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Decades after his death, the Duke of Windsor remains a notorious figure; after all, it was his desire to marry divorced American Wallis Simpson that led him to abdicate the throne of England, ultimately resulting in his brother becoming king and being succeeded by Queen Elizabeth II. Then, of course, there was the posthumous revelation that the erstwhile former King Edward VIII was also a Nazi sympathizer who felt that Britain should have appeased Adolf Hitler, not gone to war against him.
The duke spent the remainder of his life in exile, living in France. He experienced ill health in his later years and died in 1972 at the age of 77. At the time of his demise, according to his obituary in The New York Times, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson stated, “He died peacefully.” According to the Times, he’d recently undergone a hernia operation; when asked about the cause of death, the duke’s secretary John Utter responded, “Just natural causes.”
That, however, was subsequently revealed to be a lie; as The Tatler reported, the actual cause of death was laryngeal cancer. In the documentary “Queen Elizabeth II,” reported by the Daily Mail, the duke’s former nurse Julie Alexander confirmed that when the queen paid her uncle a final visit, she knew the extent of his illness. “He was terribly sick. He couldn’t have weighed — maybe 80 lbs, if that … [he] wasn’t eating at all,” Alexander said.
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