in December 1936.
She married Edward, now Duke of Windsor, in June 1937, but was refused the style of Royal Highness. That year the couple visited Germany without government approval and met Hitler, and they were long suspected of Nazi sympathies. From 1940 to 1945 they lived in the Bahamas, where Edward was governor, and afterwards moved between Europe and the United States as society figures. After the duke's death in 1972 she lived in seclusion in Paris, where she died in 1986.
Family
Wallis Simpson
Edward VIII
