Having faced losing his lover, Edward became more abject in their relationship than ever. Friends noticed how dependent he was on Freda. Duff Cooper described seeing them together at a party; the prince hardly left his mistress’s side. Duff had heard that Edward had told Freda he loved her so much that she must either give in to him or break off their relationship completely as he could no longer bear the situation.75 After a small dance at Freda’s, Winston Churchill wrote in a similar vein. He told his wife that ‘the Little Prince’ was there ‘idolising as usual’. He added that people were getting quite bored with his behaviour and thought that ‘a door should be open or shut’.76
In his letters, the prince called himself Freda’s ‘little slave’ or ‘parpee’ (puppy). He suffered from bouts of depression and told his mistress that only she could save him by letting him pour out his heart to her. He knew when he was being pathetic and if he became too self-critical and despondent Freda tried to shake him out of it by telling him not to be ‘dismal David’. After endless soul-baring sessions she told her lover that she had never known any other man as well or as intimately as she knew him.77 With her, he felt that he experienced the same kind of man–woman relationship that other young men who were not royal were able to have. She treated him as an ordinary person. Unlike the many sycophants around him, she only laughed at his jokes if she really thought they were funny and she disagreed with him if his opinion differed from hers.78
Any plans for their relationship to be on a platonic footing seem to have been forgotten once they met again. They arranged trysts while Duddie was away from the Dudley Wards’ rented home, Nether Woodcote at Epsom. Despite Freda’s attempt to cool their relationship, it was as if nothing had changed. Edward was soon saying that although he did not want anything awful to happen to Duddie he still believed that one day they would be able to be together.
In his definitive biography of Edward VIII, Philip Ziegler speculates whether, if Freda had been widowed, she would have been able to marry the prince. He points out that the king and queen would have opposed the marriage, partly because she was middle class but also because she had been married before, which would have posed the problem of semi-royal stepchildren. However, the king genuinely wanted his son to find happiness and security so there was a chance that the determination of the prince, coupled with Freda’s charm, would have won him over.79 It might also eventually have been supported by the government. In 1920, Prime Minister Lloyd George advised the king that the country would not tolerate an alliance with a foreigner. The government now openly preferred the prince to marry into the English or Scottish nobility.80 It would have been hypocritical for Lloyd George to oppose the match between Edward and Freda if she had been widowed. The prime minister was a married man having an affair with his much younger private secretary, Frances Stevenson; he married her after his wife’s death.
As Philip Ziegler writes, Queen Freda would have been a surprising choice for the British public, but the Prince of Wales was so popular, it is likely that the majority of people would have supported him.81 In fact, it might have further boosted his democratic image. As one commentator, Hannen Swaffer, asked in January 1921: ‘Why is the Prince of Wales the most popular man who ever lived?’ The answer was because ‘he is one of us. He has made our Royalty the truest Republican force in the world. He has anglicised “Ich Dien” and made it “I serve”.’ The article in The Graphic emphasised that to live up to his image it was important who the prince married. For modernisers, a break with the past would have been welcome. Using the xenophobic terms of the times, Hannen Swaffer added: ‘Flunkeydom would marry him to a foreign princess. But Prince Charming’s Cinderella will be found by our English fireside. Not for him a Dago or a Hun. Like the prince himself, his princess will be One of Us.’82 No one had better credentials as ‘One of Us’ than Freda Dudley Ward.
7
THE TOXIC CIRCLE
For the first few years of their relationship it seems that Freda was in love with the prince, but as time went on it was clear that he was more in love with her than she was with him. There was a slavish quality to his adoration that prevented it being completely reciprocated.1 While he behaved so abjectly it was impossible to build an adult relationship between equals. Clear-sighted and shrewd, Freda realised that there was no long-term future for them and so, throughout their long liaison, she neither gave nor demanded exclusivity.
For most of their relationship she was involved in an equally intense affair with Michael Herbert, a wealthy banker who was a cousin of the Earl of Pembroke. His father had been the youngest ever British ambassador to Washington; his mother, Leila Wilson, was the daughter of Richard Wilson, a New York banker. The family was very well connected and one of Leila’s sisters married Cornelius Vanderbilt. When Michael was only a child his father died of tuberculosis at the age of 46. He and his brother Sidney returned to England to be brought up with their cousins at Wilton House; the two boys were very close and throughout their lives they were devoted to each other. After Eton and Oxford, Michael fought bravely during the First World War. He joined the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry but later transferred to ‘The Blues’, where he served as an infantryman, a machine gunner and a road builder. He had a premonition that he would be killed, but – unlike so many of his contemporaries – he survived.2
After the conflict, he had a meteoric rise in the City. For nearly two years he worked very hard in a chartered accountant’s office. He gained such a good reputation with his employers that while he was only in his 20s he was made a partner in the banking house of Morgan Grenfell and Company. He was well liked by both his partners and employees. He claimed that a business career was a form of national service and he was always keen to argue that a man could serve his country as well in the City of London as in any other occupation.3 His future looked full of promise; his brother Sidney was the Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby, and it was rumoured that Michael might follow him into politics.4 Michael often supported his brother during campaigns. The two young men were so inseparable that the Liberal candidate in the constituency compared them to the ‘Dolly Sisters’, the famous female identical twin entertainers.5
Dark-haired, handsome and slight, Michael was an eligible bachelor. He was fun to be with and had an infectious smile. According to one observer, when he laughed he threw back his head with ‘a careless gesture that seemed almost to issue a challenge while it won your heart’.6 He moved in the same circles as the prince and he was a friend of Rosemary Leveson-Gower, and Diana and Duff Cooper. He could be very charming but not everyone admired him; Diana’s mother, the Duchess of Rutland, thought that he was rude and always lounging around.7 Others accused him of ‘oiliness’.8
Throughout the 1920s Freda managed to juggle her two lovers. Michael’s letters to her are as copious and obsessive as the prince’s; they are so similar in tone that it suggests there were psychological similarities between the two men. Both were much weaker than Freda and they looked to her for the wisdom and strength they lacked. It seems that her maternal nature as much as her charm and sex appeal attracted both men. Freda and Michael’s relationship began in 1918 and for more than a decade Freda seesawed between her two lovers. At times, the prince was in the ascendant; at other times Michael was. It was a frustrating situation for all three participants and without the full commitment of marriage no one could feel secure. Both men knew about the other and they felt an intense rivalry. The prince said that he loathed Michael with a hatred that passed ‘all understanding’. He wrote to Freda: ‘Gud! That man makes me angry, sweetheart, and I long to tell him off properly, though I’m not big enough!!’9 Michael felt equally aggrieved at having to share his lover.
While the prince was in England Freda prioritised his needs. Before Edward went on tour again to India in the autumn of 1921, Freda moved into her new London home in Portland Place. It was a relief to her to have a house of her own again after a year of staying in other people’s houses. A talented interior d
esigner, she spent much time and money doing it up to create a stylish and original home where they could spend time together. Knowing time was short before Edward went away, they preferred quiet evenings in to partying.
In September, they spent a happy fortnight together at Dunrobin, Rosemary’s childhood home, as guests of Geordie, Duke of Sutherland. Although they were part of a large house party and Duddie was among the guests, they managed to get plenty of time alone together. Freda had arrived two days before the prince and he asked her to study the plan of the castle so that at night they would be able to creep along the corridors to each other’s bedrooms for secret assignations. While her husband went shooting or fishing with Geordie, Freda and Edward went off on their own in his car. One evening they went out in a boat on Loch Chrine with a ghillie. The prince looked back on their stay at Dunrobin as an idyllic time and he relived every second when they were apart.
However, Michael was driven to distraction by jealousy knowing that the woman he loved was with his rival. He wrote that he was ‘tortured’ by thoughts of what she was getting up to at Dunrobin:
I hate and hate that place and the more I think of it the more I loathe it – it is getting an obsession […] Darling, it is such an eternity till I shall see you again, it depresses me terribly and more when I think of how very very quickly you forget that you really love me.10
He agonised about whether he could trust her and if she was faithful to him. He bombarded her with letters which were slightly more erotic that the prince’s. He wrote: ‘Ah Fredie, I do so want you; to hold you and kiss you and tell you that I love you from the crest of your permanent waves to the soles of your shoes.’11 His attraction to her was very physical. He wrote: ‘I love it so when you come into a room where I am and it never ceases to give me a little thrill all down my spine and to make my heart beat faster.’12 But the bond went far deeper than that, he explained: ‘I fear you have a little way of growing into one so that one remembers your moods and your gestures all the time.’13
While she was at Dunrobin, Michael felt that she was drifting away from him again, but he told her that their separation had just stiffened his resolution to get her somehow. He expressed almost identical sentiments as the prince did, telling her:
I am so certain that you are the one person for me my beloved, and that you are my great chance of happiness that I can’t and won’t even consider the possibility of our being permanently separated. – I know that we could and will be so divinely happy together if only we can find a solution.14
While Edward was away in India for eight months Michael had Freda more to himself, although there was still her husband in the background. They had some perfect days together by the sea. Michael described the ‘sheer joy’ of it and told her, ‘I shall remember it always because I felt more than I have ever felt that we were grandly alone and divinely self-sufficient one to another.’15 Unlike the prince, Michael thought about the risks she was taking, as a married woman having an affair. He told her that he was so frightened of hurting her one day. He explained that this was ‘the trouble of illicit love, there is always the risk of that – please tell me that you have thought it out and counted the risk and that it is worth it. I do want to bring you only happiness my Fredie, you are too sweet for pain from a rather worthless fellow like me.’16
However, it was more likely that Freda was going to hurt Michael than the other way around. She still had another equally adoring lover and showed no signs of making a choice between them. Before the prince left, Freda gave him a platinum wristwatch and they exchanged identical crosses engraved with ‘Dieu te garde’. He wore her presents all the time to feel close to her while they were apart. Edward resented being thousands of miles away from Freda for so long. He wrote to their mutual friend, Sheila Loughborough: ‘I do loathe it and hated leaving her far more than even last year and that was bad enough. These long separations are really too cruel for words.’17
He found it particularly difficult being apart from Freda because his cousin and companion, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had just got engaged to the beautiful heiress, Edwina Ashley. They were able to be together in Delhi while he could not be with his love. He wrote to Freda:
I shall loathe Delhi with Edwina there when you have so much more right to be there than she has […] However much they love they can’t possibly love each other a fraction as much as we do can they Fredie? I’m sure its foul of me but I do resent Dickie being happy at Delhi when I can’t be.18
Edward’s sister Princess Mary also got engaged to Henry Lascelles, heir to the Earl of Harewood, while he was away. Edward had always been close to his only sister and he hoped that she would be happy with her older fiancé. Although he was pleased she was escaping life at ‘Buckhouse prison’, he could not help feeling envious of her because he could not formalise his relationship with the woman he loved.19
The prince’s tour of India was controversial from the start. In 1919 new constitutional measures should have improved Anglo-Indian relations. However, the introduction of trial without jury for people accused of political crimes and the massacre at Amritsar, in April 1919, when troops of the British Indian Army fired machine guns into a crowd of unarmed protesters, left a deep sense of distrust.20 In 1920 Gandhi and the Congress organisation had formed a temporary alliance with the Muslim community and begun a movement of non-co-operation. At one point, there was a threat that there would be a complete boycott of the prince’s tour.21 The king and his advisers had told Edward that his informal style, which had worked in Canada and Australia, would not work in India.
Gandhi and the Congress party discouraged ordinary Indians from going to see him. At Allahabad, the streets were empty and a ceremony at the university was boycotted by the students. At first the prince felt that his trip was a waste of time and not doing any good. There were threats of violence against him, and the police rarely let him drive through native quarters. However, although it put him at personal risk, Edward insisted upon going among ordinary people.22 In Mumbai, he drove through the busiest parts of the city. As he left the amphitheatre, where he had delivered his speech, thousands of Indians prostrated themselves before the chair he had sat in and kissed the dust his car had driven over. As people crowded around his car he was not frightened. He insisted on standing up in his car so that they could see him, and he told his guards not to push them back. At Poona, crowds who could not get close enough to touch him threw silver and gold coins in front of him so that his feet might tread on them.23
As on his earlier tours, the prince had a hectic schedule. While he charmed many of the Indians he met he managed to alienate many of his own countrymen.24 He hated the ‘pompous’ round of garden parties, banquets and parades and at times he looked bored and offended his hosts. He was very critical of the native rulers. He wrote to Freda that he felt contempt and loathing for ‘these servile, cringing and insincere native potentates’.25 He also dreaded the many dances because of ‘the bitches’ he had to dance with.26 When not performing official duties there was some light relief. He enjoyed the polo and exercised to excess to relieve the strain he felt on tour. After going to bed at 2 a.m. he was up at 7 a.m. to ride four gallops on the course, then he schooled his polo ponies for an hour followed by three games of squash. He ate as little food as possible and had only biscuits for lunch. Always obsessive about his weight, he wrote to Freda with pride that after all the riding and recreation he was down to 9 stone.27
When the prince returned to England he received an enthusiastic welcome home. In London, cheering crowds lined his route. Freda, Duddie and her daughters had gone to a gala lunch at the Berkeley Hotel to celebrate his return. Every window and balcony of the hotel had red, white and blue canopies and they were filled with people who had attended the lunch. Guests were given a basketful of rosebuds to rain down on the prince as he passed by in his carriage, escorted by the Life Guards. As he reached the Berkeley a loud cheer greeted him. After so many months away from her, Edward at last saw Fred
a again standing in one of the windows, looking lovely in a black dress and a wide-brimmed hat with her two little girls excitedly waving flags. When he caught sight of her, Edward looked up, smiled and bowed.28
Once the prince was back, Michael had to share Freda again. In 1922, she took her daughters to a seaside villa called Westward Ho in Frinton for the summer. It was a fashionable place to be. It was dubbed ‘our Deauville’, and The Sketch described it as ‘the jolliest little place on earth’.29 The town became famous for its tennis tournament that attracted many well-known amateurs. Before the summer season began Freda had tennis lessons with a professional to prepare for the challenge. Freda’s friends Lady Victor Paget and Clemmie Churchill were at Frinton too with their children. The families relaxed, playing tennis, golfing and swimming in the sea. Pempie and Angie spent hours on the beach with their friends playing leapfrog and having donkey rides.30
When Duddie was not in Frinton both Freda’s lovers visited her as often as possible. While Freda was out of London, Michael and Edward would sometimes meet by chance at Buck’s Club. They just about managed to be civil, but each listened carefully to the other’s guarded conversation for any hints that they were seeing their mutual mistress. They got on better when they found themselves together at a dance at Wilton House without Freda. They agreed that parties were no fun without her and they stood looking at the dancing and laughing a good deal. The prince admitted that he had never really talked to Michael properly before and he found that he was very amusing and great fun.31
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