Although it was never officially acknowledged, Winston Churchill was generally credited as the author of the farewell speech.

Shortly after the abdication, word leaked out that months before the crisis Prime Minister Baldwin had ordered M15 of the British Intelligence service to make a thorough investigation of the life and loves, past and present, of Wallis Warfield Simpson. M15's report included an FBI investigation of the woman who was born in Baltimore in 1896 and christened Bessie Wallis Warfield.

After a divorce from an alcoholic Navy pilot by the name of Spencer, the future Duchess of Windsor had a two-year affair in Washington with an Argentine diplomat. Then she spent a year living with rich friends in China, where she became involved with a Chinese official. When she later took up with the king, the Chinese official tried to blackmail her.

In 1929 at age 33, Wallis Warfield Spencer married the recently divorced Ernest Simpson, the son of an American mother and British father. Simpson had quit Harvard to join the British Army as an officer in the Coldstream Guards during World War I, and after the war joined his father in a prosperous ship brokerage business.

His service as a Coldstream Guard officer gave them entree into London's Mayfair social circles. It was there that Mrs. Simpson first met the future king, who was then known as the Prince of Wales. The Simpsons soon became favored weekend guests at the Prince's Fort Belvedere lodge near Windsor Castle.

One summer when her husband was in America on business, Mrs. Simpson joined a group of guests for a fateful cruise with the king. In her biography, "The Heart Has Its Reasons," she noted that it was about this time she realized she and Edward had "crossed the line that marked the indefinable boundary between friendship and love."

Mrs. Simpson was now determined to eat her cake and have it, too, confessing to her aunt, "It requires great tact to manage both men. I shall try to keep them both."

Needless to say, Mrs. Simpson showed enough tact at least to manage Edward VIII. Less than an hour after his abdication speech, the ex-king, now the Duke of Windsor, was on his way to a six-month exile in an Austrian castle owned by the Rothchilds. His wife-to-be was living with friends across the border in Cannes, France, waiting for her divorce to become final. They held lengthy telephone conversations every day, making plans for their marriage in June.

Members of the royal family were conspicuous by their absence when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were married on June 30, 1937, in Montes, France.