“German was his main language, and historians have proven that he was leaking sensitive material to the Germans in the late 1930s. Mrs Simpson was a convenient reason for suggesting he couldn’t be on the throne because she’s a divorcee, but actually, if you look back at what Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, was doing, they were actually bugging with MI5. They were bugging the King. They didn’t trust him, and Mrs Simpson was a convenient reason to get rid of him. That’s a real reason that Edward VIII went.
“But the point is about the oath: whether members of the Royal Family took an oath personally to the King or the Queen, and whoever’s on the throne at a particular time. Most times it doesn’t matter very much. But let’s look back to the 1930s. If Edward VIII had still been king when the war broke out, and he had said to the armed forces, ‘You must lay down your weapons’, they may have all have done so, because they took an oath to him personally. That’s the danger of it.”
Historically, archived state papers confirm that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the Cabinet monitored Edward VIII’s communications during the 1936 abdication crisis due to security concerns regarding his relationship with Mrs Simpson and reported sympathies toward Nazi Germany.
However, under constitutional law, the British Armed Forces serve the Sovereign in Parliament, meaning military command remains governed by parliamentary legislation and Government minister decisions rather than unilateral monarchical directives.
Beyond constitutional mechanics, Mr Baker criticised what he views as a broader societal deferential protection machine that insulates the royal institution from routine public and parliamentary oversight: “Secondly, you’ve got the fact that the royals operate a very good spin machine and rely on deference from the public at large. So people don’t want to criticise the Royal Family, particularly, I might say, when Queen Elizabeth was alive, because people thought she was doing a good job, and that’s gone away a bit.