ABSTRACT

However, there was also a strong popular sense that Edward VIII had abandoned his duty for purely selfish reasons, and the obvious contrast between him and his brother, who had accepted the throne much against his own wishes, served only to benefit the latter. The new king also seems, along with the government, to have sought to encourage a sense of continuity between his own reign and his father’s. His choosing to reign as George VI rather than in his baptismal name of Albert is an obvious manifestation of this. There seems also to have been a policy of keeping the Duke of Windsor out of Britain and out of the public consciousness, which endured until the Duke’s death in 1972, at least in the first years on the basis that his presence in Britain was likely to prove divisive.22