But focusing instead for a moment on their private lives, Alexandra and Nicholas did achieve something that was progressive and modern for a royal household: They were exemplary spouses and parents who lovingly raised their five sweet-natured children in a cozy domestic environment. Neither partner dallied in extramarital affairs, although they both came from families where infidelity was de rigueur. From the day they met to the day they died, Nicholas and Alexandra adored each other, their relationship progressing from puppy love to grand passion. Each was the other’s rock and best friend, and together they weathered the kind of heartbreak that would cause weaker unions to crumble under the weight of such adversity.
Theirs was much more than a love match. Nicholas referred to Alexandra as his “heart, brain, and soul,” a rare compliment in the world of royal marriages.
EDWARD VIII 1894-1972
RULED ENGLAND: 1936
and
WALLIS WARFIELD SIMPSON
1895 or 1896-1986
married 1937-1972
“If ever there was a marriage that started off inauspiciously, resented and vilified, with many hopes and probably prayers for its failure, it was ours.”
—Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
EDWARD VIII WILL FOREVER BE KNOWN AS “THE KING WHO abdicated for love.” What gets lost in the romantic shuffle is that had he not done so, the face of the world in the mid-twentieth century might have become extremely different, with England a puppet nation of Nazism.
For Western civilization everything worked out for the best; but Edward’s love affair with Wallis Warfield Simpson didn’t have to cause a national crisis. In fact, the twice-divorced American had made it clear, even to Edward, that she would prefer to remain his official mistress than see him renounce his throne for her. In February 1936, when he had been king for just a few weeks, Wallis wrote 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.”
Even decades later, Wallis 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.”
Their royal marriage, and the arduous road that led to the altar, made some of the most notorious headlines of the 1930s.
Born only seven months after her parents’ marriage, Bessie Wallis Warfield—who eventually ditched her first name because it sounded bovine—came from modest Baltimore beginnings. During leaner years, in an effort to make ends meet, her entrepreneurial mother turned their apartment into an impromptu restaurant, serving up lavish meals to the building’s fellow tenants. Yet Wallis behaved like a genuine Southern belle, with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and somehow she managed to receive just about everything she demanded.
She 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 her measure 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 description 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.
In 1927, Wallis divorced her first husband, bisexual navy pilot Earl Winfield (“Win”) Spencer. He was a depressive and moody alcoholic, and a sexual sadist who would tie her to the bedposts and beat her. According to U.S. State Department files, during this marriage, as a naval wife she couriered sensitive documents to various parts of the world, including China, where she enjoyed extramarital affairs with dashing Italian Fascist ambassadors. She allegedly became pregnant by one of them, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and a botched abortion left her with gynecological problems for the rest of her life. And according to a U.K. Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) report on Wallis known as the China Dossier, she couriered drugs during her Asian sojourn. However, some historians believe the China Dossier may never have actually existed because the documents alleged to have been contained in it have never been made public.
Wallis was still married to Win Spencer when she commenced a passionate affair with the man who would become her second husband, the Anglo-American businessman Ernest Aldrich Simpson. She wed Simpson in London on July 21, 1928, and it was he who provided her entrée into the royal enclave.
Wallis Simpson bears the distinction of being the woman who introduced hot hors d’oeuvres to British society and is also credited with the credo “You can never be too rich or too thin.” She met the world’s most eligible bachelor, Edward, Prince of Wales, at a house party in Leicestershire given on January 10, 1931, by the prince’s then mistress, Lady Thelma Furness. Thelma and Edward had an odd relationship, to say the least. They did needlework side by side on the sofa, and played infantile sexual games. Wearing a diaper, Edward enjoyed being pushed around in a baby carriage. Thelma disparagingly (and publicly) referred to him as “the Little Man,” a reference to his woefully undersized male anatomy. The unfortunate nickname stuck, and was candidly used by others in their social set, including, eventually, Wallis Simpson.
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, and the grandson of the portly, priapic, and hard-partying “Bertie,” King Edward VII. 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 in England as Queen Mary.
Shortly after the Great War, George V and his wife had made a friendly pact with Hitler to wed the Prince of Wales to the granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm, thereby repairing the relations between the cousins (they were all descendants of Queen Victoria), which had eroded during and after World War I. This arranged marriage would create a permanent Anglo-German alliance from which each nation would benefit. Hitler would get to do whatever he wanted in continental Europe; in exchange, he would never wage war on England. The British aristocracy was ecstatic. But the idea was mooted when the German princess chose to marry into the royal family of Greece instead.
Edward had attended Oxford, but left the university in 1914 at the start of the First World War. Although his role was a noncombative one, his life was often in danger during his service. For this reason, former soldiers would always regard him as one of their own, even though he had become a dapper, charming, somewhat fey-looking bon vivant who spent the better part of his life working hard to convince people that there was more to him than the frivolous playboy whose days consisted of golf, naps, and cocktails, followed by long evenings cavorting at nightclubs with the “bright young things” of Café Society. An anti-intellectual, while the rest of the world was suffering the effects of the Great Depression, the prince chartered a friend’s yacht, had the library removed to make room for all the alcohol he brought on board, and hosted a floating house party headed for Fascist Italy—until someone talked him out of the destination.
The ambitious Wallis, who was very much like the prince in every way, and as ardent a supporter of both the Fascists and the Nazi party, saw in him what she wanted
to see, and 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?
The heir to the throne soon became a regular visitor to the Simpsons’ home, and the thirty-five-year-old Wallis, rail-slim and seductive, set her cap for him. She blithely ignored the fact that he was already involved with Thelma Furness and took advantage of Lady Furness’s holiday in New York to make her move. To Wallis, Edward was the ultimate fairy-tale prince. But people wondered what he saw in her. Like Anne Boleyn and Camilla Parker Bowles, Mrs. Simpson was no classic beauty, but her self-confidence and “metallic elegance” translated into a highly alluring sexuality.
There was also another attraction. 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.”
And when she quizzed him about his duties, his interest in reform, and his plans for his future reign, the charmed prince admitted, “Wallis, you’re the only woman who’s ever been interested in my career.”
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.”
Edward’s good friend Walter Monckton, who had known him since they were at Oxford together, felt that 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.”
Winston Churchill, a deep admirer of Edward’s, although they would end up politically at odds with each other, also noted that the prince was changed for the better by his relationship with Wallis. “He delighted in her company and found in her qualities as necessary to his happiness as the air he breathed. Those who knew him well and watched him closely noticed that many little ticks and fidgetings of nervousness fell away from him. He was a completed being instead of a sick and harassed soul. This experience which happens to a great many people in the flower of their youth came late in life to him [Edward was in his mid-thirties when he met Wallis], and was all the more precious and compulsive for that fact.”
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.” Soon the lovers developed a private language, referring to themselves as WE (for Wallis and Edward) in their love notes.
Edward and Wallis became nearly inseparable, while Ernest Simpson took frequent business trips to New York. But Ernest was no mari complaisant, willing to swallow his humiliation and discreetly keep up appearances. He had plenty of affairs of his own, and understandably, his marriage to Wallis disintegrated.
With the complicity of both Wallis and the prince, Ernest Simpson staged the classic charade where a woman is discovered in flagrante in a hotel room with the husband. The Other Woman (who signed the hotel register as “Miss Buttercup”), happened to be Mary Kirk Raffray, a mutual friend, with whom Ernest was already having an affair, and who eventually became his third wife. Although nearly everyone in their intimate circle knew that Wallis and the king were lovers, the pair had to give the impression that they were no more than “good friends.” If the court were to learn that Wallis and Edward had been sleeping together, it was a near certainty that her divorce would never be granted.
There was much speculation at the time that Wallis was divorcing Ernest in order to marry Edward—which would have put the king in collusion, a situation that was unethical, if not strictly illegal. Yet from the start, Edward had been working behind the scenes, consulting with the best lawyers, and even convening with Wallis and Ernest, where they discussed a large sum of money that would be paid to Ernest to cheerfully go away. 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 King George V died on January 10, 1936. But the new king had little interest in keeping their affair under wraps, blithely breaking royal protocol by watching the proclamation of his accession from St. James’s Palace with his paramour at his side, and traveling with her everywhere, including his formal visits to foreign countries.
For all his frivolity as Prince of Wales, once Edward became king, he displayed the common touch that John Bull had craved for decades. Edward VIII was the hero of the middle and working classes, of former servicemen, and of impoverished miners.
However, the king was an embarrassing headache to the Establishment because his political sympathies lay with the poor, and he balanced his aristocratic pastimes with charitable works and official ventures to impoverished areas that no other royal dared visit. Touring the economically devastated South Wales Black Area early in his reign, and observing the awful conditions in which the miners dwelled and worked, the shocked and appalled Edward famously remarked, “Something must be done.” That sentence would eventually become a catchphrase for the politicians who wanted him out of the way once he announced his intention to marry Mrs. Simpson.
Edward VIII had ascended the throne on January 20, 1936, and almost immediately found himself faced with a constitutional crisis. His prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, informed him that if he insisted on wedding Wallis Simpson, he would have to choose between the lady and the crown. By then, Baldwin and the cabinet also knew that the Secret Intelligence Service files, including the infamous (and dubious) China Dossier on Wallis, contained concrete documentation that she had been a Nazi contact—and a highly promiscuous one, at that. “If the king wants to sleep with a whore that’s his private business. But the empire is concerned if he now makes her queen,” Baldwin thundered.
Although the wealthy and the middle classes were solidly against his marrying Mrs. Simpson, many compassionate letters from the poor were addressed to Edward’s attention, calling him “the People’s King,” and voicing their approval of his relationship with Wallis. But it’s more than likely that Edward never saw this correspondence, or he might not have been so hasty to abdicate. Archival boxes containing thousands of supportive letters and telegrams were not released by the crown until 2003. They emphatically illustrate that Edward’s desire to marry the woman he loved—whether she became queen or some other form of consort—was overwhelmingly endorsed by the working classes, by former servicemen who admired Edward’s courage during the Great War, and by most British subjects under the age of fifty. They all loved the king because they felt he understood their concerns, and they firmly supported the “modern” view that Edward could marry whomever he bloody well liked! Some Britons even felt that Wallis was simply the government’s excuse to get rid of a king who was determined to behave like an individual. Of course, those supporters knew nothing of the SIS files or anything about Wallis’s political activities. But there were other, equally vocal proponents of Edward and Wallis—those who knew very well where their sympathies lay. Clad in the black shirts of the Fascist party, they staged rallies in front of Buckingham Palace and the government offices at Whitehall.
Yet, at the time, Baldwin was able to convince the king that his subjects would never accept the twice-divorced American (a double stigma) as their queen. Whether or not that was entirely true, there were certainly rumblings to that effect from more distant corners of the emp
ire. Prime ministers of several of the British Dominions or commonwealth realms, including Canada and Australia, were emphatically against Wallis’s having any role or status whatsoever in their empire. But there was doubt in some of the dominions whether abdication was the appropriate alternative to a royal marriage.
Edward proposed the idea of a morganatic marriage. But Baldwin rejected the suggestion, 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. Despite public opinion, in order for such a compromise 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, but in any event, Parliament was unwilling to undertake it; therefore, the proposal of a morganatic marriage was not a feasible solution.
The prime minister’s position was absolute: if Edward insisted on wedding Wallis and remaining king, Baldwin would have no alternative but to resign, leading to a mass mutiny of cabinet ministers and the collapse of the government. 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.
On December 3, 1936, Wallis and Edward had 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 her, “You must wait for me no matter how long it takes. I shall never give you up.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 46