Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  After Edward’s death, the Keppel household was plunged into deep mourning. Little Sonia Keppel asked her father, “Why does it matter so much Kingy dying?” Through genuine tears, the cuckolded husband replied, “Because Kingy was a very, very wonderful person.”

  Slipping through a side door of the chapel, Alice wore full mourning to her lover’s funeral, swathed in floor-length black veils, with ebony-colored ostrich plumes adorning her hat, a carbon copy of the grieving queen. But after the official mourning period, the Keppels fled the glare of the publicity spotlight, embarking on a two-year tour of Asia.

  On their return to England in 1912, George and Alice resumed their opulent lifestyle, entertaining lavishly, as warmly devoted to each other as ever. They also purchased l’Ombrellino, a villa in Tuscany, where they would visit for several months during the year, becoming part of the Anglo-Italian expat culture. It was in Italy that they both died, within two months of each other, in 1947. Alice was seventy-eight years old and George was eighty-one.

  But during the 1930s and into World War II, the Keppels had remained in London, residing at the Ritz on Piccadilly. Alice was in the hotel dining room on December 11, 1936, when King Edward VIII announced his abdication in order to marry his twice-divorced American sweetheart, Wallis Warfield Simpson.

  Everyone in the room heard Alice’s reaction. In her famously thrilling, husky voice, the former royal mistress very audibly sniffed, “Things were done much better in my day.”

  THE WINDSORS 1910–

  EDWARD VIII

  1894-1972 RULED JANUARY 20 TO DECEMBER 11, 1936 (ABDICATED)

  KNOWN AS THE KING WHO ABDICATED FOR LOVE, Edward VIII was the grandson of the larger-than-life Bertie, Edward VII. The younger Edward, whom the family called “David” (the last in a string of his seven first names), was the eldest son of the bearded and brusque former Royal Navy officer King George V. His mother was the quiet and remote English-born Princess May of Teck, who had inherited her German father’s courtesy title and was known as Queen Mary. Edward ascended the throne on January 20, 1936, on the death of his father.

  As Prince of Wales, Edward and his brothers were raised in a far more middlebrow environment than some of their predecessors. Perhaps this egalitarian atmosphere instilled in them more of a connection with their subjects once they became kings. Edward attended Oxford, but he left the university in 1914 at the start of World War I. Although his role was a noncombative one, his life was often in danger during his service, and former soldiers would always regard him as one of their own.

  As a child the handsome, blond Edward was somewhat fragile, bullied by both his overbearing nanny and his gruff father, whose legendary temper was often unleashed on his oldest son. He grew up to be a dapper, charming, somewhat fey-looking bon vivant, a man who came of age during difficult times for England. After the war years, he spent a lifetime working hard to convince people that there was more to him than the merry playboy whose day consisted of golf, naps, and cocktails, followed by long evenings cavorting at nightclubs with the “bright young things” of café society. Not raised to appreciate culture, including his own country’s contributions to it, he was an anti-intellectual who, while the rest of the world was suffering the effects of the Great Depression, decided it was a good idea to charter a friend’s yacht, remove the library to make room for more alcohol, and host a floating house party headed for Fascist Italy—until someone talked him out of the destination.

  Yet for all the frivolity, as king he displayed the common touch that John Bull had missed for decades. Edward VIII was the hero of the middle and working classes, of former servicemen, and of the impoverished miners from the South Wales Black Area. Visiting the economically devastated region early in his reign, a shocked and appalled Edward famously remarked, “Something must be done.” That sentence became a catch-phrase for the politicians who wanted him out of the way once he announced his intention to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American.

  Edward’s parents, unlike previous sovereigns, had hoped that their children would marry for love, and therefore didn’t rush them into passionless dynastic arrangements. Little did they suspect that, where Edward was concerned, what seemed on the surface to be a blessing was, for the British Establishment, far more of a curse.

  Practically tricked into abdicating by a prime minister who withheld crucial information from the king regarding the extent of his popularity, on December 11, 1936, after reigning for less than a year, Edward VIII gave up his crown. Because Edward had no children, his shy younger brother acceded to the throne in his place, ruling as George VI. Edward would henceforth be known as His Royal Highness The Duke of Windsor. He spent the rest of his life with his beloved Wallis, the mid-twentieth -century equivalents of jet-setters, discreetly exiled from England for their pro-Nazi sympathies at a time when Hitler’s rise to power was becoming more ominous by the day and an increasing threat to Britain.

  The brief reign of Edward VIII is so entirely tied to his relationship with the woman for whom he gave up his throne that to separate it from their love story does both a disservice. And it truly was a love story. Edward VIII had insisted on marrying only the woman he adored, was willing to sacrifice everything to do so, and made good on his promise. For all his unpalatable political sensibilities, he was a true romantic.

  Edward, Duke of Windsor, died on May 28, 1972. His brother, George VI, continued to rule England until his death in 1952 at the age of fifty-six, when the crown passed to the current queen, his oldest daughter, who acceded to the throne as Elizabeth II.

  EDWARD VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson 1895 or ’96-1986

  Bessie Wallis Warfield came from modest Baltimore beginnings. At one point her mother ran a boardinghouse to make ends meet. But even as a child, the future Duchess of Windsor possessed an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and somehow managed to receive just about everything she demanded. “So many cows are called Bessie,” she declared as a girl, ditching her detested first name in favor of her middle one. Though it wasn’t exactly Wallis’s fault that she arrived only seven months after her parents’ marriage, she entered the world something of a scandal, and her behavior would continue to shock the Western world for the next eight decades.

  Wallis was no real-life Daisy Buchanan, though. For one thing, her looks were anything but conventionally attractive. Her nose was lumpy, with a bulbous tip; her jaw resembled carved granite; there was a large mole on her chin below her lower lip; her hands, which an English aristocrat once referred to as “peasant paws,” were large and ugly, with stubby fingernails.

  Meeting her in London in the 1930s, Cecil Beaton, a distant relative by marriage of Wallis’s second husband, Ernest Simpson, took the measure of her immediately. Beaton is probably best known to Americans as the designer of the fabulous black-and -white costumes for the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. His impression of Wallis sounds like the low-class flower girl Henry Higgins bets he can pass off as a duchess. “She looked coarse. Her back was coarse and her arms were heavy. Her voice had a high nasal twang. She was loud and brash, terribly so—and rowdy and raucous. Her squawks of laughter were like a parrot’s.” Of course, when Wallis did become a duchess, Beaton revised his opinion and found many charming things to say about her features.

  Wallis walked out on her first husband, the bisexual navy pilot Earl Winfield “Win” Spencer, when he proved to be a depressive and moody alcoholic and a sexual sadist who would tie her to the bedposts and beat her.

  Yet Wallis was still married to Spencer when she commenced a passionate affair with the man who would become her second husband, the gentle, understanding, and very patient Anglo-American businessman Ernest Aldrich Simpson. After she divorced Win, she wed Simpson in 1928, and it was he who provided her entrée into the royal enclave.

  Wallis Simpson met Edward, the Prince of Wales, then England’s—if not the world’s—most eligible bachelor at a house party in Leicestershire given on January 10, 1931, by the prince’s
then mistress, Lady Thelma Furness. It wasn’t long before she would leave her indelible stamp on the British high society of the 1930s, introducing them to hot hors d’oeuvres, and giving the world the credo “You can never be too rich or too thin.”

  The ambitious Wallis—who was very much like the prince in every way—saw in him what she wanted to see. The homely girl from Baltimore was bowled over by the power he wielded. “His slightest wish seemed always to be translated into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialized; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; airplanes stood waiting.” What woman’s head wouldn’t be turned?

  Soon Edward was a regular visitor to the Simpsons’ home. The thirty-five-year-old Mrs. Simpson, rail-slim and seductive, set her cap for the heir to the throne, taking advantage of Lady Furness’s holiday in New York to make her move. Juggling her husband and her new paramour was not always easy, yet Wallis was confident of her own abilities, boldly telling her aunt Bessie, “It requires great tact to manage both men. I shall try to keep them both.”

  To Wallis, Edward was the ultimate fairy-tale prince. But people wondered what he saw in her. One answer is that Wallis—who by now had perfected the “metallic elegance” for which she would become famous—never fawned on him, and he was a man who was used to women doing just that.

  The Prince of Wales fell in love with Wallis in 1934, later writing in his memoirs that one day she “began to mean more to me in a way that she did not perhaps comprehend. My impression is that for a long time she remained unaffected by my interest.”

  In Edward’s own words, “I admired her forthrightness. If she disagreed with some point under discussion, she never failed to advance her own views with vigor and spirit. That side of her enchanted me . . . From the first, I looked upon her as the most independent woman I had ever met.”

  Eventually, their passion became mutual. Wallis fell in love with the prince during a Mediterranean cruise aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht, the Rosaura. She, too, experienced the sudden realization that something had shifted in their relationship, that her emotions were now engaged, passing “the undefinable boundary between friendship and love.” The prince gave her a diamond and emerald charm, which she didn’t disclose to Ernest, who was conveniently in America on business. Soon the lovers developed a private language, referring to themselves as WE (for Wallis and Edward) in their love notes.

  Edward’s good friend Walter Monckton, who had known him since they were at Oxford together, observed: It was “a great mistake to assume that he was merely in love with her in the ordinary physical sense of the term. There was an intellectual companionship and there is no doubt that his lonely nature found in her a spiritual comradeship. . . . No one will ever really understand the story of the King’s life, who does not appreciate . . . the intensity and depth of his devotion to Mrs. Simpson.”

  Wallis was presented to Edward’s parents only once and the reception was distinctly chilly. In the autumn of 1934, she attended a lavish Buckingham Palace ball. Wallis mingled among the glittering and distinguished guests, at one point lingering by a window overlooking Queen Mary’s famous flower beds, the pride of the nation. A palace servant overheard Wallis remarking, “Of course, when I live here, this will all be tennis courts.” Her comment spread like wildfire from the royal back stairs to every London pub. Wallis had made her first set of enemies in the servants at Buckingham Palace.

  Edward and Wallis soon became nearly inseparable, while Ernest disappeared on business trips to New York. But unlike George Keppel, another husband whose wife had become the official royal mistress, Mr. Simpson wasn’t willing to swallow his humiliation and discreetly keep up appearances. Understandably, their marriage disintegrated.

  To chivalrously spare Wallis’s reputation, they set up a classic scenario that would automatically lead to a charge of adultery. A woman was hired to share a hotel room with Ernest, and—Shock! Horror!—the two were discovered in flagrante. In order to keep the news out of the papers, Wallis subsequently sued Ernest for divorce in the quiet town of Ipswich. However, there was much speculation at the time that Wallis was in fact divorcing Ernest in order to marry Edward—which would have put the king in collusion—a situation that was unethical, if not strictly illegal. Wallis was eventually granted a divorce on October 27, 1936, although her decree would not become absolute until the following spring.

  So, she was still married to Ernest Simpson when Edward’s father, King George V, died on January 10, 1936. Yet, Edward, now king, refused to keep their affair under wraps, breaking royal protocol by watching the proclamation of his accession from St. James’s Palace with his mistress at his side.

  Edward VIII then found himself faced with a constitutional crisis—the possibility of a rift with his own government over the choices he wished to make in his personal life. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin stated that if Edward insisted on wedding Wallis anyway, Baldwin would have no alternative but to resign, leading to a mass mutiny of cabinet ministers and the collapse of the government. If Edward were compelled to reform the government he would be hard-pressed to find support—or so he was told.

  Though the royals were popular with the people, it would be disastrous to the health of the realm to have a serious division between the sovereign and his government. In the twentieth century, although the British monarchy still played a vital role, its duties had become more ceremonial than political. Parliament and the government ministers really ran the country. Nevertheless, the monarch had a very public duty, and was fully expected to perform it faithfully, upholding centuries of tradition.

  There were no laws forbidding an English monarch from marrying a commoner, or a divorcée, or a foreigner. After all, nearly every queen of England was born in a country on the Continent. What made Wallis Simpson off-limits as queen consort material was that her two ex-husbands were still thrashing about. Dead ex-husbands might have been all right, but living ones presented a thorny legal issue for a Church that didn’t condone divorce. Therefore, Wallis could never be married in the Church of England—and the King of England was also the Supreme Governor of the Church.

  And if Edward insisted on marrying a woman whose two former spouses were alive and well, he would not only incite a mass exodus among his cabinet, but he could not expect to uphold his title of Defender of the Faith while remaining King of England. Edward had two choices: ditch Wallis or abdicate the throne. No one, not even Wallis, expected him to do the latter.

  However, Edward’s subjects were unaware of the official minutiae that would prevent him from marrying his girlfriend while remaining king. A large number of Britons just wanted him to be happy, delighted that he had found True Love, no matter who his lady was or what her background had been.

  Boxes of supportive letters and telegrams marked “top secret” were locked away in Windsor Castle until 2003. Many of these were compassionate notes from the working and middle classes, calling Edward “the People’s King” and endorsing his relationship to Wallis. It has only been in the past few years that historians have been able to see the side of the story that was suppressed—the massive public opinion in the king’s favor. The correspondence firmly supported the “modern” view that Edward could marry whomever he bloody well liked! Some even felt that Wallis was simply the government’s excuse to get rid of a king who was determined to behave like an individual.

  However, although many of the letters were addressed directly to his attention, the king may never have seen them, or he might not have been so hasty to abdicate. After all, kings didn’t open their own mail. And Edward’s Private Secretary, Major Alexander Hardinge, was very much aligned with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s government.

  At the time, Baldwin carefully spun the information to suit his own purpose and that of his government, casting Wallis as the ultimate outsider who was costing the popular Edward his subjects’ love and support. He kept the king unaware of the truth—that the people were largely behind him—and in
stead informed Edward that they would never accept the twice-divorced American (a double stigma) as their queen.

  To give Baldwin some credit, this was partly true. There were certainly rumblings to that effect from more distant corners of the empire. Prime ministers of several of the British Dominions, including Canada and Australia, were emphatically against Wallis’s having any role or status whatsoever in their empire. But there was also doubt in some of the Dominions that abdication was the right thing to do if the king insisted on marrying Mrs. Simpson.

  Eamon de Valera, the prime minister of the Irish Free State, reminded Baldwin that Edward was a very popular king, even in Ireland, and that “every avenue ought to be explored before he was excluded from the throne.” He added that “many—especially young people—throughout the Empire would, in these democratic days, be attracted by the idea of a young king ready to give up all for love.”

  It is doubtful that the Irish PM’s concerns were forwarded to the king.

  Therefore, operating on the information Baldwin had supplied to him, Edward proposed the idea of a morganatic marriage, where Wallis’s status as a commoner would remain unchanged and she would have no title and none of the rights of a queen consort, such as the succession to the throne of any children she might bear Edward. But Baldwin rejected the king’s suggested compromise, informing His Majesty of the Dominions’ position and citing a lack of parliamentary precedent for the existence of a king’s wife who was not the queen, nor had any other official role or title. Regardless of public opinion, in order for a morganatic marriage to be viable, new legislation would have to be enacted in England, as well as in each of the Empire’s Dominions, requiring constitutional changes in each venue. It would have been a lengthy process, and Parliament was unwilling to undertake it. Therefore, the king’s proposal was not a feasible solution.