That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor

by Anne Sebba

  S. said he felt a streak of almost madness. The King simply could not understand & S. couldn’t make him. The King was obsessed by a woman & that was the long & short of it … she was the best friend he had ever had & he couldn’t live without her. S. was so impressed by the want of sanity & clear vision in it all that he feared that really he might completely go ‘off it’ if at the moment he was more directly opposed & Mrs Simpson disappeared. On leaving, the King held Stanley’s hand for a long time & there were almost tears in his eyes as he said good-bye.

  Baldwin now had to see the Queen who, he said, ‘came trotting across the room exactly like a puppy dog and before I had time to bow she took hold of my hand in both of hers and held it tight. “Well, Prime Minister,” she said, “here’s a pretty kettle of fish!”’ And a few days later the King himself wrote to his mother telling her how relieved he was finally to have been able to share with her his ‘wonderful secret. A dream which I have for so long been praying might one day come true. Now that Wallis will be free to marry me in April it only remains for me to decide the best action I take for our future happiness and for the good of all concerned.’ Nancy Dugdale recorded that when the Queen remonstrated with the King, calling up the obvious arguments of duty and responsibility, his answer was: ‘“The only thing that matters is our happiness.” After that there was no more possibility of understanding between two people whose point of view was so divergent.’

  Baldwin was in constant contact with elder statesmen from the three main political parties, as well as with Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Indian leaders appalled at the effect in the Dominions of the prospect of ‘Queen Wallis’. He was only too aware of the seriousness of a possible government collapse in view of the fragile world situation. At the same time P Se s toarliamentary Counsel were now instructed to draw up an Abdication Bill and associated measures, while the King went about his business with renewed vigour looking for all the world like a confident young monarch full of new ideas. He surpassed himself when he toured the mining villages of South Wales for two cold and damp days in mid-November, meeting the unemployed and destitute, offering his famous words of comfort, ‘Something must be done,’ without having any clear idea of what. This former Prince of Wales, uttering greetings in Welsh when he could, was welcomed by more than 2,000 cheering people, including flag-waving children and the Dowlais Aged Comrades Choir, which gave a spirited rendering of God Save the King. There is no doubting his genuine sympathy for the poor as he travelled around the desperately depressed mining towns and villages walking among his loyal subjects. But when he left all he could offer was ‘to think about what can be done’.

  And while the politicians were scrabbling around for a way out of this crisis, Wallis was feeling ‘really miserable’, as she admitted to Sibyl Colefax, her most trusted confidante that autumn. To Sibyl she had admitted that ‘Ernest and myself’ living apart this winter had left her ‘in a rather upset and confused state of mind’. She could not see friends ‘until I can break the shell I have temporarily gone into’. The situation had plunged dramatically out of her control and she felt manipulated by politicians and caught up in the inexorability of the legal process. But those who urged her to abandon a situation that had become untenable ‘do not understand that if I did so, the King would come after me regardless of anything. They would then get their scandal in a far worse form than they are getting it now.’ In her memoirs Wallis blames ‘the fundamental inability of a woman to go against the urgent wishes of the man she loves’. But the most likely reason for staying put was, as ever with Wallis, fear – in this case fear that the King would come after her and abandon everything. ‘If the country won’t approve our marrying, I’m ready to go,’ he told her now. ‘It was the first mention between us that he had ever entertained any thought of stepping down from the Throne,’ she claimed in her memoirs, insisting that she had begged him now to let her go. ‘I tried to convince him of the hopelessness of our position … to go on fighting the inevitable could only mean tragedy for him and catastrophe for me.’

  Quite probably they had both failed to confront reality until this very last moment when it was foisted upon then. The death of George V had come too soon for any plans. Blinded by single-mindedness and solipsism, Edward was convinced that his popularity would allow him to marry whomever he wanted and Wallis was afloat on his buoyancy. But now, unnerved by the growing pile of threatening letters, exhausted by the King’s demands and unhappy at being an object of hate blamed for the feared destruction of the British monarchy, she wanted to leave while she still had a shred of dignity. Yet again, though, she did not. She was almost paralysed by fear.

  Matters changed slightly at the end of November. While the King was away in Wales, Esmond Harmsworth took Wallis to lunch at Claridge’s in order to put to her the possibility of a morganatic marriage, whereby she would marry the King but, instead of becoming queen, would take another of his titles and become Duchess of Cornwall or Lancaster. This very unEnglish idea seemed briefly to offer a way out of the crisis and Wallis urged the idea on the King that weekend at the Fort with her aunt. Initially reluctant, the King soon espoused the idea enthusiastically. He agreed to discuss it with Baldwin, as legislation would be required not just in Britain but in the Dominions. Baldwin, appalled that the suggestion had come from Harmsworth – ‘a disgustingly conceited fellow’ – was convinced that neither the House of Commons nor the British people would accept the idea, which in any event would require legislation that he did not think would be passed by Parliament. But, to avoid a confrontation, he agreed to meet the King again on 25 November. He sounded out opinion in advance and individually summoned the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of Liberals, ‘and the possible snake in the grass, Winston Churchill, whose very freedom from loyalties makes him a dark horse in a loose box’, according to Nancy Dugdale, mixing her metaphors to imply that Churchill, whom she and others did not trust, could change sides whenever it suited. There was always a lurking fear of the country being split and Churchill being called upon to lead a King’s party which accepted the marriage to Wallis. Just a few days beforehand Churchill had been arguing that the King should ‘be allowed to marry his Cutie. Noël [Coward] – summing it up for most people – said: “England does not wish for a Queen Cutie.”’

  Baldwin asked Attlee, Sinclair and Churchill: if the King insisted on marrying Mrs Simpson would they come down on the government side against the marriage or would they form a government if summoned by the King? ‘The first two pledged their absolute loyalty to Mr Baldwin by saying they would not form an alternative government. Mr Churchill said although his outlook was a little different, he would certainly support the Government.’ Baldwin, now authorized to do so by the King, put to the Dominion governments specifically the idea of a morganatic marriage and asked for their views. The telegrams conveying this request were, many historians now believe, couched in such a way that a negative response was inevitable. It was pointed out at the Cabinet, as the Marquess of Zetland, Secretary of State for India, told Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, in ‘the most secret letter I have ever written’, that if the King persisted in his intention of marriage and the Government resigned this ‘would give rise to a constitutional issue of the first magnitude viz the King v the Government. It seems that the K has been encouraged to believe that Churchill would in these circumstances be prepared to form an alternative Government … this clearly would be fraught with danger of the most formidable kind.’ In reality, however, the idea of a King’s party was faint; supporters were a miscellaneous collection who could never have commanded a majority in Parliament. The Australian Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, cabled that in his country there would be outspoken hostility to His Majesty’s proposed wife becoming queen while any suggestion that she should become consort and not queen ‘would not be approved by my Government’. He went further and indicated that abdication might be the best solution in any event as the Crown had already s
uffered so grievously. South Africa considered that abdication was the lesser of two evils, as marriage would prove a permanent wound.

  The Irish Free State, then still a member of the Commonwealth, was a cause of serious concern for Baldwin. Prime Minister Eamon de Valera had already alarmed Sir Harry Batterbee, Assistant UnderSecretary at the Dominions Office, by saying in November that ‘it was politically impossible for him at the present time to ask the Dail to do anything regarding the succession to the Crown or to declare their consent to the UK Parliament legislating’. Malcolm MacDonald, then Dominions Secretary, tried warning de Valera that if the Free State failed to pass legislation approving the abdication and the succession of George VI, Edward would remain king of Ireland and Mrs Simpson, once they married, would be queen of Ireland. Sn oucc De Valera may not have welcomed that scenario but, always nudging his country towards independence, used the crisis to bring in legislation which removed from the British monarch the formal functions which still remained to him in the Free State. The British, relieved at having resolved the crisis with relative speed and ease, hardly objected as long as Ireland was prepared to legislate. But it was a step along the road towards weakening the constitutional ties with Ireland, so crucial in the coming war when the British were constantly fearful of the Axis powers taking advantage of Irish neutrality.

  New Zealand believed that a morganatic marriage might be possible but agreed to be guided by the ‘Home’ government, while Canada, where Edward was still warmly remembered and had a ranch home, showed a more nuanced view. Mackenzie King, admitting that Canadians would prefer abdication to Wallis becoming queen consort, warned Baldwin that he did not want it put about that Canadian opinion had been a determining factor in the situation. In his diaries Mackenzie King makes clear his personal sympathy as well as his belief that voluntary abdication was the only honourable course if the King were to retain both his own self-respect and respect in the eyes of his people and other nations.

  These were enormous issues of international importance with much to play for at any time, but as 1936 drew to a close it is impossible to exaggerate their significance. Wallis, in the eye of this hurricane, was seriously unwell by the end of November. She was also terrified. She told Ernest how loathsome she found most of her so-called friends for accepting money in return for revealing stories about her. ‘Herman was offered ten thousand dollars for a snapshot of me in his garden! [he refused] – however a few gentlemen still seem to be alive.’ And she confided to him something of her deepest feelings in a letter full of self-pity but also revealing how much she despised herself:

  Such awful things have happened to me inside during the past month that I have a new girl to know and she’s not very nice … I’ve been pretty flattened out by the world in general and have certainly had the full crack of everything from the beginning – used by politicians, hated by jealous women, accused of everything and, though I have no resilientse [sic] at the moment, I trust I’ll be able to lift my weary body up from under the load some day and laugh and play once more. The other side of the story, if written in my life time, will be the answer to them all.

  By the time she came to attempt writing her own answer in 1956, the belief that she had been ill used had hardened: ‘As a woman in love I was prepared to go through rivers of woe, seas of despair and oceans of agony for him.’ The hyperbole may seem excessive, but Wallis genuinely saw herself as suffering.

  The King had done his best to shelter her by giving her his chauffeur George Ladbroke and the royal housekeeper Mrs Mason, and sending red roses daily at £5 a bunch from Constance Spry. But none of that could allay her palpable and not unreasonable fear of violent attacks. In addition to receiving poison-pen letters written with an increasingly menacing tone, there were stones thrown at her windows in Regent’s Park. She could no longer make her regular visits to hair and beauty salons such as Elizabeth Arden or even go shopping without risk of being accosted. Baldwin himself thought ‘that some woman might shoot her’, and an American news agency reported an attempted bomb plot. When the police advised that they could no longer guarantee her safety, the King had Wallis moved down Ss mtemto the Fort.

  And on the last day of November, Crystal Palace burned down. The destruction of this magnificent symbol of Victorian confidence and splendour was, as Winston Churchill was only too aware, the end of an age. But that catastrophe was not on Wallis’s mind when she wrote to Sibyl Colefax, Foxy Gwynne and Ernest. She told her former husband what she had not yet told the King:

  … I shan’t be able to see you after all for which I’m very sorry for I’ve decided to [go] away some time this week. The US press has done such harm here and worked people up to such an extent that I get the most alarming letters threatening my life unless I leave. Naturally I am upset over it all. I cannot tell HM I am going because I know what would happen – so I am really simply telling him the old search for hats story – I shall stay safely away until after the coronation, or perhaps for ever, one cannot tell. But I can never forgive my own country for what they have done to the King and to myself …

  And in the midst of all her woes she voiced two other concerns: ‘the expense of it all has been appalling and the money which I spent on the decoration, which I’ve never been able to enjoy as being in the place makes one nervous as I am threatened with bombs etc. I haven’t told Aunt B the danger side, simply that my very presence here was hurting the K.’ Aunt Bessie, she explained, was going to remain at the house for a while as she did not want to give the waiting journalists and voyeurs the idea that she was not returning.

  Finally, she could not resist telling Ernest of her fury with Mary, the woman he was about to marry, whom she accused of having ‘thrived on the publicity she has got through me and never refuses any of it. I know what I am writing. Anyway you are no longer in a position to say I am trying to upset your and Mary’s social career in London … well, my dear, I hope you have a happy life – if I am put on the spot, Ipswich etc will have been a great waste of time, as far as I am concerned, won’t it?’

  To Sibyl too she wrote that she was planning to go away, alone for a while:

  I think everybody here would like that – except one person perhaps – but I am constructing a clever means of escape – after a while my name will be forgotten by the people and only two people will suffer instead of a mass of people who aren’t interested any way in individual feeling but only the workings of a system. I have decided to risk the result of leaving because it is an uncomfortable feeling to remain stopping in a house when the hostess has tired of me as a guest. I shall see you before I fold my tent.

  But she did not. Overtaken by events, she had to leave before she was ready. Wallis often wrote about herself being neither good nor nice but never about being weak. Nonetheless, in those final few days in England while she desperately tried to formulate a plan, she lacked both physical courage and emotional strength to leave. For years, she lived in fear of violence, and photographers would recount her fright whenever a flashbulb exploded. Once she was away in the South of France, she admitted her failure to Sibyl:

  Brain is so very

  tired from the struggle of the past two weeks – the screaming of a thousand plans to London, the pleading to leave him, not force S> him, I know him so well. I wanted them to take my advice but no, driving on they went, headed for this tragedy … If only they had said ‘let’s drop the idea now and in the Autumn we’ll discuss it again’ – and Sibyl darling, in the Autumn I would have been so very far away I [would] have already escaped.

  Some day if we ever meet I shall tell you all. The little faith I have tried to cling on to has been taken from me when I saw England turn on a man that couldn’t defend himself and had never been anything but straight with his country.

  9

  Wallis on the Run

  ‘Concentrate on the legal side now’

  On a cold and foggy afternoon in early December 1936 the King told Wallis that it was no longer safe for her
to stay at the Fort. She must leave the country as soon as could be arranged. He had telephoned Perry Brownlow, a personal friend and lord in waiting, that morning and asked him if he would be prepared to escort her abroad. Brownlow offered Wallis his own home, Belton House in Lincolnshire, as a safe refuge, but she declined, so he made preparations for the journey to France. He drove to Windsor where he found the King ‘rather pathetic, tired, overwrought, and evidently dreading Wallis’s departure, almost like a small boy being left behind at school for the first time’.

  The dramatic change in the situation resulted from an outspoken speech delivered by the inadvertently historic figure Dr A. W. F. Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, to his Diocesan Conference on Tuesday 1 December. Bishop Blunt preached on the King’s need for divine grace in the months before the Coronation service, adding that ‘it could be wished that he showed more awareness of this need’. The Bishop claimed he had written his speech six weeks earlier following a discussion with a businessman about the commercial versus religious aspects of the Coronation and had no intention of referring to current rumours about Mrs Simpson, only to the King’s negligence in churchgoing.

  The British press could restrain themselves no longer. All the newspapers now reported this attack on the Sovereign, which opened the floodgates of publicity. Suddenly pictures of Mrs Simpson appeared in British newspapers. For most readers these were the first images of the American woman who was said to be the King’s ‘close friend’. The Bishop’s speech came to Mr Baldwin ‘as did the ravens feeding Elijah in a predicament in the wilderness’, in Nancy Dugdale’s phrase, while her husband believed that Bishop Blunt’s address ‘could not have been brought about in a more desirable and less scandalous way … purely religious, non political, non sectarian – just SB’s luck!’