Such was the sense of apprehension that the prince would one day rule as a bachelor that there were plans for the Australian prime minister, Stanley Bruce, to speak to him man to man and impress on him that the “certainty of the succession . . . is not less than essential for the maintenance of the Empire.” As the London-based Australian diplomat R. G. Casey informed Bruce:
I hear that pressure is steadily being kept on the Prince of Wales with regard to his marriage. There is some little anxiety, I believe, with regard to the amount of heart that he would find himself able to put into it—as it would, of course, be a marriage de convénience. A subsequent scandal would be almost as bad as if he had never married.
At some point Louis Mountbatten drew up a list of seventeen eligible young royals. The daughters of Prince Andrew of Greece—Princesses Margarita and Theodora—were possible candidates, but for a time the front runner was eighteen-year-old Princess Ingrid of Sweden. Her family was eminently suitable, as her mother, Princess Margaret of Connaught, and King George V were first cousins, both being grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
In the summer of 1928 Princess Ingrid arrived in London, accompanied by the country’s minister in London, Baron Erik Palmstierna, in the hope of snagging the Prince of Wales. Ingrid, a well-read if somewhat naïve young girl, had previously expressed the hope of one day becoming a queen. Of course the English throne would do very nicely. Palmstierna, though hopeful of a match, did not share her confidence. He admitted that the whole enterprise was somewhat “chancy,” his assessment proving correct. There was little chemistry between the thirty-four-year-old prince and the teenage princess. In July, Princess Ingrid returned to Stockholm, her hopes dashed—for the moment.
During the twenties and thirties a variety of candidates, promoted by family or government, paraded before the future king. Even though, under the 1701 Act of Settlement, a Roman Catholic was barred from ascending the throne, that did not prevent King Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy making serious overtures regarding his eldest daughter, Princess Jolanda. To the king’s disappointment they came to nothing, and she went on to marry an Italian nobleman.
In many ways the most serious contender was promoted by the newly elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler. What the ambitious German Führer had in mind was a dynastic union that harked back to the days of the Hapsburgs and the Hanoverians, namely an arranged marriage between a high-born German noblewoman and the heir to the British throne.
As part of his grand diplomatic strategy after he became chancellor in 1933, Hitler encouraged marriage between German aristocrats and their European counterparts in order to improve the international position of the Fatherland. For example, he viewed the 1937 union of Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld to Princess Juliana, the daughter of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, with much approval, seeing it as a chance to build closer ties between the two countries.
Before this successful union, the Führer’s restless eye fell upon the Prince of Wales and Princess Friederike, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Duke Ernst August III of Brunswick and his wife, Duchess Viktoria Luise, the only daughter of German emperor Wilhelm II and Empress Augusta Viktoria.
Princess Friederike’s pedigree was impeccable. As daughter of the head of the House of Hanover, she theoretically enjoyed the titles Princess Friederike of Hanover, Great Britain, and Ireland, and also Duchess Friederike of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Moreover, as a descendant of King George III, she was nominally thirty-fourth in line to the British throne, although these titles were now in abeyance following the 1917 Titles Deprivation Act, which stripped Britain’s enemies of rank and honours during World War One.
Not only were her royal credentials immaculate, but her family’s allegiance to the Nazi Party was impressive. Her father, Duke Ernst August, often appeared in an honorary brown SA stormtroopers uniform and regularly donated funds to the party. He never formally joined the Nazi Party but his son, also Ernst August, did sign on and became a member of the paramilitary SS, wearing its sinister black-and-silver uniform with the death’s head emblem. As for Princess Friederike, she belonged to the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the branch of the Hitler Youth movement exclusively for young women. At her private boarding school in Italy she was remembered for her defence of Nazi policies. In later life she was dubbed the “Prussian sergeant.”
Her parents had met with Hitler on a number of occasions, their discussions focusing on constructing an enduring rapprochement between England and Germany. What Hitler had in mind, though, was more than just words: He wanted a union between the royal houses of Britain and Germany. His demand that Princess Friederike be offered as a possible bride for the Prince of Wales was made sometime in 1934 and conveyed to the royal couple by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne salesman turned confidant of the Führer. Ribbentrop had at that time been appointed Special Commissioner of Disarmament, his task being to convince the world of a benign Germany’s desire for peace.
When he informed them about Hitler’s designs for their daughter, the duke and duchess, who had only recently returned from a visit to England, where they had been received by King George V and Queen Mary, were “astounded.” Friederike’s mother, Princess Viktoria Luise, was particularly nonplussed, as a decade before she, too, had been considered a potential bride for the future English king.
Even these enthusiastic Nazi aristocrats were unable to countenance a match between their teenage daughter and a man twenty-two years her senior. The duchess later recalled:
My husband and I were shattered. Something like this had never entered our minds, not even for a reconciliation with England. Before the First World War it had been suggested that I should marry my cousin [the Prince of Wales], who was two years younger, and it was now being indicated that my daughter should marry him. We told Hitler that in our opinion the great difference in age between the Prince of Wales and Friederike alone precluded such a project, and that we were not prepared to put pressure on our daughter.
Her protestations, made in a memoir written after the war, seem somewhat disingenuous, like those of many other German aristocrats trying to distance themselves from their tainted Nazi affiliations. Only a year or so later, Friederike met Prince Paul, the crown prince of Greece, who proposed to her while he was attending the now notorious 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. Their sixteen-year age difference did not seem to trouble her parents unduly, the couple marrying in January 1938 and Friederike ascending the Greek throne in 1947. As keen as Hitler was on seeing this royal match take place, the Duchess of Windsor’s biographer Charles Higham is perhaps stretching a point when he argues that if Edward and Friederike had married and Wallis Simpson had remained a “back street mistress” it is “doubtful whether World War II could have occurred.”
While Hitler’s first attempt to bring the Prince of Wales into the formal orbit of the Nazi regime foundered, it was but the prelude to future ploys to woo the king who was never crowned, entreaties that lasted almost as long as the Third Reich itself—and with consequences for the duke that endured for much longer.
Unknown to Hitler—and the rest of Europe—the Prince of Wales’s heart beat a little faster when he was facing west towards America rather than east to Germany. If they were married and seemingly unattainable so much the better. For practical men of the world like Hitler, to fall in love with one’s mistress was simply baffling. Yet this became the prince’s settled romantic routine.
In the summer of 1929 he met Viscountess Thelma Furness in the incongruous setting of an agricultural show in Leicestershire, where he had the job of handing out rosettes to prize cattle. The daughter of American diplomat Harry Hays Morgan Sr., she had been briefly introduced to the prince at a ball three years earlier. On this occasion sparks flew, the prince attracted by her beauty and her American accent. By now Thelma, who had an identical twin Gloria, was on her second marriage, to Viscount Marmaduke Furness, the head of the Furness Shipping Line. That did not stop the prince, who was begu
iled by what Cecil Beaton described as her “hothouse elegance and lacy femininity.” He asked Thelma for dinner at York House, his London home, and later, after seducing her, invited her and her husband to join him on a safari to Kenya. Although they were chaperoned, the lovers managed to spend time alone. “This was our Eden,” she later wrote of their magical nights under canvas. “I felt content to let the prince chart the course, heedless of where the voyage would end.”
When the prince returned to Britain in April 1930, his frequent weekend companion at Fort Belvedere, the prince’s country home near Windsor, was the married viscountess. She was his hostess, companion, and lover—though he still remained in contact with court favourite Freda Dudley Ward, who helped redecorate his hideaway. At the Fort the prince could be himself, working on his beloved garden, playing his bagpipes or ukulele, or simply sitting quietly with Thelma doing a little needlepoint. Hardly the vision of Sodom and Gomorrah that caused his father to exclaim “Those damned weekends.” Independent of Balmoral and Sandringham, it was a place he could call his own, where he could put down roots.
The prince genuinely believed that he could perform a little light “princing” during the week and then retire to the informality—a word he loved—of his weekend retreat in the Surrey countryside. Here he was free from those twin scourges of his life who watched his every move—his Scotland Yard bodyguard and what he called “the damned press.” Free, too, from the constrictions of court and the strictures of courtiers concerned that he understand the true nature of his calling as sovereign-in-waiting, the living apex of the empire. Edward saw his future position, onerous as it was, as a job rather than a sacred calling, believing that if he performed his necessary quota of public duties, as he had done manfully since the end of the First World War, then his personal life would have no bearing on his role as king. Obstinate as ever, he refused to listen to more conventional voices. As his private secretary Godfrey Thomas wrote: “I’m terribly sorry for him but unless someone can succeed in disabusing him of this idée fixe I can see nothing but disaster ahead.”
It is not that he had an awful lot to grumble about. While his imperial tours had, by any measure, tested his reserves of charm and endurance, his life at home was not especially onerous. He would typically rise not much before eleven and have a light breakfast before a game of golf—he became captain of Walton Heath Golf Club in 1935. The prince was immensely proud of the fact that during his golfing career he had managed three holes in one, whereas his golfing hero, Ben Hogan, managed only one.
After cocktails at seven o’clock on the dot, followed by dinner, he would take in a nightclub—most Thursdays he was at the Embassy Club on Bond Street—until the early hours. By his own admission he would often pull rank and ask his younger brothers to undertake official engagements he had previously agreed to perform.
Even though he had, at the request of Baldwin and the king, agreed to give up steeplechasing and point-to-point, he still played polo and went fox hunting, often staying at Burrough Court, the Furnesses’ country home near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. It was here where the prince and his younger brother Prince George spent the weekend fox hunting in January 1931 shortly before both princes embarked on a grueling four-month, 16,000-mile tour of South America.
During his visit to Burrough Court he met a woman nursing a heavy cold. In between sniffles, Wallis Warfield Simpson managed to drop a half-decent curtsey, which she had hastily practiced on the railway journey from London.
She and her husband, Ernest, were very last-minute additions to the house party. They had been invited only because Thelma’s friends had been forced to drop out. As Edward would later recount in his memoirs, his opening conversational gambit about Americans missing central heating in the chilly English countryside cut little ice with the lady from Baltimore. “I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales,” she countered.
In the circumstances it was a somewhat challenging response but typical of a woman who had gone through life aware that her smart mouth rather than her angular, rather mannish looks garnered attention. Wallis remembers their first encounter somewhat differently, striking up a conversation when she was seated next to him at lunch. Although “petrified,” by the time dessert arrived she found him “truly one of the most attractive personalities I have ever met.” So began an acquaintance that within five years would set the throne tottering.
CHAPTER THREE
Sex, Drugs, and Royal Blackmail
Though born in the northern American state of Pennsylvania on June 19, 1896, two years after the prince, Bessie Wallis Warfield was a product of two proud, warring, and very different southern families, the Montagues and the Warfields. The Warfields, from Maryland, had the reputation as a staid, patrician, and religious family, whereas the Virginian Montagues, who boasted a general, a governor, and judges among their ranks, were considered reckless and irresponsible.
Alice Montague and Teackle Warfield first met in 1895 in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, having travelled there in the hope that the pure mountain air would cure their tuberculosis. It was perhaps no surprise that when they married after an impetuous courtship, their families promptly disowned them, not just because of family differences but on medical grounds. The wiseacres on both sides of the family were proved unhappily accurate in their gloomy prognosis. Just five months after Wallis’s birth her father, Teackle, died of his illness, forcing her penniless mother to rely on the grudging charity of her relatives, particularly her uncle Sol Warfield and her sister, Bessie Merryman. While Aunt Bessie would come to have a pivotal role in Wallis’s life as both a companion and a counsellor, in the early years it was her generosity that was crucial in keeping her irresponsible sister and niece financially afloat, Alice and Wallis settling in Baltimore, where Bessie paid for Wallis’s private education.
For long periods, though, they led a hand-to-mouth existence, which bred in Wallis a toughness, a boldness, and a greed paired with a gnawing sense of insecurity, a fear that at any moment the trapdoor may swing open. Fear of poverty was just one of the many torments that crowded her nervy, superstitious psyche; she was terrified of thunder, flying, and the dark, quirks of character that, paired with a ready wit, made her an intriguing if challenging proposition. Nicknamed “Skinny” by her school friends, she was chic, well groomed, but not conventionally pretty. Photographs, even by society favourite Cecil Beaton, never truly did her justice—Wallis’s frequent refrain: “Please don’t make me look like a horse.” Moving images capture her best, her face alight with easy, intelligent laughter, her manner confident and animated, her carriage graceful and self-possessed, some would say imperious. Wallis was always much more than the sum of her parts.
Like most girls, she was eager to escape the restrictions of home and took the opportunity to stay with a cousin in Pensacola, Florida, where she met a naval officer from Chicago called Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. or, as she wrote to her mother, “the world’s most fascinating aviator.” Dazzled by his military uniform and persona, she ignored the brooding violence that lurked inside a character described by his fellow naval graduates as a “merry devil.” Soon after they married in November 1916 she discovered that while he was jovial in public, in private he was the very devil to live with. Spencer, eight years her senior, was a moody, violently jealous alcoholic with a sadistic streak.
By her own account, when he was away he would hog-tie her to the bed or lock her in the bathroom to prevent her going out. Other times he would play cruel practical jokes that made her realize he couldn’t possibly love her. Her own heart grew cold to him, Wallis contemplating separation and divorce. In spite of the opposition of her family—there had never been a divorce in the Warfield family—Spencer and Wallis separated in 1921, Wallis moving to Washington. That year she began an affair with Felipe Espil, first secretary at the Argentinian embassy, falling madly in love with the charming, intelligent career diplomat who was the living embodiment of a “Latin smoothi
e.” Their affair lasted for more than a year until Espil said goodbye in the fall of 1923, leaving her in tatters and tears. As one of his friends, who watched him climb the diplomatic career ladder until he became ambassador to the United States in 1931, later observed: “Felipe had a higher regard for his career than Edward VIII had.”
After a period of travel, during which she spent time in Paris with her cousin, she agreed to try again with her husband, sailing in July 1924 to Hong Kong, where he was now stationed. The reunion was not a success, the couple separating almost immediately. During what she would call her “lotus year,” Wallis travelled to various Chinese cities in the company of other navy wives, before meeting up with her old friend Katherine Bigelow, a war widow who had married Herman Rogers, a wealthy and well-connected socialite who dreamed of writing the great American novel but contented himself with travelling to the world’s most exotic places. His family’s estate on the Hudson River, called Crumwold, adjoined Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, and the president’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, was his godmother. Katherine and Herman were generous hosts, Wallis living with them for nearly a year at their home in Tartar City, the couple becoming her lifelong friends and supporters.
Her Far East adventures led to lurid speculation about her various liaisons, including her time learning curious sexual techniques in the brothels of Shanghai, as well as a botched abortion during an affair with the Italian diplomat Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, who later became foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law. A chronicle of these sexual adventures is apparently contained in the infamous “China dossier,” which was prepared for Prime Minister Baldwin and King George V years later. Even though eighty years have passed since that report was purportedly compiled, not a trace of it has been found in any official or unofficial record. The document retains a mythical status, like so much surrounding the girl from Baltimore.
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 4