She naturally thought that she must be on her guard because the Duke of Windsor, to whom the other brothers had always looked up, was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new king, who was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please.
The queen’s opinion prevailed: A sixty-four-page Downing Street report prepared on the proposed financial provision for the new duke focused on the potential difficulties for the king and queen should the newly minted American duchess set up a rival court funded from the public purse. Author Sir Horace Wilson warned:
It must not be assumed that she has abandoned hope of becoming Queen of England. It is known that she has limitless ambition, including a desire to interfere in politics; she has been in touch with the Nazi movement and has definite ideas as to dictatorship.
After much back and forth about the vexed matter of the duke’s finances it was finally decided that the king would give him an annual allowance of £25,000, with the strict proviso that he would lose the allowance should he decide to visit Britain without the king’s express permission. This provoked a furious seven-page missive from the duke to the prime minister. The decision, he said, was “unfair and intolerable as it would be tantamount to my accepting payment for remaining in exile.” He had “never intended to renounce my native land or my right to return to it—for all time.”
The letter had no effect. His brother the king wrote back to say “the continuation of this voluntary allowance must depend on your not returning to this country without my approval.”
For all the bitterness and rancour, the royal outcasts had to think practically and plan where they would live as exiles. For a long time the duke harboured the thought that he could return to his beloved Fort Belvedere and remain in quiet seclusion for part of the year. That ambition remained unfulfilled.
There was much talk, too, that they would move to the United States, the duke for a time discussing a property outside Baltimore. Even President Roosevelt was drawn into the guessing game. Shortly before Wallis and Edward planned to marry, a small army of workmen were drafted in to remodel Crumwold, Herman Rogers’s home on the Hudson River. Everyone, including the president, thought he was about to get a royal neighbour.
The president sent an amused note on White House headed notepaper to Herman’s brother Edmund: “You doubtless have heard the local rumors that there are thirty plumbers, painters and carpenters in the house getting it ready for the Duke of Windsor and his prospective bride! By the way I think Herman has handled himself extremely well in an extremely difficult situation.” That plan, however, came to nought, the royal couple staying mainly at the Hôtel Meurice in Paris for a time after their marriage before eventually renting two different houses in Paris as well as the Château de la Croë on the Cap d’Antibes in the South of France.
As the duke slowly absorbed the reality of life in exile, so he and Mrs. Simpson had to accept that their dream of an officially sanctioned wedding was just that—a fanciful idea. It was made abundantly clear that the court was completely hostile; their wedding would not be announced in the Court Circular, there would be no royal guests or other members of the Household, and the Church of England would not allow a bishop—their preference—or any other member of the clergy to marry them. Even the duke’s choice of best man, Louis Mountbatten, who had shared so many royal adventures, was barred from attending by the king. When their beloved dog Slipper was killed by a poisonous viper, they saw it as some kind of omen. The royal voodoo was working.
“It is all a great pity,” wrote Wallis. “To set off on our journey with proper backing would mean so much.” She felt, correctly, that her husband had been too trusting of his family, who would strain every sinew to deny him a dignified and correct position as befitting an ex-king of England. Just as the queen blamed “a certain person” for all the calamities that had befallen the House of Windsor, so Mrs. Simpson was at daggers drawn with Queen Elizabeth. “How she is loving it,” she wrote bitterly to the duke. “There will be no support there.” She returned to the same theme in another note: “I blame it all on the wife—who hates us both.”
Wherever they turned they were confronted by enemies or friends who deserted or exploited them. For Wallis it was the last straw when Newbold Noyes, one of Mrs. Simpson’s distant cousins, published a series of articles in America based on family conversations. Though the stories were utterly anodyne, she felt her privacy had been invaded. Ignoring Herman Rogers’s sensible advice to rise above the fuss, Wallis started a libel action, hiring Parisian lawyer Armand Grégoire to represent her.
It was a disastrous mistake. At that time he was known to the French security forces as a notorious Nazi activist who had earlier been described in a French secret service dispatch as “one of the most dangerous of Nazi spies.” While she eventually dropped the suit, her association with a known Nazi supporter—after the war he was sentenced to hard labour for life for collaboration—did little to remove the pervasive suspicion in official circles that she was an enemy of the State.
It was not only Mrs. Simpson who was frustrated and embittered by her situation. For once, the duke forgot the first rule of royalty—never complain, never explain. He issued a libel suit in relation to an innocuous, somewhat oleaginous book, Coronation Commentary, which amidst the saccharine contained a couple of lemons, suggesting that the duke and his wife-to-be were lovers before her divorce and that in the days before the abdication he drank too much.
The idea of the duke being cross-examined in the witness box gave the palace palpitations—“So degrading,” noted the queen—and royal lawyer Sir Walter Monckton was sent to soothe the duke and settle the case favourably without the need to go to court. He succeeded on both counts, the duke winning a substantial settlement from the hapless publisher.
If the duke was telling the truth, it meant he had given up the throne for a woman with whom he enjoyed a purely platonic relationship. It was a remarkable and, to modern eyes, barely believable admission. If, on the other hand, as Queen Mary, several courtiers, and at least one royal butler suspected, he was lying, it meant he was willing to commit perjury and risk jail as well as everlasting disgrace simply to protect Mrs. Simpson’s honour, a potentially ruinous choice even for a reckless royal romantic.
Surrounded by foes, family and friends both, the duke and his wife-to-be were forced to rely on the comfort of complete strangers. Feeling hemmed in and imprisoned at the Rogerses’ villa in Cannes, Wallis leapt at the invitation from Charles and Fern Bedaux to spend time in the secluded and discreet surroundings of the Château de Candé, in the Loire region of France. Katherine Rogers, an old friend of Fern Bedaux, had previously written suggesting that she extend an invitation to the frazzled and terminally bored Mrs. Simpson. An invitation was duly sent and accepted, and the Rogerses and Wallis—with her personal maid and twenty-seven pieces of luggage—arrived at the opulent château in early March.
Charles Bedaux himself, who had never met either the duke or Mrs. Simpson, was a colourful self-made multimillionaire who started adult life as an apprentice pimp in the notorious Pigalle district of Paris before heading for New York, where he founded a management company which introduced the first scientifically based time-and-motion studies. The fortune he made from the worldwide implementation of these industrial methods allowed him to indulge his passion for big-game hunting and various extravagant expeditions to the less populated parts of the globe. In 1934 he was joined on a trip across northern British Columbia in Canada by Herman Rogers and his banker brother, Edmund.
There was another side to the flamboyant businessman. Ever since his companies were seized in Nazi Germany in 1934, he had worked hard to ingratiate himself with the leadership. He leased a schloss in Berchtesgaden so that he would be close to the Nazi hierarchy, and with his vast array of political and business connections he was a natural conduit to feed information to important contacts in the Nazi regime. As historian Prof
essor Jonathan Petropoulos observes: “He was almost certainly a Nazi intelligence asset; he knew Göring personally and had many German business contacts.”
His name, therefore, would not have appeared high on the list of people deemed suitable by the royal family to stage this ersatz royal wedding, though the attitude of the House of Windsor had in part engineered this course of action. As for Bedaux, he pronounced his sympathy for the plight of the two lovers, exiled from their home and isolated from their friends and family. The expansive, eloquent, if rough-hewn self-publicist told one journalist: “My wife and I believe that when two people sacrifice so much for love they are entitled to the admiration and the utmost consideration of those who still believe in this ideal.”
The six-month separation had served only to heighten the anticipation felt by the royal lovebirds. As soon as Wallis’s decree was made absolute on May 3, the duke boarded an Orient Express train in Austria and hurried to be by the side of his future wife, bounding up the stone stairs of the château in his eagerness to see her. As Wallis recorded in her memoirs: “Before we had been alone in the face of overwhelming trouble, now we could meet it side by side.”
Days later, on May 12, the couple sat in the château’s great room and listened to what might have been, the radio broadcasting the Coronation at Westminster Abbey of the new King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Inside the abbey, Winston Churchill, the duke’s doughtiest supporter, enjoyed something of a Pauline conversion as he watched Queen Elizabeth being crowned as consort after making solemn vows and receiving tokens of grace for her special task. The patrician statesman turned to his wife, Clementine, his eyes brimming with tears, and said: “You were right; I see now the ‘other one’ wouldn’t have done.”
Days after the Coronation, in one of his first acts as sovereign, George VI bleakly informed his elder brother that Letters Patent, a legal order emanating from the monarchy, had been issued stating that Mrs. Simpson would not be entitled to share his title or rank. It seemed to the duke—as well as legal experts—that this ruling was not just unfair, unconstitutional, and plain vindictive, it was also illegal. “This is a fine wedding present,” he exclaimed bitterly.
In a letter to the duke, the new king guilelessly explained that this matter, which had given him “great trouble and concern,” had been forced on him after taking the advice of his ministers. It was nothing of the kind. Recently released government documents reveal a much more telling story of a family on the brink of war. Initially the government was nervous about denying royal rank to Mrs. Simpson, believing that it was legally unjustified. It was the duke’s own family who forced the government to find a legal and constitutional explanation for denying Mrs. Simpson the “Her Royal Highness” nomenclature.
As the king bluntly demanded of Baldwin: “Is she a fit and proper person to become a Royal Highness after what she has done to the country; and would the country understand if she became one automatically on marriage?” He and the rest of the family thought not.
Baldwin sucked on his pipe and pondered the issue anew. When the matter was first broached by Buckingham Palace in March 1937, the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, wrote a bread-and-butter response to Lord Wigram setting out that “the settled general rule” was that the wife took the status of her husband and that any children of the duke’s marriage would also take his style and title. The only way of changing this lay with the king. As the fountain of all honour, he would have to change the Letters Patent to specifically deny Mrs. Simpson her husband’s title.
At a round-table conference, which included the Home Secretary, Attorney General, Lord Chamberlain, and the improbably titled Garter Principal King at Arms, it was concluded that as Edward VIII had given up any right to the throne by virtue of his abdication, it was an anomaly that he still held the rank of “His Royal Highness” in any case. Queen Victoria had ruled that only those in the line of succession could have the HRH prefix. As the duke continued to hold that title only by the king’s grace, then neither Mrs. Simpson nor any children of their marriage could lay any claim to his rank and title.
In a memo to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the Home Secretary confessed that, unless positive action were taken to deny Mrs. Simpson a title, the social repercussions would be “exceedingly awkward,” especially at functions abroad, where the wife of an ambassador would be expected to curtsey. Furthermore, he warned that if they ever returned to Britain there would be a “good many” ladies who would refuse to curtsey to her whatever her style and title. Crucially it was agreed that the king should be seen to be advised by the prime minister rather than taking the initiative himself, which was in fact the case. In his letter of explanation to his brother, George VI wrote: “I am satisfied that what has been decided is in the best interests of everybody, not forgetting your own future happiness.”
While the decision to issue new Letters Patent may have been an elegant and legally astute solution to a ticklish issue, everyone involved studiously tiptoed around the emotional fallout. Only Walter Monckton grasped the nettle, pointing out to the Home Secretary that there was a “real risk of a complete family rift” that “might not be easy to damp down or keep hidden.” Ministers were so concerned, not to say embarrassed, by the issue that they took great lengths to keep the announcement low-key. Senior editors were primed beforehand so as not to make mischief, and the announcement itself was made on the day that Stanley Baldwin resigned as prime minister, meaning that public attention would be focused elsewhere.
Once again Monckton was proved to be accurate in his judgement. The decision to condemn Edward to a morganatic marriage—which the prime minister and Dominions had categorically rejected during the abdication crisis—was a wrenchingly painful issue that grieved Edward until the day he died. He never forgot or forgave his family, considering the ruling to be a terrible slur on his wife and therefore on himself. Impetuously, the duke promised to give up his own royal title, though Wallis convinced him not to take such a hasty step. Even thirty years later the decision still rankled, the duke writing in a New York newspaper that “this cold blooded act, in its uprush, represented a kind of Berlin wall alienating us from my family.”
The couple’s choice of wedding date, June 3, which coincided with the birthday of the late King George V, merely added to the expanding pool of bad blood. Queen Mary, still grieving, was deeply hurt. Rather than blaming her errant son, she pointed a finger at the bride-to-be, writing to the new queen: “Of course she did it, but how can he be so weak? I suppose it is out of revenge that none of the family is going to the wedding.”
The absence of any member of the royal family, especially the Duke of Kent and his erstwhile best man Louis Mountbatten, was particularly hurtful. In a fit of hyperbole, Lord Wigram declared that for any member of the family to attend “would be a firm nail in the coffin of monarchy.” In addition he threatened to “hound out” any of the king’s chaplains should they agree to officiate. In the end the royal couple found what Wigram called a “scallywag clergyman” from Yorkshire who agreed to marry them. Shortly after officiating, the Reverend R. Anderson Jardine sailed for America, where he enjoyed a lecture tour round the country on the basis of his involvement in their nuptials.
So much for the grand and fitting ceremony the duke had imagined just a few weeks before. As the duke’s equerry Dudley Forwood recalled: “Right up to the last minute the duke hoped that his brothers would come and that somehow the royal family would relent. But they did not. He was deeply, deeply hurt.”
Wallis tried to put a brave face on things, attempting, before the wedding, to present a softer image of herself and to dispel some of the most virulent rumours about her. She asked Cecil Beaton to take photographs of her for Vogue magazine and granted an interview to a distant relative, Helena Normanton, who was the first woman to practice as a barrister in England as well as a fanatical royalist and sycophantic admirer of the American bride-to-be.
In the article, which gained worldwide attention, Mrs
. Simpson was at pains to emphasize that she had no ambitions to the English throne. She also tackled the two most hurtful canards, namely that she had made off with Queen Alexandra’s fabled emeralds and had had a love affair with the German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.
She told her cousin: “I cannot recall ever being in Herr von Ribbentrop’s company more than twice, once at a party of Lady Cunard before he became ambassador and once at another big reception. I was never alone in his company and I never had more than a few words of conversation with him—simply the usual small talk, that is all. I took no interest at all in politics.”
All the denials and all the smiles could not cover up the fact that on their wedding day it was clear to the world that their family and friends had turned their collective back on the couple. Six months before, Edward VIII ruled over the greatest empire the world had ever seen. On the day the duke took his wedding vows, only seven English people were present at the ceremony; the rest were French or Americans, notably Katherine and Herman Rogers. It was the ever sagacious Herman who gave Mrs. Simpson away. All bowed or curtsied to the newly minted Duchess of Windsor.
After the ceremony Walter Monckton took the duchess to one side and told her that “most people in England disliked her very much, because the Duke had married her and given up his throne.” If she kept him happy, all that would change. “Nothing would be too bad for her” if she failed in that task.
She replied: “Walter, don’t you think I have thought of all that? I think I can make him happy.” The story goes that the morning after their wedding, the duchess awoke to find the duke standing by their bed. With his boyish smile, he asked, “And what do we do now?” Her heart sank, the duchess now reconciled to devoting the rest of her days to amusing her impatient husband.
The dawning realization of what their future life together would hold came during their lengthy honeymoon, which they spent, in the company of equerry Dudley Forwood, two cairn terriers, a pair of Scotland Yard detectives, and 266 pieces of luggage, at Schloss Wasserleonburg, an Austrian country house placed at their disposal by Count and Countess Paul Münster. Henceforth, the amount of luggage that accompanied their every journey would become a constant source of fascination and comment for the media, their baggage excesses largely responsible for the duke’s precipitous plunge from international statesman to playboy socialite.
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 13