17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up

by Andrew Morton

  Perhaps the worst that can be said of her during this time is that she harboured a crush, if not an infatuation, for her host, Herman Rogers. Tall, athletic, well read, and above all decent, Herman became her most reliable and closest male confidant until his premature death from cancer. Movies of Wallis and Herman together, parading in matching kimonos at his home in Peking, show the undoubted affection that existed between them. Certainly she was always very proprietorial towards her Herman.

  She returned to America somewhat abruptly, further fuelling speculation that the ménage had run its course—at least for the moment. More likely it was to sort out the details of her divorce, which was finalized in 1927 in Virginia. Wallis was still separated when, in December 1926, she met Ernest Simpson at a Christmas party hosted by her friend Mary Kirk Raffray in New York’s Washington Square, the setting for the famous Henry James novel. Ernest was also married—though unhappily—to judge’s daughter Dorothea “Dodie” Parsons Dechert, with whom he had a daughter, Audrey, then aged two.

  Frail and frequently hospitalized, Dodie was not the companion he had married, Ernest beginning divorce proceedings shortly after embarking on an affair with Wallis. Dodie would later tell writer Cleveland Amory, “Wallis was very smart. She stole my husband while I was ill.”

  At first glance Ernest was a substitute for the cosmopolitan and sophisticated but happily married Herman Rogers. He was a man of polish, intelligence, and humour, able to declaim Greek classics in the original, fluent in both French and the foxtrot. Safe, solid, and dependable, he was a quiet Renaissance man who was the polar opposite of her braggadocio first husband. Above all he was financially secure, a partner in the ship brokers Simpson Spence and Young, which his father, Ernest, co-founded.

  Though his mother was the daughter of a New York lawyer, his father was British of Jewish descent. Ever since he was young he had been an Anglophile to his fingertips, brought up on the claustrophobic metropolitan tales of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling’s yarns of empire, and A. A. Milne’s children’s favourite, Winnie-the-Pooh. During World War One Ernest, who studied at Harvard, renounced his American citizenship and became a naturalized Briton, serving briefly as a captain in the Coldstream Guards at the end of the war. When he was demobbed, Ernest, in his pin-striped suit, bowler hat, rolled umbrella, neatly trimmed moustache, and Guards tie, was the very model of an English City gent.

  Shortly after Wallis’s divorce was finalized in December 1927, Ernest proposed. Even though she was now thirty-one, with no job and all but destitute, she hesitated. After all, the happiest times of her life had been when she was single or separated in Washington, Paris, and Peking. What if, she mused, she had misread Ernest just as she had Spencer? It would be too awful to make the same mistake again. As she pondered his offer, she travelled to what was to become her safe haven, the villa of Lou Viei in Cannes in the South of France, the European home of her friends and counsellors, Herman and Katherine Rogers. After a period of reflection she agreed to Ernest’s suit, the couple marrying at Chelsea register office on July 21, 1928, and moving to London permanently after Ernest had taken over the running of the shipping company.

  Wallis’s hesitation had almost cost her dear. Most of her savings were wiped out in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, leaving her utterly financially dependent on Ernest. Fortunately the shipping business escaped the worst of the financial tsunami, enabling him to stay solvent—at least for a while. After a year leasing a Mayfair apartment, they moved into 5 Bryanston Court, a smart if anonymous mansion block just north of Marble Arch in central London.

  With a dining table that seated fourteen, an elegant drawing room, which Wallis decorated, and a staff of four, including a cook, they were able to entertain in some style. Regular visitors included Javier “Tiger” Bermejillo, the second secretary at the Spanish embassy, and Ernest’s friend from his time in the Guards, Reuters chief editor Bernard Rickatson-Hatt. Ernest’s sister, Maud Kerr-Smiley, who was married to a member of Parliament, introduced them to Connie and Ben Thaw, who was first secretary at the American embassy. In turn, Connie—or Consuelo—one of the glamorous and rich Morgan sisters, introduced them to her sister Viscountess Thelma Furness, possibly the most gossiped-about woman in London both for her beauty and for her affair with the Prince of Wales. It was at her country estate in Melton Mowbray that Edward and Wallis had their first social encounter, and it was through Thelma that the Simpsons again met with the prince at a cocktail party in April 1931 to mark his return from his South America visit.

  It was hardly as if the prince had been pining for any of the women in his life—during his visit to Buenos Aires he had relentlessly pursued “the very charming and very beautiful” Consuelo Morgan, the sister of his erstwhile mistress Thelma Furness and the wife of diplomat Ben Thaw. As American diplomat George Messersmith observed: “During his stay he had shown a great deal of attention to Consuelo and this did not please many of the young Argentinian beauties who had replenished their wardrobes in Paris for the visit.” When her sister reported on his caddish behavior it may have given the royal mistress pause. Thelma may have accepted that her days as the prince’s sole object of affection were now numbered.

  Gradually the Simpsons began moving from the fringes to the centre of the prince’s life. In June 1931 Ernest, in his full dress uniform of a Coldstream Guard, almost burst with pride and excitement as he watched Wallis drop a full curtsey to the king and queen when she was presented at court during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. As she passed the royal party she heard the Prince of Wales mutter that all the women looked “ghastly” because of the lighting. Later, when the prince attended a party held at Thelma’s apartment, he complimented Wallis on her gown, only for the sassy American to snap back: “But sir, I thought you said we all looked ghastly.”

  Clearly her breezy conversational style attracted him, as he accepted an invitation to Bryanston Court for dinner in early 1932, enjoying the evening so much that he did not leave until four in the morning. He became a regular visitor to the Simpsons’ apartment, afternoon tea turning into cocktails ending up with long, lingering dinners. As he later recalled of Wallis’s skills as a hostess, “The talk was witty and crackled with new ideas that were bubbling up furiously in the world of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and the New Deal. Wallis was extraordinarily well informed, her conversation deft and amusing.”

  He was not the only admirer, Spanish diplomat Tiger Berme-jillo acknowledging the breadth of her general knowledge and her ability to draw guests into the conversation.

  In turn, the Simpsons became regular visitors to Fort Belvedere, helping with the gardening, walking the prince’s dogs, Cora and Jaggs, and, in time, arranging menus. During one weekend in January 1933 Wallis, Thelma, and the prince’s brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of York, went skating on a nearby frozen lake, to great hilarity. It would prove to be a significant date.

  The Simpsons were there twice in February and once in March, and such was her growing proximity to the Prince of Wales that when Wallis travelled to America in March she received a bon voyage radiogram signed “Edward P.” That same month she wrote: “If the Prince was in any way drawn to me I was unaware of his interest.”

  If she was, somewhat disingenuously, unaware of his interest, George V was alerted to her presence at the Fort—much to the embarrassment of the king’s daughter-in-law, the Duchess of York. She found herself in social difficulties when she wrote to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, denying that she had ever met “the lady.” Her agitated letter, which she penned on August 1, 1933, was written five months after she and her husband had been skating with Wallis and Thelma.

  Her missive to the queen was a result of a previous encounter with the king during the Cowes regatta. He had quizzed her about the fact that a “certain lady” had been at the Fort when she and the duke were present. At the time he had a good mind to discuss this matter with his eldest son, the implication being that he should not parade his mistress in
front of his family.

  She wrote that she hoped that the king had avoided a quarrel, continuing: “Relations are already a little difficult when naughty ladies are brought in, and up to now we have not met and I would like to remain quite outside the whole affair.”

  Queen Mary soothed her agitated daughter-in-law, writing that the king had not mentioned the guest list at Belvedere and so avoided a quarrel. She continued: “I confess I hope it will not occur again for you ought not to meet [David’s] lady in his own house, that is too much of a bad thing!!!”

  The exchange is noteworthy as it suggests that the intimate royal circle were fully aware that Wallis Simpson, rather than Thelma Furness, was regarded as the Prince of Wales’s main object of affection.

  The accepted version of events is that Thelma met with Wallis at the Ritz hotel in January 1934—nearly a year later. Over lunch Thelma, who was about to sail to New York to see friends, asked her American friend to look after “her little man” as he would be lonely. When she returned some two months later Wallis had, as Thelma acidly remarked in her memoirs, “looked after him exceedingly well.” Another interpretation is that she was simply giving Wallis her seal of approval. During her New York stay she enjoyed a very public liaison with the legendary lothario Prince Aly Khan, the sexually precocious twenty-three-year-old son of the Aga Khan. Hardly the behaviour of a woman in the throes of passion for the Prince of Wales. After all, she had heard about the advances the prince had made towards her sister Consuelo when he was in Buenos Aires. It seems that episode had probably marked the beginning of the long goodbye.

  Certainly, if the king was aware of his son’s illicit romance with a married American, then it seems unlikely that Thelma Furness was in the dark. While Thelma was away, Edward telephoned Wallis frequently, called at the Simpsons’ apartment a couple of times a week, and singled her out for dancing at the Fort, where the Simpsons were regular weekend guests.

  The traditional interpretation pinpoints Wallis’s ascendancy to May 1934—rather than a year earlier—when Edward invited Thelma to dinner at the Fort after she returned from New York. Her one-time lover was polite but distant, and at dinner she noticed that the prince and Wallis seemed to have developed little private jokes. When she saw Wallis playfully slapping the prince’s hand when he picked up a piece of salad with his fingers, she realized she was surplus to requirements. All the while, Ernest looked on silently, prompting the diarist Chips Channon to describe them as “Menage Simpson,” implying a consenting three-way relationship.

  The ousting of Lady Furness by the American was the talk of London society. “Our little Prince is not so nice,” one titled Chelsea lady said. “His treatment of Thelma and Freda [Dudley Ward] is appalling. Just overnight—bang! No letter, no nothing. Just silence.” It was particularly galling for Freda who, during their sixteen-year relationship, had been worshipped by the prince in a way that was, according to Mountbatten, “religious, almost holy.” Now the royal iconoclast was prostrating himself at the shrine of Mrs. Simpson. At least one royal castoff enjoyed revenge of sorts, Lady Furness describing exactly why, when she was in bed with her royal lover, she had called him “my little man.”

  It was not just the king who was baffled by his son’s behaviour. The smart set were equally perplexed. Wallis was neither gorgeous nor glamorous, had no title, standing, or lineage, nor any money or land to speak of. She was certainly not PLU—people like us.

  When George V declared that his family could marry their English subjects he never for a moment considered his son would be consorting with a twice-married American of the second rank. Of course, Americans had been infiltrating the British aristocracy for well over a century, but for the most part they were wealthy, swapping weighty dowries for lofty titles. Gladys, the Duchess of Marlborough, a fellow American and a renowned beauty who had dazzled European society at the turn of the century, was dismissive. “She was just a common little American making her way in the world. She was amusing and had a good sense of fashion. Nothing more.” Society photographer Cecil Beaton, himself the son of a wealthy London timber merchant, was equally scornful. “[Wallis’s] voice was raucous and appalling. I thought her awful, common, vulgar, strident, a second-rate American with no charm.” The prince’s equerry, John Aird, considered the Simpsons to be the worst sort of Americans, pushy social climbers without breeding or money. “They seem terrible at first and this feeling does not decrease as one sees them more often.”

  As Wallis’s relationship with Edward intensified, so did her money worries. The trapdoor was yawning open. “Business foul,” recorded Wallis. “The money question is serious and we have to give up the car and pull our horns in in every way.” The tidal wave from the financial crash had now swamped Ernest’s shipping business, forcing stringent economies. Out went the chauffeur-driven car, holidays abroad, lavish entertaining at home, and social outings. They even tried renting out their £600-a-year apartment.

  Ironically Ernest’s business difficulties merely served to draw the prince and Wallis closer together, as he had to cry off numerous social outings to attend to his company. When it got to the point that he could not afford Wallis’s train fare and outfits to attend Royal Ascot, the prince promptly paid and invited her to join the racing party at the Fort for the week. Similarly, Ernest was on a business trip to America during the summer of 1934 when the prince invited the Simpsons to join him for a sailing holiday setting out from Biarritz, his favourite French resort. Her aunt Bessie, Mrs. Merryman, came as her chaperone and could see “in his every glance” that Edward was in love with her. “I can see no happy outcome to such a situation,” she warned. As Wallis later admitted of that holiday: “We crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love.”

  It didn’t hurt that he quietly gave her a diamond-and-emerald charm at the end of the voyage, the first of many gifts of jewels, clothes, and other treasures. As much as she began to find his puppy-dog attentions “exhausting,” it was difficult for a woman who had had nothing to refuse such princely largesse. She had clawed herself out of the dark hole of penury before. Wallis did not want to go through that exercise again. As her biographer Anne Sebba observes: “Insecurity at the thought of losing everything, the deepest of all her many fears, was now corrosive; she was becoming mean and grasping in preparation for the day the clocks stopped.”

  As the king and his court looked on aghast, they realized that a line had been crossed, and they thought and feared the worst—of the prince but particularly the Simpsons. The king did what he could to limit their proximity to the heir—at least on official and family occasions. Several months after that fateful cruise, in November 1934, the king made his views perfectly apparent at an evening reception to celebrate the wedding of Edward’s younger brother Prince George, Duke of Kent, to Princess Marina of Greece. Even though the Simpsons had met Prince George at the Fort on numerous occasions and always enjoyed his company, the king scratched their names from the invitation list. It was only after Edward’s personal intervention that they were admitted. Adorned with jewels from her royal lover and a borrowed tiara, she was duly presented to the queen. Afterwards the king, furious at “that woman” invading his kingdom, gave orders that the Simpsons were barred from all functions commemorating the 1935 Silver Jubilee as well as the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Biographer Kenneth Rose’s ringing phrase encapsulated the opinion of the king and his courtiers: “George V thought her unsuitable as a friend, disreputable as a mistress and unthinkable as a queen.” His private secretary went further, describing “that woman” as a witch and a vampire.

  A greedy vampire who was working as a double act with her social-climbing husband, trying to suck every cent from the naïve, feckless prince who really at his age—he was now forty—should have known better. It was easy to assume that Wallis was a gold-digger with a brazen eye for the main chance and an “unattractive and common” husband who was prepared to turn a blind eye to his wife’s behaviour.
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  When Lady Diana Cooper was a guest at the Fort in October 1934, she described Wallis as “glittering and dripping in new jewels and clothes,” jewels from the prince that the unfortunate Ernest had to pay to insure. That Christmas and New Year, Edward was said to have given her £110,000 (£7 million or $11 million today) worth of jewels. A few months later the king was told that his son was giving Wallis an allowance of £6,000 a year (£370,000 or $600,000 today). This was alarmingly different from his previous liaisons. He may have given Lady Furness and Freda Ward gifts, but nothing on this scale. At this rate the House of Windsor would very quickly become the House of Simpson.

  Ernest was not left out either, the prince using his influence to ensure his smooth entry into Edward’s own Masonic lodge. When other members complained that it would break the rule about Masons sleeping with other members’ wives, the Prince of Wales gave a solemn pledge that nothing was going on. The king and many others thought otherwise, and he sent his private secretary, Lord Wigram, to confront the prince about his choice of companion. It was a dusty interview, the prince professing astonishment that anyone could take offence at his friends, describing Wallis as a “charming, cultivated woman.” The word “blackmail” was now being uttered, though Queen Mary subscribed to the theory, which she discussed with psychologist Dr. William Brown, that Edward had been hypnotized by the American adventuress.