by Diana Mosley
The French admired the Duchess, not only her friends but the public in general. A few years after the Duke’s death a film about the Abdication was shown on French television called The Woman He Loved. It was followed by a discussion in the studio; friends of hers taking part included M. Maurice Schumann and Lord Tennyson, and there were others, Professor Hugh Thomas the historian among them. The part of the Duchess was acted by Fay Dunaway who succeeded in looking exactly like her. (The Duke is quite impossible to act, it is hard to say why. Perhaps, it is because no actor can simulate his royal aura.) During the subsequent discussion members of the public could telephone to ask questions or give their point of view. The questions were all on the lines of ‘How many times has the Duchess been invited to Buckingham [French for Buckingham Palace]?’ There was a good deal of criticism of her treatment by the Duke’s country, and this fairly represents the French point of view. She had lived so long in France and she had so obviously made the Duke happy that people there failed to understand why this was not universally recognised.
Possibly his happiness was the trouble. There had never been, in the words of the lady who wrote long ago to Victor Cazalet, ‘a fearful awakening.’
In 1978 a television serial, Edward and Mrs Simpson, was shown in Britain. When the Duchess asked to see the script, it was not forthcoming. It was announced in the press that she objected to this invasion of her privacy, and it did indeed seem an extraordinarily tasteless way to behave to a widow who was old and known to be far from well. The result was a flood of letters of sympathy from all over Britain to the Duchess, of which the following extracts are typical.
‘Thousands of British people, like ourselves, are outraged at this intrusion.’
‘There are thousands of British people who love you very much.’
‘Many ordinary people such as myself and many of those with whom I work are disturbed, it seems to us to be a gross intrusion of your privacy.’
‘You are a wonderful lady, with great dignity.’
‘I shall always admire the late Duke. I shall remember him always as a great man.’
‘I love you both for what you did and if only more people were like you the world would be a happier place.’
‘… great love and admiration for a very great lady.’
‘You see, dear, he didn’t turn his back on the working people and this is why he was so well liked, and you yourself were a loving person whom we all love. The people wanted you, Mr Baldwin didn’t. How wrong he was.’
‘I would like you to be aware that the majority of British people are much saddened by the present television series.’
‘… disgust at the recent TV show. To hundreds of working-class people the late King was their much-loved King and your marriage a true love match.’
‘A love story such as yours is something precious.’
‘I feel ashamed.’
‘I have not watched it, on principle.’
‘I feel so great a love as your Royal Highness has known can only be envied and admired by so many.
‘The British Legion was behind him to a man. Winston Churchill was his staunch friend and it is a pity he is not here to defend him.’
There is no doubt that letters such as these, which arrived in sheaves, were balm to the Duchess as she lay in her room at the house in the Bois, or sometimes in the American hospital at Neuilly.
Georges and Ofélia cared for her. A friend who left her flowers, saddened by the atmosphere in what had formerly been a house full of laughter and gaiety, asked whether anyone spoke to the Duchess about the years when she was so greatly loved. Georges replied: ‘Oui. Je lui parle souvent du passé.’
The last time the author went to sit with the Duchess, her face looked like the Greek mask of tragedy, her mouth a square, her dark and penetrating blue eyes staring out of the window. There is nothing to be said for growing old, as she herself wrote, and where there is deep love between two people there is nothing to be said for being the one who is left alone.
Notes
27 In a letter to the author from Mrs Hudson.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Summing Up
There are two things to aim at in life:
first, to get what you want: and after that,
to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind
achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith
THE DUCHESS OF Windsor’s story is unique. A novel describing such a strange life as hers would hardly find a publisher, the truth altogether too bizarre even for fiction. This may be one reason why she has so often been attacked; people dislike what they cannot understand, and the Windsors’ history does not fit into any of the customary stereotypes of human behaviour. Even more than the Abdication, the life-long devotion and adoration she received from the Duke surprises many and exasperates some, and since this obviously lay deep within his character, the most that can be done is to attempt to understand him.
But the Abdication itself remains for many people something of a mystery. The King’s insistence that he must marry Mrs Simpson was, as we have seen, enough in itself to make it inevitable, but could it really have been the only reason? Some believe in a hidden hand, a plot by politicians to eliminate the King, perhaps because he was loved in such a very special way by the ordinary people and ex-servicemen, which potentially gave him power no king should possess. Some believe they got rid of him because he wanted peace with Germany (yet one of his ardent supporters was Churchill, the man of war). Others again thought the King himself felt his impotence in everything that mattered to his country was so inhibiting that he preferred to go. There may or may not be a grain of truth in all these things. Thirty years after the Abdication the Duke of Windsor wrote in 1966 in the New York Daily News: ‘Being a monarch … in these egalitarian times can surely be one of the most confining, the most frustrating, and over the duller stretches the least stimulating jobs open to an educated, independent-minded person.’ He probably thought that the Duke of York would be a more successful King than he, which, as we know, is what their father George V himself thought.
Wallis and the King during one of the happiest times of their life: relaxing among sightseers on the Dalmation Coast, during the cruise of the Nahlin in 1936.
When the royal princes were on the threshold of manhood King George V’s old friend Lord Derby, with whom he was staying at Knowsley, made some observations about the relations between fathers and sons. He was distressed by the King’s hectoring tone with his children. He told him how much he enjoyed the company of his own sons now that they were grown up, and hinted that if he stopped bullying the King also might find pleasure in the company of the princes. George V was silent for a long moment, then he said: ‘My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I am going to make damned sure my sons are frightened of me.’ This Mr Pontifex-like observation left Lord Derby with no possible rejoinder. There is a certain pathos about such a desire to dominate and crush; only a weak man could have spoken thus. The King was delicate, and often ill.
The trouble really began when the Prince of Wales grew out of being frightened of his father. He was liberated by the war, and by the fact of his own overwhelming popularity. The King went on with his scoldings, but the Prince paid no attention, even when traps were laid for him about matters the King thought very important, like orders and decorations. Lady Airlie, who saw all this going on year after year, admired the Prince’s forbearance, and never was it more admirable than when much later, as Duke of Windsor, he wrote his memoirs. He referred to his father’s private war with the twentieth century, but there is not a word of criticism, let alone an account of the old King’s strange behaviour to ‘dear David’, as he called his heir.
At the time, however, the Prince took good care to ration his visits to Balmoral and Sandringham to a minimum; he had a strong desire not to put too great a strain upon whatever fragile ties of family affection remained. One of ‘David’s fads’, with which
it is easy to sympathize, is that he chose to enjoy his free time as far away as possible from the denizens of Buckingham Palace, and that he chose his friends and his lovers among people as unlike his parents and his father’s friends as he could find. He must have resolved never himself to be in any way like his father and, insofar as George V was considered an excellent King, it is possible that he doubted whether he was the man for the job.
He may have thought to himself: ‘Here am I, forbidden to make even suggestions about matters of life and death for the country; would not the English establishment be better off with someone who could take a genuine interest in orders and decorations and so forth?’ He probably halfguessed about his father’s passionate prayer that nothing should come between the Duke of York and the throne.
The Duke and Duchess on their wedding day at Candé, 1937.
The Duke and Duchess on board their yacht at Portofino, 1955.
In one biography28 there is a reference to ‘the terrible responsibilities of the role he inherited.’ It would be interesting to know what these terrible responsibilities are supposed to have been. Nobody, not even a republican (if such a person exists in Britain, which is doubtful) would dream of blaming the Sovereign for the steady decline of our country during the last thirty years. The terrible responsibility for that belongs to the politicians.
Nevertheless, though powerless in a political sense, the Sovereign and the royal family are important to Britain, and not only because of tradition. There is more to it than jubilees, coronations and weddings, though exactly what this may be is not easy to define. A contemporary French Catholic priest, Father Jean-Maria Charles-Roux, has put forward his idea of where this importance lies in his book, Mon Dieu et Mon Roi; the following is a rough translation:
The State is symbolized by a family which is part of the country’s history. Every manifestation of official life, whether in the capital or in the provinces, is an opportunity for a member of this family to be present, a prince, a princess, the King, the Queen, representing everyone’s uncle or cousin or child or parent.
In the councils of the State the presence of someone entirely unpolitical but with a heart, a conscience, a spirit, is of inestimable value in the evolution of society.
This, together with grand and beautiful ceremonies, seems to be about the measure of it. That there is nothing here about terrible responsibilities in no way detracts from the importance of the role played by the royal family and above all by the Monarch. Provided there is continuity, it is perhaps rather exaggerated to make too much play with ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility.’ At the time of the Abdication the King had three brothers, each with a wife eminently suitable to be queen. Continuity was assured.
The Duchess of Windsor was told at her wedding by Walter Monckton that she must try to make the Duke happy ‘all his days.’ Her triumph is that she did so. When they were in the Bahamas she sent a letter by hand to Queen Mary describing the Duke’s life and his activities; it was taken by a bishop who was leaving for England. Queen Mary did not reply, but next time she wrote to the Duke she sent ‘a kind message to your wife’, which surprised him, since he knew nothing of the Duchess’ letter. In 1951 the Duchess was ill in New York and Queen Mary hoped she was getting better. Otherwise nothing. It is easy to understand why it was Queen Mary who most resented the Abdication; she announced that she felt ‘humiliated’ by it. She was imbued with a sense of the importance of being royal, and she never recovered from having been a Serene Highness among Royal Highnesses.
It must not be supposed that the Duchess of Windsor lost any sleep over this. The relationship is seldom an easy one, and many a daughter-in-law would be delighted with such loose ties between herself and her husband’s family. The Duke was forty-three when he married, and none of his relations was important to him except his brother the Duke of Kent. Even he, since his own marriage, had ceased to be the close companion of former days. The Duchess completely filled the Duke’s heart, and the idea that he hankered for his family is all of a piece with the theory that he was a sad exile. It has been invented by the people who were vainly waiting for the ‘fearful awakening’ that never came.
Perhaps it is over-optimistic to say that all ended very well, but that is how it seems. The Royal family is as popular as ever, members of it marry anyone they fancy and nobody minds when a marriage ends, or begins, with a divorce. (If the Archbishops mind they keep quiet about it.) The Duke of Windsor had thirty-five happy years with the Duchess. He is not forgotten, and neither is she. On anniversaries, her birthday, their wedding day, hundreds of letters from well-wishers came from England; another proof that what is called ‘a bad press’ does not have quite the effect that might be imagined. The only sad thing is her long, long illness at the end of life.
When the Duke said to James Pope-Hennessy: ‘I played fair in 1936 but I have been bloody shabbily treated’, he did not mean that his offer of service to his country was rejected, that was up to the authorities. The notion that he was aching to lay a few more foundation stones, and that he was deeply offended not to be permitted to do it, hardly merits a moment’s consideration. What he meant was that ordinary, common or garden good manners were lacking. It was something he found as hard to understand as to forgive, being himself the embodiment of what a French acquaintance described as an ‘exquise courtoisie.’
Speaking to a friend about ex-King Umberto of Italy, a footnote in history, the Duchess once said: ‘Kings haven’t much of a part to play nowadays; it’s not Umberto’s fault if he’s forgotten’, then, indicating the Duke who was out of earshot, she added: ‘He will be spoken of for a long time to come—because of me!’
She was perfectly right. As Winston Churchill said to Lady Airlie: ‘The Duke’s love for her is one of the great loves of history.’
Notes
28 Edward VIII by Frances Donaldson.
Notes
1 Letter to the author.
2 One of his courtiers in conversation with the author.
3 Letter to the author.
4 1066 and All That.
5 She repeated it to Mabell Lady Airlie, who immediately noted it down.
6 The Slump by John Stevenson and Chris Cook, 1977.
7 Sir John Boyd Orr in Food, Health and Income examined the diets of over 1,000 families and found that the lowest income group of 4½ millions had, a diet ‘inadequate in all respects.’ Seebohm Rowntree found that 49% of all working-class children under the age of five suffered from poverty and were ‘living below the minimum.’
8 Harold Nicolson.
9 Victor Cazalet, a Tory MP, was a great personal friend of the Baldwins. He was a Christian Scientist and teetotaller.
10 Lord Beaverbrook’s biographer, Tom Driberg, points out how he failed in this endeavour.
11 Churchill, though in private he referred to Baldwin as ‘a contemptible figure’, would never have joined Beaverbrook in such an enterprise.
12 In conversation with the author.
13 In conversation with the author.
14 In conversation with the author.
15 In a letter to the author.
16 In conversation with the author.
17 The author, who saw Hitler from time to time, cannot remember hearing him mention the Duke or the Duchess of Windsor. More than once he said that England was fortunate to have ‘these kleine Prinzessin.’ He had seen Princess Elizabeth, then aged about ten, on cinema news-reels, and considered she was ‘ein fabelhaftes Kind’, a marvellous child.
18 In conversation with the author.
19 In a letter to the author.
20 In conversation with the author.
21 One evening, years later, the author was dining with Lord Beaverbrook at his villa on Cap d’Ail when Sir Harold Christie was a guest. Beaverbrook’s opening gambit was, ‘Come on, Harold, tell us how you murdered Harry Oakes’, a joke which evoked a tired smile from Christie.
22 In a letter to the author.
23 In a letter to t
he author.
24 As it did Queen Mary, who in her eighties, astonished country people by saying: ‘So that’s what hay looks like.’
25 In a letter to the author.
26 In conversation with the author.
27 In a letter to the author from Mrs Hudson.
28 Edward VIII by Frances Donaldson.
Copyright
First published in 2012 by
Gibson Square
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The moral right of Diana Mosley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library. © Diana Mosley.