Yet, abdication had to seem like the king’s idea. If the people were to get wind of the fact that the government had doctored the information to make it appear that the chips were stacked against the king, public opinion would be extremely divided.
For all his Fascist sympathies, Edward was very concerned with upholding the sanctity of the democracy. Keen to avoid “the scars of civil war,” he buckled under the pressure of his government—exactly the opposite of Henry VIII, who steam-rolled over his ministers when they sought to deprive him of his chosen bride. If Edward had flagrantly disregarded Parliament and made a stand, it would have divided his country.
Wallis and Edward shared a tearful farewell before she departed for the Continent on a well-advised holiday. In the arched doorway of Edward’s home, Fort Belvedere, the king told Wallis, “You must wait for me no matter how long it takes. I shall never give you up.”
Wallis had finally achieved what she wanted—or had she?
Back in February 1936, Wallis had written to Edward, “I am sad because I miss you and being near and yet so far seems most unfair . . . Perhaps both of us will cease to want what is the hardest to have and be content with the simple way” (which presumably was for her to remain his mistress, rather than become his wife). And in a document made public in the year 2000 that was signed by Mrs. Simpson shortly before Edward’s December 11, 1936, abdication, Wallis had written (partially under duress from the prime minister’s office) that she “has abandoned any interest in marrying His Majesty.”
Decades later, she insisted, “I told him I didn’t want to be queen . . . All that formality and responsibility . . . I told him that if he stayed on as king, it wouldn’t be the end of us. I could still come and see him and he could still come and see me. We had terrible arguments about it. But he was a mule. He said he didn’t want to be king without me, that if I left him he would follow me wherever I went.”
Made nearly four hundred years later, this argument is the very antithesis of Anne Boleyn’s insistence to Henry VIII that he must push for their marriage because she refused to be a royal mistress. Wallis was genuinely content to remain the king’s maîtresse en titre, if it meant that he would keep his crown—provided he remained a bachelor and wed no one else in a marriage of convenience.
Although journalists in the United States and on the European continent had kept their readers informed of Windsor and “Wally’s” affair, the English press did not publish the story of the king’s impending abdication until a week before the event. The reason is surprising. It had nothing to do with protecting the privacy of the couple, but was intended to prevent an informed public that might be sympathetic to the Windsors from swaying the powerful Establishment or aristocracy from its plan to replace Edward with his younger brother George, the more pliant Duke of York.
In such an extremely class-oriented society, the conservative Establishment could not yield to the great unwashed masses. By telling Edward that public opinion was heavily against a marriage to Wallis, Baldwin had in fact “fixed up” the situation to yield the desired result before the people of England had in fact heard a word of what was going on.
The formal Instrument of Abdication was executed at ten a.m. on December 10, 1936. And on December 11, 1936, at one fifty-two Greenwich Mean Time, he renounced his throne, the first English monarch to voluntarily relinquish the crown. In a radio broadcast that day, Edward told his former subjects, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility, and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.” Parts of the speech were ghostwritten by Winston Churchill, who was advising Edward, and who strongly opposed the PM’s efforts to force the king’s hand. Other lines of Edward’s speech bore the distinct imprint of Wallis Simpson, though she would claim that she knew nothing about his abdication until it was practically a fait accompli.
The Church’s opinion of Edward’s exercising his desire over his duty was crystal clear, when in a 1936 radio broadcast, Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang intoned, “From God he had received a high and sacred trust. Yet by his own will he has abdicated—he has surrendered the trust. With characteristic frankness he has told us his motive. It was a craving for private happiness. Strange and sad it must be that for such a motive, however strongly it pressed upon his heart, he should have disappointed hopes so high and abandoned a trust so great.”
But, unlike centuries of his predecessors, Edward didn’t want some sleazy hole-in-the-wall intrigue. He wanted a wife. And he wanted that wife to be Wallis.
On December 12, 1936, the day after his abdication, Edward sailed for France. Complying with an alleged “agreement” with the new king—his younger brother George VI—Windsor and Wally would never again permanently reside in England. Edward wrote in his memoirs, “HMS Fury slid silently and unescorted out of Portsmouth Harbor. Watching the shore of England recede, I was swept by many emotions. If it had been hard to give up the throne, it had been even harder to give up my country. . . . The drawbridges were going up behind me.”
On March 8, 1937, the former King Edward VIII was granted the title Duke of Windsor. It never sat well with the other royals that Wallis would now be a duchess.
Wallis obtained her decree absolute finalizing her divorce on May 3, 1937, and she married Edward on June 3, in a tiny French town at the home of a confirmed Fascist who was developing a workforce production system for Adolf Hitler. The bride wore a suit of blue silk crepe and a wedding ring fashioned of Welsh gold by a loyal former subject. No member of the royal family or the court was present, on instructions of Edward’s younger brother, the new king, George VI.
They honeymooned in a private railway car (affixed to regular trains) that had been loaned to them by Benito Mussolini. Among other stops, they visited Munich, where Hitler warmly received them, chatting with the newlyweds for two hours. When Hitler learned of Edward’s abdication, he had glumly moaned, “I have lost a friend to my cause!”
The Windsors lived the life of expatriates in France. By all accounts, it was Wallis who supplied the backbone in their relationship. She whipped him every way but literally (one assumes) and he seemed to enjoy it. When she commanded him, in front of a group of their friends, to “take off my dirty shoes and bring me another pair,” Edward fell to his knees and removed her footwear, relishing every moment of his humility. No wonder that their social set referred to him as Wallis’s “lap-dog.”
Edward’s friend “Fruity” Metcalfe had no problem sharing his opinion of Wallis with their mutual friends. “God, that woman’s a bitch! She’ll play hell with him before long.”
One evening during a dinner party the Duke of Windsor asked the butler to deliver a message to the chauffeur regarding his plans for the following day. Wallis raised her hands and slammed them on the table. You can probably still hear the silver and stemware rattling. “Never—never again will you give orders in my house!” the duchess shouted at her adoring husband. Then in a belated effort to smooth things over, Wallis explained to the mortified guests, “You see, the duke is in charge of everything that happens outside the house, and I on the inside.”
Utterly cowed by his wife’s outburst, Edward mumbled his apologies—but to the hostess, or to their guests?
“No one will ever know how hard I work to try to make the little man feel busy,” Wallis once confided to a friend during their postabdication peregrinations.
To Edward, it had been worth exchanging his kingdom for this former Baltimore colt, despite the oft-repeated joke that the king who had once been Admiral of the Fleet had become “the third mate on an American tramp.”
During World War II, the duke was initially assigned to the British Military Mission in France, but he wasn’t doing his own country any favors. In fact, there was no doubt as to the specifics of Edward’s politics after Rudolph Hess reported to Hitler, “There is no need to lose a single German life in invading Britain. The Duke and his clever wife will deliver the go
ods.” As a thank-you gift, in the event of a German victory over the Allies, the führer intended to restore Edward VIII to the English throne. Wallis, of course, would be his queen consort.
However, as Hitler’s agenda became more apparent, the duke and duchess of Windsor were essentially exiled to a place where their pro-Nazi sentiments could do little to harm British policy.
George VI put an ocean between the crown and his older brother, distancing the current monarchy from its former, politically incorrect sovereign by sending Edward to Nassau to be Governor and Commander in Chief of the Bahamas. Bored out of their minds, the Windsors managed to spend as little time there as possible, taking off for shopping sprees in Manhattan or Palm Springs. They were living large while their country endured the dangers and deprivations of wartime. Wallis’s annual clothing budget at the time was somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000—nearly $351,000 today.
She was ever fashion-conscious for her husband as well. Wallis had been telling him for years that white dinner jackets at black-tie parties were passé, but the duke insisted on remaining unfashionable—high treason to his wife. One night, at a Palm Beach soiree, Wallis grabbed a tray of hors d’oeuvres from a passing waiter, shoved it into Edward’s hands, and exclaimed, “Here! If you’re going to dress like a waiter, you might as well act like one!”
In 1941, the FBI launched an investigation into the Windsors’ Nazi connections. It was revealed that during Germany’s 1940 invasion of France, Wallis had been passing information to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister. Some sources are certain that they had trysted in 1936 when von Ribbentrop was ambassador to Britain. Allegedly, the ambassador had seventeen carnations delivered to Wallis every day for a while, representing the number of times the pair had slept together. And an American journalist, Helen Worden, wrote that the duchess kept a framed photo of von Ribbentrop in her Bahamian bedroom, an allegation that the duke vociferously denied.
In all likelihood, Wallis was not entirely faithful to her “lap-dog,” though their contemporaries never believed that sex was the glue that kept the couple together. Nor did sex appear to be one of the most vital aspects of any of Wallis’s relationships. In 1950, thirteen years after Wallis wed Edward, she embarked on an affair of sorts with Jimmy Donohue, a flamboyantly gay American playboy twenty years her junior.
Donohue often traveled with the Windsors as a threesome, and the duke didn’t seem to mind when Wallis and Jimmy, their heads conspiratorially inclined toward each other, giggled like a pair of schoolgirls. Edward also didn’t object to his wife’s traveling alone with Donohue, despite Jimmy’s provocative endorsement of Wally’s talents. “She’s marvelous! She’s the best cock sucker I’ve ever known!”
Their affair lasted into the mid-1950s.
From the time of her husband’s abdication until she and Edward grew too frail and infirm to travel, they enjoyed the peripatetic lifestyle of the bon vivant. The duke and duchess of Windsor did little but attend parties and galas, shop, and play golf. They stayed with friends and acquaintances—often for months at a time. When they departed, they left behind reams of unpaid phone bills and legions of untipped servants. Wallis took every opportunity to remind her husband of his fallen state whenever his demands were not met in a timely fashion or in full. “Don’t forget, darling, you’re not King anymore,” she would scold.
After battling several illnesses, including throat cancer, probably caused by a lifetime of cigarette smoking, on May 28, 1972, Edward died, one month shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. He lay in state in Windsor, but not in Westminster Hall, where late British monarchs are traditionally honored before burial. It was at Windsor that Wallis paid her respects to his bier on June 3, their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. The former Edward VIII was interred in the royal burying ground at Frogmore, where he often played as a boy.
By the time she reached her mid-seventies, Wallis’s health was deteriorating as well. In 1973, at the age of seventy-eight, she fell and broke her hip. A few months later, she suffered a number of fractured ribs in a second fall. Doctors had difficulty inserting the anesthesia tube down her throat because it was so tight from her numerous cosmetic surgeries.
The duchess’s chief solace during her declining years seemed to be the iced vodkas she would frequently nurse, served to her in silver cups. But the consumption of all those spirits, plus her increasing dementia, did not diminish the lady’s much-vaunted rudeness. In 1974, unhappy with either the room service or the menu at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, she phoned down to the chef and screeched, “This is the Duchess of Windsor! Are you the son of a bitch who sent this fucking trout up here?”
Wallis spent the last five years of her life in complete seclusion. She died in Paris at her home in the Bois de Boulogne on April 24, 1986. Several members of the royal family, including her surviving sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and Queen Elizabeth II, attended the funeral service and the burial, as they witnessed Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, interred beside her beloved Edward. Maybe they just wanted to be sure she was really out of their lives.
CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES
B. 1948
THE MAN KNOWN AS CHARLES PHILIP ARTHUR GEORGE, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, was born on the night of November 14, 1948, to the Princess Elizabeth, who stood next in line to the English throne. His father is Elizabeth’s fourth cousin, the Greek-born Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
When Charles was just three years old, his mother acceded to the throne on the death of his fifty-six-year-old grandfather, George VI, in February 1952. This left the new queen, just twenty-five years old, with little time to devote to her young family.
His parents raised him at arm’s length and he often shivered from the chill. Prince Philip was a stern figure and rebuked Charles for what he perceived to be a lack of rigor and robustness. In 1962, he enrolled his thirteen-year-old firstborn in his 416 own alma mater, Gordonstoun, a rigid academy on Scotland’s northeast coast.
Eventually, Charles completed four terms at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he asserted himself by pursuing his own choice of subjects—not his father’s—reading anthropology, archaeology, and history.
On July 1, 1969, the twenty-year-old heir was invested as Prince of Wales at the medieval Welsh castle Caernavon. After completing his tour of his new kingdom he returned to Cambridge, and the following year Charles met the woman who would become his great love—Camilla Shand. But Charles was about to embark on five years of military service, so Camilla got on with her life, marrying Andrew Parker Bowles.
In 1976, the twenty-eight-year-old Prince of Wales returned from his tour of duty and began serially, though not particularly seriously, dating. Soon, his family, the country, and the press started pressuring him to do his royal duty by settling down.
In 1980, he began to court Lady Diana Spencer, the youngest of the 8th Earl Spencer’s three daughters, and the royal romance sold so many newspapers that half the kingdom might as well have been deforested. But when Charles seemed to dither about proposing, his father put his foot down, advising him to pop the question ASAP, before the popular rumors about lovers’ trysts aboard the royal train effectively ruined Diana’s reputation—which would also have rendered her a less eligible choice to become Britain’s future queen.
So, on February 24, 1981, Buckingham Palace announced the engagement of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. The royal wedding took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, amid copious pomp and circumstance. Charles was thirty-two years old, and Diana only nineteen.
On June 21, 1982, the Waleses welcomed their first child, Prince William, into the world. Two years later, in September 1984, Prince Harry, their second son, was born. But there had been trouble in Paradise almost from the moment Charles and Diana had wed. The stresses of Diana’s official responsibilities, coupled
with her awareness that her husband had never entirely forsaken Camilla, drove the princess to bulimia. Only on occasion would there be glimpses of warmth within the royal marriage, of what might have been able to blossom, had each of them given the other a fighting chance. Instead, Charles and Diana continued to drift apart, the prince rekindling his romance with Camilla while Diana consoled herself in the arms of a number of different men.
The couple formally separated in 1992.
In November 1995, Diana was interviewed by Martin Bashir on a current affairs television program called Panorama (taped on the incendiary Guy Fawkes Day and broadcast nine days later on Prince Charles’s forty-seventh birthday). On national television, she aired the royal couple’s dirty linen and accused the Windsors (and most pointedly Her Majesty) of being out of touch with the times.
The palace had had enough. After consulting the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding its feasibility, with their concurrence the queen decided to order her son and Diana to divorce. Their marriage was dissolved on August 28, 1996. Diana was killed a year later, during a high-speed automobile chase in Paris on August 30, 1997.
Charles discreetly continued his affair with the now-divorced Camilla until public opinion against her had noticeably relaxed. On April 9, 2005, Charles wed Camilla in a civil ceremony at the Guildhall in Windsor. Camilla’s title is Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall. She and Charles reside at Clarence House in London, formerly the home of Charles’s grandmother, the late Queen Mother.
As Prince of Wales, Charles has involved himself over the decades with a number of nonprofit charitable trusts, and has spoken extensively on his two passions, architectural preservation and organic farming.
If Elizabeth II is still on the throne at the end of 2008, then Charles (who will celebrate his sixtieth birthday that November 14) will have beaten Edward VII’s record for remaining Prince of Wales for the longest amount of time.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 37