Edward VIII

Born in 1894 as the eldest son of the future George V, Edward was created Prince of Wales at sixteen and spent his youth as the Empire's most charming export - popular, stylish, prone to affairs that unnerved his father and the prime minister. When George V died in January 1936, Edward became king but immediately clashed with constitutional convention, impatient with protocol and careless about political neutrality. Within months he announced his intention to marry Wallis Simpson, an American in the process of her second divorce. The prime ministers of Britain and the Dominions refused to accept a twice-divorced queen consort; the Church of England, which Edward nominally led, forbade remarriage with living ex-spouses. Faced with the collapse of his government and his status as constitutional monarch, Edward abdicated in December 1936, succeeded by his younger brother George VI. He married Simpson in France the following June, toured Nazi Germany that autumn, and spent the Second World War shuffled to the Bahamas after a brief posting in France. He never returned to live in Britain, spending his remaining decades in French exile until his death in 1972.