The letter arrived in Lubeck in December 1945, addressed to the Duke of Windsor from a man named Count Bentinck, a member of one of Europe’s most famous noble families of diplomats. It came out of the blue, and it was something of a shock to the British authorities who intercepted it. The count was asking whether the Duke would be prepared to accept a throne—not the throne of Britain, which he had surrendered nine years earlier, but the throne of Hanover, a crown that had ceased to exist in any real sense since the collapse of the German monarchy in 1918. Reading the letter, the British officials must have wondered who was behind such an extraordinary proposition.

The Bentinck letter explained that after Germany’s fateful experiences during the previous twenty-five years—defeat in the First World War, the chaos of the Weimar Republic, and the catastrophe of National Socialism—many Germans believed that a British form of constitutional monarchy would be the most suitable form of government for their defeated nation. And as for who should fill that role, the count added that the personality of the Duke would certainly appeal to the German people. To understand how a former King of England came to be courted with the crown of a minor German dukedom, one has to go back to the beginning, to the peculiar circumstances that made Edward, Prince of Wales, an ex-king possibly for hire in the first place. Known as David to his family, Edward had succeeded to the British throne in 1936 upon the death of his father, King George V.

He reigned as King Edward VIII and was Emperor of India, a popular figure who had spent his years as Prince of Wales as something of a playboy, whose only real interest appeared to have been sleeping with other men’s wives. Then he met Wallis Warfield Simpson, a twice-divorced American, and fell deeply in love. There was a genuine fear in the British establishment that Edward might actually marry her and make her his Queen. To the establishment and the Church of England, she was completely unacceptable, because of her divorces, because she was American, and because she was ignorant of court life.

There was more troubling about Edward than his choice of wife. Edward became king the same year Hitler began testing the waters regarding his plans for German expansion in Europe. As many who knew him noted, Edward was a natural fascist. He stated openly that he felt more German than English, and he was fluent in the language.

In fact, by ancestry, Edward was more German than English: his mother was Princess Mary of Teck, from a German princely state, and his late father was almost completely German by descent. Edward VII, his grandfather, had been the son of Queen Victoria, a Hanoverian princess, and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. George V’s mother, Alexandra of Denmark, was herself mostly German. By ancestry, King Edward VIII was almost entirely German, with a slight dash of Hungarian from his mother’s side.

His love of all things German was understandable. What was less understandable was his admiration for Adolf Hitler. When Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, he expected some military reaction from France and Britain. Evidence emerged that Edward threatened to precipitate an abdication crisis if Britain stood up to Hitler.

As it happened, Britain and France did nothing, emboldening Hitler to further territorial grabs and putting Europe on the road to war by 1939. Even more worrisome for the British establishment was Edward’s evident unfitness to be king. The German ambassador to Great Britain before the war was Joachim von Ribbentrop, who formed a close—and some said extremely close—relationship with Wallis Simpson. At a diplomatic reception, Ribbentrop mentioned information that could only have come from secret cabinet meetings.

The monarch receives state papers just as the Prime Minister does, and these confidential reports should never be shared with anyone. Yet it was clear that Edward had told Wallis about confidential information, and that she in turn had passed it to Ribbentrop. If anyone else had done such a thing, a charge of treason might have been contemplated. These problems led to a plot developing among the establishment to get rid of Edward as king.

The plotters used Edward’s stated wish to marry Mrs. Simpson as their pretext, and Edward foolishly played straight into their hands by giving the government an ultimatum: either he would marry Wallis, or he would abdicate. The Prime Minister chose the latter option. Edward abdicated after barely a year on the throne, and his brother Bertie took over as King George VI.

Edward and Wallis went to France and married. Though Edward was not officially banished from Britain, he entered a period of self-imposed exile that would last for most of his life, until his death in 1972. The problem for the British government was Edward’s continued interest in Hitler. In 1937, he and Wallis visited Germany and actually met Hitler at the Berghof.

What Hitler and Edward discussed has never been fully revealed, but Hitler definitely saw Edward as a friend of Germany. When war broke out, Edward, now titled the Duke of Windsor, was attached as a major general to the British military mission in France. According to German sources, Edward leaked Allied war plans for the defense of Belgium to the Germans, helping Hitler’s 1940 invasion. Fleeing France ahead of the Germans, Edward and Wallis set up a house in neutral Lisbon, Portugal, where the Duke became the focus of a kidnap plot conducted by the SS, called Operation Willi, in order to place Edward under German intelligence control during a critical stage of the war.

In 1940, when Britain and her Empire stood alone, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Edward to return to Britain, threatening a court martial if he refused. Thereafter, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were packed off to the British colony of the Bahamas in the Caribbean, with Edward appointed Governor, to keep him out of harm’s way. He remained in that post until March 1945, when he started making noises about some future role. In September 1945, Edward and Wallis returned to Europe—she to reopen their old French mansion, which had been carefully guarded by the German army during the occupation of France, and he to Britain to see his mother, Queen Mary, for the first time in nine years, and his brother, King George VI.

During that meeting, it was made clear to Edward that his wife would not be received by the royal family, and that he would not be given any further jobs. Though Edward was independently extremely wealthy, he desired above all two things: some useful role, and the granting of the title Her Royal Highness to his wife, which had been specifically denied her. All the while, the royal family had enacted a secret mission to Germany to retrieve a series of letters and documents held in the archives of their German cousins at Marburg Castle, in order to keep potentially damaging information about the royal family out of the newspapers. Among the documents were German intelligence files on the Duke of Windsor and his Nazi ties that would have proven damaging to the royal family if published.

Naturally, both the royal family and the British government would have preferred it if Edward stayed in France doing the celebrity party circuit. But Edward was fairly thick-skinned and kept pushing. From this unsatisfactory state of affairs emerged the curious plot found in the archives, overlooked by historians. With the defeat of Germany in May 1945 came the dissolution of Germany as a nation-state and its division into four occupation zones—American, British, French, and Soviet—governed by the Allied Control Commission, made up of representatives of the four powers.

The British section controlled much of northwestern Germany. The British political division based in Lubeck received that December letter from Count Bentinck. Hanover and Britain had, of course, a long history. In 1714, following the end of the Scottish Stuart dynasty in Britain, the Elector of Hanover was crowned as King George I of Great Britain, Ireland, and Hanover, beginning a personal union between Britain and Hanover that lasted until 1837, when the personal union between the two houses ended.

Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the British throne that year, was nonetheless a Hanoverian princess. The Duke of Windsor, by descent from Queen Victoria, remained closely related to the Dukes of Hanover in Germany. The various German dukedoms, kingdoms, and principalities had been united in 1871 to form Germany, with the King of Prussia made Emperor, or Kaiser. At the conclusion of World War One in 1918, the German monarchy was abolished, and Hanover became part of the Weimar Republic.

But the old ruling Hanoverian family retained their estates and castles and their position at the top of society. Many of the princes and Dukes of Germany actively collaborated with Hitler before and during the war, not least of which were the Hanoverian royals, now the Dukes of Brunswick—in German, Herzog von Braunschweig. Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, was the grandson of the last King of Hanover and also a Prince of the United Kingdom, until he was stripped of that title in 1917 during World War One. In the Nazi period, Ernest Augustus donated funds to the Nazi party and was close friends with several senior Nazi leaders.

He desired peace between Germany and Britain. The Duke of Windsor was also his friend, and had stayed with his cousin in 1937. In 1945, Brunswick had lost one of his castles to the Soviets, but aided by his cousin King George VI, British troops had been ordered to transfer the castle’s contents and Brunswick family property to his other castle at Marienburg in the British occupation zone. However, the family was tainted by its association with the Nazis.

Brunswick’s son and heir, Ernest Augustus, Prince of Hanover, had briefly been an SS officer, later served in the army on the Eastern Front, and was also imprisoned following the July plot against Hitler. Count Bentinck’s extraordinary letter of December 1945, offering the crown of Hanover to the Duke of Windsor, was politely rebuffed by the curious expedient of Germans not being allowed to send letters abroad at that time. But the person behind the plot appeared to show himself on the 5th of November 1946. The British authorities were made aware of an article published in the magazine World Affairs by famous editor and writer Kenneth de Courcy.

The article concerned the state of occupied Germany and its future, and outlined the idea of the British turning its occupation zone into a realm—a royal realm—with someone appointed as king. Parliamentary democracy, de Courcy wrote, would never function in Germany unless this was done; otherwise there would be chaos ending in dictatorship, or dictatorship ending in chaos. De Courcy believed constitutional monarchy to be the best type of government and the British model the finest example in the world. As for who should be the new monarch, de Courcy wrote that it would not be difficult to find him: an able man thoroughly accustomed to constitutional practice, acquainted with world problems and with a political flair, ought not to be hard to find from amongst the exalted personages in the royal circle of Europe.

It would, of course, be a great mistake to have a German. It must be someone who knows America and Britain and who has the support of them both. The man wasn’t named in the article, but it wasn’t difficult to work out who de Courcy might have thought had the right qualifications—and was free. Major Brahma of the political division in Lubeck drew the government’s attention to the de Courcy article, and also noted that de Courcy had told him he had recently lunched with the Duke of Windsor.

Even more interestingly, Brahma learned that de Courcy was in Germany to meet with the Duke of Brunswick and another unnamed Duke at Glücksburg Castle. As Glücksburg was the family seat of the Dukes of Schleswig-Holstein, the unnamed noble may have been Wilhelm Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein—but that remains speculation. Count Bentinck’s curious offer of the crown of Hanover to the Duke of Windsor now made sense. De Courcy had evidently pitched the idea to a frustrated Edward, then in France, as a way back into a useful position: to be a king once again, of a part of a nation that Edward loved and respected in the time of its greatest need.

And Wallis would be his Queen, gaining the full royal status that Edward had desired so badly for his wife and which the King of England, George VI, had specifically denied her. Edward was of Hanoverian blood, and his meeting with the Duke of Brunswick must have been to clear the way for Edward to have the crown. Edward and Wallis had no children, so perhaps it was intended that upon Edward’s death the crown would go to the Duke of Brunswick’s son, or his grandson, both of whom were princes of Hanover. Edward was due to go to America, and the British Foreign Office minutes recalled that there was some disquiet that he might be seeking U.

S. support for de Courcy’s plan to put him on the throne of Hanover. Ultimately, the de Courcy and Edward plan came to naught. King George VI and his government were determined that Edward would be kept out of any position and sidelined.

What remains of the papers concerning the Hanover plot suggest the idea was dismissed as nonsense by the Foreign Office, at least officially, and allowed to fall into obscurity. Even though the files were declassified in 1977, five years after the Duke of Windsor’s death, the story of the plot remains largely unknown today and unremarked upon by historians. But it demonstrates that Edward was prepared to examine any avenue to a return to public life, up to and including a crown in the land of his ancestors.