The Duchess of Windsor

by Diana Mosley

  A few old friends came from Paris to see her from time to time, among them Mrs Rex Benson, an American who lived in London. They had a long talk and Leslie Benson remembers Wallis saying: ‘You know, I never wanted this marriage.12 She was certainly speaking the truth, and it is worth quoting since even now she is sometimes portrayed as an adventuress who with her wiles lured the King of England from his throne. During these months of waiting she made up her mind that as far as lay in her power she would make the Duke happy, it would be her life’s work from now on. As we shall see, she succeeded to an almost miraculous extent.

  Château de Candé, the home of Charles Bedaux, which he offered to Wallis and the Duke of Windsor for their wedding.

  Wallis and Katherine Rogers at Candé with the Cairn terrier, Slipper, which was killed by an adder.

  Wallis and the Duke reunited at last at Candé, May 1937.

  The wedding of Wallis and the Duke of Windsor at Candé, 3 June 1937, posing for the photographers with Herman Rogers (left) and Major Metcalfe (right).

  On the balcony steps at Candé (left to right): Aunt Bessie, the Rev. Anderson Jardine, Wallis, the Duke of Windsor, Randolph Churchill.

  The Wedding breakfast with Walter Monckton (centre) and Major Metcalfe (right), flowers by Constance Spry.

  Rev. Anderson Jardine’s prayerbook, autographed after the wedding ceremony by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  In England the year before the King had given Wallis a cairn terrier called Slipper. When she dashed away to France with Lord Brownlow she left Slipper behind at the Fort, and he went with the Duke of Windsor to Enzesfeld. During the waiting time at Candé Slipper was sent to keep her company. One day, chasing a rabbit into the wood, he was bitten by a viper and died. Wallis was inconsolable; the cairn’s death shed deep gloom for many days.

  On 3 May George Allen telephoned from London to tell Wallis that her divorce was now absolute and she rang up the Duke to tell him the good news. ‘Wallis,’ he said, ‘the Orient Express passes through Salzburg this afternoon. I shall be at Candé in the morning.’ And so he was, accompanied by his equerry, Dudley Forwood. He rushed up the castle steps two at a time: ‘Darling, it’s been so long! I can hardly believe this is you, and I am here!’

  They decided to be married after the coronation, for which the date of 12 May had been retained; as it was on the coronation mugs it had seemed easier to keep it. They all listened to the ceremony on the wireless in the Candé drawing room.

  Wallis was superstitious and did not want a May wedding so they fixed it for 3 June. She had ordered a blue crêpe satin dress from Mainbocher and a hat to match from Reboux. Constance Spry, who was devoted to the bride, came from England to arrange the flowers, and Cecil Beaton to photograph the couple on the wedding eve. He remembers the scent of lilies and white peonies in the castle. The only French journalist who was present at the wedding was Maurice Schumann, who years later was many times a Minister and is a member of the Académie Française. He says that on her wedding day Wallis woke to a ‘Wallis blue sky.’ He praises the elegance of the Duchess and what he calls ‘her very great dignity.’13

  A few friends came, including Major Metcalfe as best man, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, Hugh Lloyd-Thomas, Lady Selby, Randolph Churchill and others, but none of the Duke’s relations.

  ‘Alas! the wedding day in France of David to Mrs Warfield … We all telegraphed to him’ wrote Queen Mary in her diary.

  A Church of England clergyman, braving his bishop’s ban, had volunteered to conduct the marriage service, which seems to have pleased the Duke who wanted a religious ceremony. The legions of the press gathered at nearby Tours; Herman Rogers, by now accustomed to the job, acted as liaison with them. Although he was disappointed that his brother the Duke of Kent had not come, for the Duke everything was joy and happiness until the unfortunate Walter Monckton appeared, the bearer of evil tidings, a letter from the King. This letter said that the King was advised by the British and Dominions Prime Ministers that when the Duke renounced the Throne he had also given up his royal titles, including the right to the title of Royal Highness. The King was now re-creating him a Royal Highness. but the title did not extend to the Duke’s wife. In conclusion, the King hoped that this painful decision he had been forced to take would not be considered an ‘insult’ by the Duke. It goes without saying that the painful decision was considered an insult, a deadly insult. The Duchess writes: ‘The letter enraged David. He exclaimed: “I know Bertie—I know he couldn’t have written this letter on his own. Why in God’s name would they do this to me at this time!” To Walter Monckton he said: ‘This is a nice wedding present!’

  The world press at the gates of the Château.

  Characteristically, the Duchess of Windsor did not mind for herself, though she did for the Duke. She never gave a fig for titles and would have been perfectly content, had it not been for the Duke’s violent reaction. A morganatic marriage had never been an ideal solution in his eyes because it made Wallis a second-class wife. He had accepted it as the only alternative to renouncing his throne, but it had been rejected unanimously by the British Cabinet and the Dominions. Now that he had abdicated in order to marry, here he was with a morganatic marriage after all.

  In fact it was a clever move on the part of the politicians who devised it. They knew, none better, that the Duke was loved in a quite special way in Britain and that legends to not disappear at the wave of a wand. They dreaded his return to his native land, and they reckoned, quite correctly, that he would never come back unless his wife was treated property. In order to ensure his continued absence they acted illegally, in the opinion of learned lawyers. Sir William Jowitt, a future Lord Chancellor, so advised the Duke. (The editor of Burke’s Peerage wrote years later that it was ‘the most flagrant act of discrimination in the whole history of our dynasty.’) Walter Monckton14 said that nothing and nobody could take away the Duke’s title, as son of a sovereign, of Royal Highness, and that since he was married according to the law of the land his wife automatically became a Royal Highness too. Monckton said that if the Duke had brought an action in the English courts to establish the Duchess’ right to be a Royal Highness he would have won it, but this of course was something he would never do.

  Everything she possibly could to make their wedding a perfect day for the Duke, Wallis had done. The quiet country setting, the rooms full of flowers, the food, all were perfection. The yawning gaps among the guests, the fact that the ever-faithful Aunt Bessie was the only relation present, were not her fault.

  After the wedding breakfast the guests were received one by one by the Duke and Duchess, and for the first time the problem arose of who was going to bow or curtsy to the Duchess as they did to the Duke. This recurred for the rest of their lives, and it was noticeable that everyone with the slightest pretension to good manners treated her, for the Duke’s sake, as he would have wished. Only people very anxious and unsure of themselves, hoping, perhaps, to show they knew what was what, did otherwise.

  Afterwards Walter Monckton took the Duchess aside; he ‘told her that most people in England disliked her very much because the Duke had married her and given up his throne, but that if she kept him happy all his days that would change, but that if he were unhappy nothing would be too bad for her.’ The Duchess said: ‘Walter, don’t you think I have thought of all that? I think I can make him happy.’ Fate had given her a tremendous challenge and she was determined to meet it.

  Notes

  12 In conversation with the author.

  13 In conversation with the author.

  14 In conversation with the author.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The First Two Years

  Man is by nature a political animal.

  Aristotle

  AFTER A HONEYMOON in Austria at Wasserleonburg, an old castle belonging to Count Paul Munster whose wife Peggy was a cousin of the Duke’s friend Lord Dudley, the Windsors went to Paris. Probably the first year was the most difficult of all th
eir married life. During the Abdication crisis the then Duke of York had told Walter Monckton that the Duke of Windsor could, after an interval, come back and live at Fort Belvedere, the house and garden to which he was so deeply attached, but as the months went on it became obvious that this was a promise he was not going to be allowed to keep. Yet the Duke could not bring himself to believe that his present circumstances were to be permanent. When, according to the best legal advice, he discovered that the blow he had received on his wedding day was of doubtful legality he felt convinced that before long it would be admitted that his wife was indeed a Royal Highness. Then they could go back to the Fort, and he could take on some of the work of the royal family. For this reason he did not buy a house, and in a rented house neither gardening nor anything else seems worthwhile. Sir Dudley Forwood, who was with the Windsors during this testing time, writes: ‘During my tours of duty with them both, she showed every kindness and understanding; indeed often, when His Royal Highness was being somewhat difficult, she would overcome his stubbornness.15 In Sir Dudley’s opinion, the Duchess has never been given a ‘fair deal.’

  During their stay at the Hôtel Meurice the new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. called on the Duke. They had a long talk and he promised to ask the Palace when the Windsors could go home. Nothing happened, and a few months later the Duke asked again. The Palace and Downing Street played a sort of game with him, each putting the blame for delay upon the other, turn and turn about. Perhaps neither wished to incur the odium of telling him outright that the Duchess was never to be a Royal Highness, and that the reason was they emphatically did not want a living legend to come back to England and had hit upon this simple way of stopping him. The rather cowardly evasions were exasperating to the Duke, who had he been placed in like circumstances would have made it a point of honour to he perfectly frank and truthful.

  The Duke and Duchess on their honeymoon at Wasserleonburg.

  The Duke and Duchess on their honeymoon at Wasserleonburg.

  A lunch party at Wasserleonburg, June 1937 (left to right): Wallis, Collin Buist (equerry to the Duke of York), Walter Monckton, Dudley Forwood, Mrs Buist, Foxie Gwynne (later Countess Sefton).

  The Duchess found a furnished house at Versailles where they stayed for a few months, and then they took a lease of the Château de la Croë at Cap d’Antibes on the sea. The Duke liked the South of France; what he never liked was living for more than a short time in a town. He looked upon his present life in France as an interlude, it never occurred to him that he would not be back in England before very long.

  He was a modest man, and he probably never quite understood the reason which underlay the determination on no account to let him go home. He thought of himself as a hard working member of the royal family. If at first some of his relations failed to see that Wallis was the perfect woman, he was convinced they would soon come to realize how perfect she was. He himself never had the slightest doubt as to her perfection.

  Walter Monckton had taken on the same work for George VI as he had done for Edward VII. Then and always he remained a good friend of the Duke of Windsor who was very fond of him, but he also sympathized with the new King and understood his hesitation to welcome home a brother who had formerly dominated him to such a marked degree. When from time to time Walter Monckton visited the Windsors after their marriage he sensed the frustration of the Duke, who had wrongly imagined he could go home once his brother was firmly established on the Throne.

  Although, as we know, this was not to be, the Duke at that time was still hoping to be able to serve his country. One of the worst miseries of pre-war Britain (and it is by no means over, even now) was bad housing. The Duke of Windsor, as Prince and as King, had many times seen the degradation of it. In 1930 Queen Mary had written to him: ‘I don’t think there would be much discontent if only people were housed properly.’ Discontent is, rather naturally, dreaded by kings and queens; the Duke of Windsor saw the problem in terms of men and women, citizens of a country then considered the richest and most powerful in the world, ‘owning’ a quarter of the globe and with a vast reserve of unemployed labour, yet governed by politicians with neither ability nor imagination.

  When, in 1937, the Duke was invited to go to Germany and see what had been done there about low-cost housing he accepted. It was exactly the sort of non-political, non-party problem where he thought he might be able to play some part before too long. The politicians did not see it in this light. Although incapable of devising a solution, they were determined to allow no-one else to help, whether it be Lloyd George with his dynamism, or the Duke of Windsor with his almost magic popularity. It was unrealistic to imagine they would react in any other way. We have seen that Lloyd George went so far as to attribute the ‘alacrity to dethrone him’ to the fact that he had ‘as Prince and Sovereign exposed the continual neglect by Government of chronic distress, poverty and bad housing conditions amongst the people in his realm.’

  While he was King he had been visited by his cousin, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, an enthusiastic National Socialist who had brought messages from Hitler. The Duke of Windsor’s love of Germany was inborn. ‘Every drop of blood in my veins is German,’ he said16- a slight exaggeration. He was anything but a Nazi, for obvious reasons; he was a convinced monarchist and a firm believer in the multi-racial Empire to which he had devoted so much time and energy all his life.

  Dr Ley, the Minister responsible for housing showed the Windsors round. In her memoirs the Duchess says she disliked Ley, and no doubt he was a rough and ready sort of man. His position was Reich Organizations leader. The German Labour Front (DAF) had thirty million members, and it regularly received ninety-five per cent of the subscriptions due, a notable expression of the German workers’ confidence in Ley and the DAF. With this vast wealth the DAF built housing for its members, as well as holiday cruise vessels, convalescent homes and so forth.

  While they were in Berlin, the Windsors drove to Karinhall and lunched with General Goering. A few months previously Lord Londonderry, a former Secretary of State for Air, had invited Goering to stay at Londonderry House for the Coronation, but he had declined. He said that in his opinion Anglo-German relations had cooled since the year before, when Lord Londonderry had been to a shoot at Karinhall.

  In Bavaria, after visiting the new housing estates, the Windsors went to the Berghof, where the Duke had a talk with Hitler while the Duchess chatted with the entourage in the famous room with its view of range upon range of mountains. Although the Duke spoke fluent German, Hitler used his interpreter, Paul Schmidt. From time to time the Duke was displeased with the translation of his words, saying sharply ‘Falsch übersetzt!’ and making Herr Schmidt try again. The transcript of their conversation has vanished from the captured files.

  What did Hitler and the Duke make of one another?17 There were certain areas of agreement between them—admiration for the British Empire, hatred of communism. Hitler would undoubtedly have been sensible of the well-known charm of his guest, but as a realist he was aware that any usefulness to himself or to his policy with regard to Britain that might have resulted from the fact that the Duke was friendly disposed toward Germany, had been thrown away in 1936 when he abdicated. He would therefore not have given any more importance to the visit than he did to the visits of other prominent foreigners who came to sec him. The previous year he had had a long talk with Lloyd George, for example, who subsequently wrote enthusiastically in the English press about what he had seen in Germany. But Lloyd George was out of office and destined to remain so.

  In Germany in 1937: the Duke and Duchess with Dr Ley (left), the Reich Organizations leader.

  The Duke and Duchess being welcomed by Hitler on their visit to the Berghof.

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor leaving the Berghof.

  In 1937 there was as yet no war fever in England; it only began to build up after the Munich settlement in the autumn of 1938. The Foreign Office was against this visit of the Duke to Germany a
nd the British Ambassador did not call upon him, though the Chargé d’Affaires did. This reflected official disapproval of the Duke taking any initiative; English officialdom hoped that by ignoring him he would cease to exist. There was little point to the visit if under no circumstances was he to be allowed to return to England, but at that time he assumed that he would be home before too long. What Ley had done in Germany was what Lloyd George and others wished to do in Britain, and just as before the First World War it had been Germany to which Lloyd George looked as the first country to institute national insurance (detested by the Tories, ninepence for fourpence,) so in 1937 it was the country which had solved the problem of unemployment, at the same time enriching itself with new roads, land reclamation and decent houses for its citizens.

  The Windsors’ visit to Germany was criticized at the time; Herbert Morrison in Forward, a Socialist weekly, asked why, if the Duke was so interested in housing, he did not study and read books on the subject. It was precisely because he had studied it that the Duke wished to see for himself what could be done in a practical way.