Wallis Simpson

Bessie Wallis Warfield grew up in Baltimore, her widowed mother leaning on wealthier relatives after her father's early death. Her first marriage to Navy officer Win Spencer collapsed through separations and divorce. In 1931, while married to her second husband Ernest Simpson, she met Edward, heir to the British throne. Five years later Edward became king, Wallis divorced Ernest, and his determination to marry her - a woman with two living ex-husbands - forced a constitutional crisis across the United Kingdom and the Dominions. He abdicated in December 1936, becoming Duke of Windsor; she became his duchess six months later, but was denied the style "Royal Highness." In 1937 they visited Germany without approval and met Adolf Hitler, deepening suspicions of Nazi sympathies that shadowed them before, during, and after the war. Edward served as governor of the Bahamas from 1940 to 1945, then they drifted through Europe and America as society celebrities until his death in 1972. She spent her final years in seclusion, rarely seen, a source of speculation and controversy that never quite settled.