He would speak to the prince and offer him a deal—he would divorce his wife if Edward agreed to support her financially. As for the “high honour,” which Superintendent Canning had heard him discuss that summer, well, maybe that would be conferred by a grateful Edward once he became king.
When Ernest and Mary mulled over this plan it probably never entered their heads for a moment that Edward would ever want to marry his wife, or for that matter that he would become king so soon. As a staunch monarchist Ernest would have been horrified at the idea that his decision precipitated the abdication. At the time he saw it as a business transaction pure and simple.
On the way home from New York, he doubtless spent time in his cabin rehearsing how he was going to broach the subject with the prince. Deferential and diplomatic—yes, that was it. As for breaking the news to Wallis, that would be an entirely different proposition.
While the death of George V forced him to stay his hand for a time, the opportunity to speak to the new king arose soon enough. In February 1936, shortly after Edward’s accession on January 21, Wallis decided to take herself off to Paris, spending a week at the Hôtel Meurice. With Wallis out of the picture, arrangements were made for Ernest and the king to have supper at York House. Ernest took along his closest friend, Reuters editor in chief Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, for moral support or as a friendly witness. Or perhaps both.
It was Rickatson-Hatt’s astonishing account, which he later told to Walter Monckton at the Guards Club on August 13, 1940, that rapidly reached the ears of the prime minister and his closest advisors. At the end of dinner, according to Rickatson-Hatt, Simpson asked the king point-blank if he intended to marry his wife. “Are you sincere? Do you intend to marry her?” Ernest blurted out, all diplomatic niceties forgotten in the bald drama of the moment. They may have been fellow Masons speaking man to man, but nonetheless it was an audacious question to a sovereign from a loyal subject who knew his place and had meekly stayed there.
The king’s response was equally dramatic. He rose from his chair and declared: “Do you really think that I would be crowned without Wallis at my side?” With the cards now on the table, the two men got down to business, Ernest agreeing to end his marriage if the king agreed to look after Wallis financially. Of course the card he kept firmly in his hand was his affair with Mary Raffray, his own entanglement possibly giving him the courage to broach the matter with the king in the first place.
Whether the two men—the sovereign and his subject—shook hands after this horse-trading, Rickatson-Hatt does not record, but the one person who did not want to be treated like some equine commodity was the woman herself. Shortly after the York House meeting, Ernest travelled to Paris to break the news to Wallis. She was furious that the two men in her life had used her this way and made clear to her husband that she had no intention of divorcing him and had no wish to marry the king. “She was completely taken by surprise,” a friend recalled later. “Her whole future decided by these two men and both without even discussing it with her. It left her absolutely shaken. And the terrible thing was, she hadn’t any intention of divorcing Simpson and there it was.” While she may have suspected the shadow of another woman in this affair, as yet she had no proof. That came soon enough.
In the meantime, news of this incredible story was relayed to Baldwin by Simpson’s friend Sir Maurice Jenks, the former lord mayor of London who had, much to the concern of fellow Masons, facilitated the enrollment of Simpson into the Prince of Wales’s own Masonic lodge. The imperturbable Baldwin summoned Wigram, now lord in waiting; Sir Lionel Halsey, then a council member of the Duchy of Cornwall; Sir Maurice Gwyer, first parliamentary counsel to the Treasury; and the king’s lawyer, Walter Monckton, for a confidential discussion. When Wigram heard the tale he threw his head back with laughter at the very idea of the king marrying an American with two husbands still living.
It was the only moment of levity. Though Jenks insisted that Simpson was an honourable man, the prime minister’s advisor Lord Davidson described the couple as “high-class blackmailers” who should be deported if possible. He was convinced that the king had lied about his so-called platonic relationship with Mrs. Simpson in order to ensure Ernest could join the Masons. As a result, this left him open to dishonour and blackmail.
In a top secret memo, he wrote: “S [Simpson] and Mrs S [Simpson], who is obviously a gold digger, have obviously got him on toast . . .Mrs S is very close to [the German Ambassador Leopold von] Hoesch and has, if she likes to read them, access to all Secret and Cabinet papers.”
Wigram sent Simpson a message suggesting that he remember his marriage vows and if possible take his wife back to America and out of harm’s way. If he had known about the existence of Mary Raffray in Ernest’s life, his view might not have been so sanguine.
At this juncture Wallis would have been astonished at the very idea of marriage to the king. It was as impossible as it was impractical. She was under no illusions, enjoying her role as his companion and hostess but knowing that the king would eventually tire of her, as he had of so many others, and find a younger and grander passion. As for being a gold-digger, well, that was open to interpretation. She made him happy and he needed her in a way that was frightening in its intensity was all she knew. If he wanted to give her jewels, clothes, and money, that was his prerogative. Who was she to refuse the sovereign?
Her view simply reflected the sensible consensus inside the inner circle. As Queen Mary told her lady-in-waiting Mabell, Countess of Airlie: “At present he is utterly infatuated but my great hope is that violent infatuations usually wear off.” The Earl of Crawford reached the same conclusion, noting the affair would continue until Mrs. Simpson was “supplanted by some younger rival.” Or as his assistant private secretary Alan Lascelles wrote: “Mrs S was no isolated phenomenon but merely the current figure in an arithmetical progression that has been robustly maintained for nearly twenty years.”
All were agreed that the unfailing remedy for the king’s condition was time.
Winston Churchill, who indulged the prince like his often wayward and spoiled son Randolph, consistently argued that the king’s advisors should play the long game, believing that if the prince’s passion was allowed to run its course then after a while the woman he and Max Beaverbrook called “Cutie” would become a creature of his past. He conceded, though, that Mrs. Simpson had been a positive influence in Edward’s life, successfully encouraging him to eat properly, to cut down on his drinking and smoking—and to be more diligent with his red boxes.
Time, though, was running out. In March, at Wallis’s previous invitation, Mary Raffray came to stay at Bryanston Court on her way to the South of France. Though relations were, by all accounts, somewhat strained, it seems that Ernest had not spoken with his wife about the existence of his lover. She stayed with them for a couple of weeks, even attending a weekend at the Fort where, as ever, Wallis was hostess. During her visit Ernest and his mistress managed to slip away to hotels in Dover and Devon without Wallis’s knowledge.
After leaving her hosts Mary travelled to the South of France. From the Carlton Hotel in Cannes that Easter she wrote two letters, the first a bread-and-butter thankyou note to Wallis, the second a love letter to Ernest. She put the letters in the wrong envelopes, Wallis receiving and reading Mary’s billet-doux to her husband. A Freudian slip or a classic attempt by the mistress to force the vacillating husband to make a decision? No matter, it did the trick, Ernest finally confessing his adultery and moving out of Bryanston Court to the Guards Club.
They kept the matter quiet, Ernest still appearing in public with his wife, though rather less frequently. In late May the Simpsons were guests when the king hosted a formal dinner party at York House in honour of Prime Minister Baldwin. “It’s got to be done,” Edward told Wallis. “Sooner or later my prime minister must meet my future wife.” Wallis’s response, which became a familiar refrain, was that marriage was out of the question. “They’d never let you,” she told h
im.
That evening Edward was at his most charming and affable, his easy manner carefully observed by Anne Lindbergh, the writer and wife of the famous American aviator and Nazi admirer Colonel Charles Lindbergh. Living herself with a national icon, she was more conscious than most of the difficulties of teasing out the human being hiding behind the mask. She considered the king “the most human Englishman I’ve met,” while Mrs. Simpson was “authentic,” with a natural poise and ease. “She is not beautiful and yet vital and real to watch. Her vitality invests her movements with charm or a kind of beauty.” It was this vivacity that Herman Rogers captured in the movies of their various holidays together.
While the accounts of these momentous events are incomplete or, as with the king and Mrs. Simpson, self-serving, it seems that the king, the Simpsons, and Mary Raffray remained on civil terms throughout the “change-over” period. During that summer the quartet spent the weekend at Himley Hall in the Midlands as guests of Edward’s old friend the 3rd Earl of Dudley. Some time later, the earl was favoured with a teatime visit by Queen Mary, who was eager to find out just what was motivating her son’s aberrant behaviour. “I understand that my son was here recently,” Queen Mary said to Lord Dudley, who confirmed the visit. “And that so was Mrs. Simpson.” Again Dudley agreed. “And Mr. Simpson and Mrs. Simpson’s lady friend.” The earl, now blushing, had to acknowledge that she was correct. Queen Mary then insisted on being shown the sleeping arrangements. It soon became obvious that the bedrooms of the king and Wallis Simpson shared a connecting bathroom, as did those of Mr. Simpson and his girlfriend. “I see,” said the queen stiffly. “Very convenient.”
Queen Mary was not the only one trying to understand the king’s fascination with the married American; by now the whole of London society, not just the inner royal circle, was gossiping. On July 9, 1936, for the first time, Wallis’s name was included alone on the Court Circular, the dry record of regal engagements, which listed the guests when the king hosted another dinner at York House. “The Simpson scandal is growing,” noted Chips Channon, “and she, poor Wallis, looks unhappy. The world is closing in around her, the flatterers, the sycophants, and the malice.” There were compensations, Wallis variously described as “dripping” or “smothered” in rubies and emeralds.
Two weeks later Wallis began the long, convoluted legal process of securing her second divorce and thus paving the way for a possible marriage to the king. Under Britain’s arcane divorce laws, the husband had to be discovered in a compromising position, thus giving the wife grounds for divorce. As he and the king had agreed, Ernest Simpson went along with the bogus scheme, on July 21 checking with his lover, Mary Raffray, into a hotel at Bray in Berkshire where, to no one’s surprise, a private detective made the necessary discovery, thus allowing Wallis to instruct her lawyer Theodore Goddard to embark on proceedings. Throughout the proceedings Wallis insisted, as she told Chips Channon, that the divorce was “at Ernest’s instigation and at no wish of hers.”
The king was determined to give the girl from Baltimore a taste of the sweet delights, the glorification, and the enchantment that went with life as the king’s consort. Just maybe, that would still her doubts about one day becoming his wife and queen.
Rather than spend August in Balmoral, the traditional royal holiday retreat in the Scottish Highlands, he chartered the 1,391-ton yacht the Nahlin from eccentric millionairess Lady Yule. Among the party were Duff and Diana Cooper, Emerald Cunard, Herman and Katherine Rogers, as well as the king’s aides. The king even invited a surprised Ernest Simpson, perhaps in gratitude for his going along with the divorce.
Wallis soon got a taste of the romance accompanying a royal cruise: On one occasion, peasants dressed in traditional costume appeared on the quayside chanting “Long live love”; on another, she was delighted as thousands of locals, carrying torches down a mountainside, lit up the evening sky. As the yacht proceeded along the Dalmatian coast and on to the Greek islands and Istanbul, Herman Rogers, a keen amateur cameraman, filmed the party: Wallis and Edward swimming from sandy coves, Wallis on a “terrifying” donkey ride on one island, al fresco picnics, visits to ruins and monuments, and even the naked king changing beneath a skimpy towel on a beach. He stopped filming at the vital moment. Wallis’s behaviour impressed the sceptics, even the normally critical Alan Lascelles thinking her a good influence with good manners and the wit to make suggestions to the king about doing the “right thing at the right moment.”
Tensions bubbled just below the surface, Edward’s equerry John Aird telling him to his face that he liked him as a man but “despised” him as a king because of his association with the American. Edward himself was plunged into a black mood after a lunch with his cousin King George of the Hellenes and his beautiful English girlfriend, Rosemary Brittain-Jones. When they departed, Wallis innocently asked why they could not marry, as both parties were divorced. It was explained that it was not easy for a reigning monarch to marry a commoner, especially one who had been divorced. Consequently King George could not marry Rosemary Brittain-Jones. That she was a commoner and already married put her out of bounds. So, too, by implication was her opposite number, Wallis herself.
Once the momentous cruise was over, Wallis went to Paris for a few days. In the city of love she learned the hard facts of life about her situation. She was suffering from a heavy cold, and to while away the dreary hours in her suite at the Hôtel Meurice she read her mail and newspaper clippings sent by her friends and family from America.
As she glanced over the cascade of cuttings, she realized that she had been living in a bubble for the last few weeks, perhaps months. Unlike the British press, which had been silent on her relationship with the king thanks to a self-denying ordinance agreed by newspaper proprietors and broadcasters, the American media had shown no self-restraint. She was “amazed and shocked” that her friendship with the king had excited such hysterical comment and saw in her practical, down-to-earth way, that all the rose petals and all the torch-lit parades in all the world could not disguise the fact that she was not a suitable consort for the new king-emperor.
With a heavy heart, she came to the inevitable conclusion that their relationship should end and that she should return to the “calm congenial life” with Ernest—if he would take her back. He didn’t. On September 16 she committed her thoughts to paper, writing to the king: “I am sure dear David that in a few months your life will run again as it did before and without my nagging. You will know I want you to be happy. I feel sure I can’t make you so and I honestly don’t think you can me.” She also promised to contact the king’s solicitor and return the money he had settled on her. So much for blackmail.
That anguished letter broke the king’s heart, the sentiments devastating for a man who was now totally dependent on Wallis for emotional support and succour. As he later confessed: “Wallis’s companionship had become my only solace in a job which otherwise would have been intolerably lonely.” For the seven days that Wallis Simpson was out of his life, the king contemplated the unthinkable. He threatened to cut his throat with a royal razor if she did not return. He slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow at night, daring himself to blow out his brains. If she left the country, he vowed to follow her to the ends of the earth.
In the face of this tormented emotional blackmail, Wallis capitulated and agreed to join the king in Scotland, where he was hosting the annual house party at Balmoral. She arrived at Aberdeen rail station on September 23, 1936, with her friends the Rogerses, the first Americans, Herman liked to boast, ever invited to stay at the royal Highland home.
The king was so eager to be reunited with Wallis that he drove the sixty miles from Balmoral to pick them up. It was a tactless decision, as he had previously declined an invitation to open a new hospital in Aberdeen that day, citing the grounds that he was still in official mourning for his father. The Duke and Duchess of York, also in mourning, had been obliged to undertake the king’s duty. “Aberdeen will never for
give him,” Chips Channon wrote several weeks later, after seeing that the local newspaper had published a photograph of the Yorks opening the hospital alongside one of the king greeting his guests.
Sensitivities were already raw at Balmoral where, as with other royal properties, the new king had made draconian changes, cutting wages, sacking staff, and planning the sale of tenanted farms. Old retainers were horrified—and often out of a job. Naturally the blame for these changes was laid at the door of—in the Duchess of York’s phrase—“a certain person.” Downstairs staff gossip quickly spread a story about the king’s first tour of the greenhouses at Windsor Castle, where he ordered the head gardener to cut all the peach blossom, which he was carefully nursing into ripe fruit. He wanted the delicate blooms sent to Mrs. Simpson’s bedroom. It was interpreted by royal retainers as a thoughtless, nay heartless, act rather than the romantic gesture of a besotted monarch.
This almost equalled the consternation that greeted Wallis’s unheard-of request for a triple-decker American-style sandwich when she arrived at the Highland castle. The downstairs staff were simply taking their cue from the upstairs folk. When the Duke and Duchess of York, who were staying at nearby Birkhall, arrived for dinner, the duchess swept by Wallis and ignored her hand, proffered in friendship. She stated loudly: “I came to dine with the king.” It was remarkably rude and abrupt behaviour, especially as Wallis had been asked by Edward to act as his hostess. In truth the changes, resented by all and sundry, were testament to the years of tensions that existed between himself and his father, George V. The haste and the haphazard nature of the reforms were interpreted by novelist Virginia Woolf as the revenge of a man who had been “daily so insulted by the King that he was determined immediately to expunge his memory.”
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 10