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

by Anne Sebba

  It is remarkable how he expressed his sympathies for the Nazis in Germany. ‘Of course it is the only thing to do, we will have to come to it, as we are in great danger from the Communists here, too.’ He naturally condemns the peace Treaty [Versailles, 1919]. ‘I hope and believe we shall never fight a war again,’ he commented. ‘But if so we must be on the winning side and that will be the German, not the French’ … I asked him how he imagined that one got out of the National Socialist dictatorship … He seemed not to have thought k ha very much about these questions. It is, however, interesting and significant that he shows so much sympathy for Germany and the Nazis.

  Dudley Forwood believed that the most compelling motive for the visit was to give Wallis a taste of being queen, ‘and when the Foreign Office and George VI asked him not to go, he felt … they’d been bloody to me why the hell should I do what they want? They denied my wife her right. It showed his great respect for the throne that even on this most vexed question he would never in public question his brother the King but in private … it hurt him a lot.’ Relations with his family were now strained almost to breaking point. As the Duke told Walter Monckton, he embarked on the trip in the wake of ‘a series of rather tricky letters I have had to write to bring home to my mother and the King how sore I feel from their humiliating treatment of me ever since I left England in December.’

  The Windsors went by train from Paris to Berlin in early October and there to greet them on the Friedrichstrasse station platform were a number of Nazi leaders, including Dr Robert Ley, the boorish, alcoholic leader of the Nazi National Labour Front, but from the British Embassy there was only a junior member of staff. That night Ley gave a magnificent banquet in their honour at which several of the most senior German leaders were present, among them Goebbels, Himmler, Hess and Ribbentrop – the latter, according to the British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps, pronounced himself delighted by the trip, declaring that ‘HRH will some day have a great influence over the British working man’. They were taken to visit various housing projects, hospitals and youth camps in Dresden, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Munich by Ley in his enormous and powerful Mercedes, and local authorities were instructed always to refer to Wallis as Her Royal Highness – and they did not disobey. The visit was well covered in British newspapers which showed the Duke, relishing an opportunity to speak German, clearly enjoying himself even when visiting a beer hall in Munich. They went by train to see a major German coalmine, deep in the Ruhr at Kamp-Lintfort, ‘because it was known how pro-German he was’, according to a woman, whose father accompanied the Duke on that occasion. ‘There was jubilation at the Kamp to have a former King visit. He was totally enraptured by the technical innovations of the German mining industry,’ she recalled.

  Wallis, uninterested in the politics, could not resist writing naively to Ernest about the tour: ‘This is a most interesting trip, though very strenuous, starting at 8 am each morning and ending at 5. Tomorrow, to vary the tour a bit, we take the train at 7.15 am. Peter Pan is determined to help working conditions. He really likes those people much better than any of us – and I’m sure they are much nicer.’

  But she did not write to him about the climax of the trip, a meeting with the Führer himself at his mountain home, the Berghof, just outside Salzburg. Since it came three days after the pro-appeasement British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had called on Hitler hoping to come to some permanent agreement with Germany over its expansionist aims, the Duke’s visit had the effect of encouraging Hitler further in his belief, however erroneous, that when the time came to install a puppet government in England the Duke would be willing to be restored to the British throne with Wallis as queen. There are several photos recording the historic meeting but none more evocative than that showing the Duchess smiling broadly and enjoying the pomp and pageantry as the Führer leans over to kiss her hand while the Duke looks on proudly.

  After the war the Duke wrote: ‘[The] Führer struck me as a somewhat ridiculous figure, with his theatrical posturings and his bombastic pretensions.’ But Dudley Forwood, also a German-speaker, who was present at the hour-long meeting, gave a different account: ‘My Master said to Hitler the Germans and the British races are one, they should always be one. They are of Hun origin.’ Wallis was not included in the private interview. She was offered tea by the fireplace with Rudolf Hess instead. Later she insisted that when she asked the Duke afterwards what he had discussed he told her, ‘I’d never allow myself to get into a political discussion with him!’

  ‘His tour was ill-timed and ill-advised but not a crime,’ is Philip Ziegler’s sober assessment. Since the Duke had agreed to make no formal speeches while in Germany there are at least no words to be quoted back at him. But the grainy newspaper images showing a smiling Wallis and Edward meeting uniformed Nazi leaders against a vivid backdrop of swastikas, flags and jackboots have become indelibly imprinted in the public imagination. By not condemning any aspect of the German social experiment, the Duke was tacitly condoning it and thus allowing himself to be used by the Germans. For Queen Mary there was a still greater crime, and one that solidified with time: forsaking his sacred duty as king of a glorious empire. She was not afraid to make her views known to her son.

  Meanwhile Charles Bedaux was busy organizing another, rather grander tour for the Duke and Duchess, a visit to the United States, which Wallis had told Ernest would last a month and feature more visits to factories in an attempt to examine working conditions in America. But, in the wake of the German trip, it was clear that a visit to America would prove disastrous on several counts, principally because the American labour unions hated Bedaux for what they saw as his brutal ideas about workers’ efficiency. According to Dudley Forwood, ‘they could not even vouch for his security’.

  And it was the projected American trip that caused so much ill-feeling in London.

  The fear at Court – the King and Queen advised by Hardinge and Lascelles – was that the Duke, behaving abominably, was trying to stage a come-back. Coincidentally, the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, was on home leave while the trip was being discussed and he argued that if the Duke went ahead with the visit he should be accorded the full courtesies of the Embassy. Lindsay could feel the King’s continued sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis his brother, ‘and up to a certain point he is like the medieval monarch who has a hated rival claimant living in exile’. Lindsay recognized that there were many grounds for objecting to this trip, but recorded that Queen Elizabeth’s view was that:

  while the men spoke in terms of indignation she spoke in terms of acute pain and distress, ingenuously expressed and deeply felt. She, too, is not a great intellect but she has any amount of intelligence du coeur … In all she said there was far more grief than indignation and it was all tempered by affection for ‘David’. He’s so changed now and he used to be so kind to us. She was backing up everything the men said but protesting against anything that seemed vindictive … and with all her charity she had not a word to say for ‘That Woman’.

  The new King and Queen were not yet ready to make any state visits themselves and their first was not to be until 1938 when they went to Paris. Queen Elizabeth was acu kabemaktely sensitive to the damage being inflicted on her husband by living out this unexpected public duty and laid the blame squarely at Wallis’s feet. In response to a remark just after the Paris trip that the Duchess of Windsor had ‘done much for the Duke – stopped him drinking – no more pouches under his eyes’, she retorted, ‘Yes, who has the lines under his eyes now?’

  So although the suggestion that they should visit North America, combining a tour of Canada with a trip to the United States, had already been mooted as early as 1937 when the Canadian Prime Minister, William Mackenzie King, came to London for the Coronation, such a tour needed careful planning. It was felt that, once people had had an opportunity to see the new King and Queen in person, the wounds from the abdication and the loss of such a popular monarch as Edward VIII would be fin
ally healed. And President Roosevelt was also keen for such a visit but, by the time all the arrangements had been made, it did not actually take place until May 1939, making it a deeply significant trip given the worsening situation in Europe. The idea of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor making a tour of North America in 1937, advised by such dubious friends as Charles Bedaux and in advance of the new King and Queen, could only be interpreted as a blatant attempt to upstage the British sovereign.

  When Wallis wrote to Ernest, who was in New York, on 30 October, just a year after her divorce, she knew the US trip was hopeless: ‘Ernest dear, What can I say when I am standing beside the grave of everything that was us and our laughter rings in my ears over “letter from New York”. My opinion is the same only more strong than that because the events in London more than proved what we were laughing about. Only oh my very dear, dear Ernest I can only cry as I say farewell and press your hand very tightly and pray to God. Wallis.’ In fact, the Duke did not call off the trip until 6 November when he made a statement in The Times denying that he was ‘allied to any industrial system … or for or against any particular political or racial doctrine’. From now on a sense of despair inflamed his already raw bitterness against his family, especially his mother and sister-in-law whom he blamed for the situation.

  Whether the Windsors would return to Britain was a constant source of gossip, and Mary Simpson’s diary reflects this at a personal level. ‘Life in London would be unbearable for us if they lived here too,’ she wrote on a November day in 1938 reflecting on a meeting between the Windsors and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester who happened to be in Paris. Prince Henry, who had married Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott three years before, had never been especially close to Edward. But as Mary perceived:

  This really makes them respectable. It’s funny when I think of all the things we did together at school, how we fought, how we hated and loved each other, how jealous we were until we both married, then it was so different … however, memories aside, if she comes back to England … I won’t let it disturb me … I feel that I’m lucky now not to feel more bitterness. But if they lived here I believe it would poison my life … everyone would want to curry favour in the higher sphere and I think she’d see to it that life was difficult on that score for us.

  Walter Monckton, the skilful go-between, was well aware that the Queen and Queen Mary remained implacably opposed to the Windsors’ return, whether for a brief visit or for a prolonged stay. As long as Wallis was denied her royal appellation and the dignity k thrn,of being received, it was unlikely she would return, which was what both Queens wanted. ‘He couldn’t come back. You can’t have two kings,’ was Elizabeth’s view. Her mother-in-law agreed and, while feeling sorry for her son, genuinely believed ‘of course we know she is at the back of it’. But in February 1939 Monckton tried to move things forward and asked to see Queen Mary to enquire whether she would receive the Duke and Duchess if they came to London. When she sent a message to say she would not, Monckton asked King George to give the Duke some hope that he and the Duchess would eventually be received. ‘To put the matter at its lowest, I find it increasingly difficult to keep him quiet … I should hate to see any open controversy about it.’

  The refusal to meet Monckton, as well as an argument with his family over the dedication to his father George V’s tomb, was the catalyst for an eruption from the Duke, who finally wrote to his mother accusing her of destroying any remaining feelings he had for his family and adding that ‘You … & BERTIE, BY HIS IGNOMINIOUS CAPITULATION TO THE WILES OF HIS AMBITIOUS WIFE, have made further normal correspondence between us impossible.’

  Throughout all of this Winston Churchill remained doggedly loyal to his former sovereign. Having argued in 1936 that the King should not be hurried into abdicating, he now wrote supportively to the Duke after the German tour, informed by his son Randolph who had been reporting it. ‘I was rather afraid beforehand that your tour in Germany would offend the great numbers of anti-Nazis in this country, many of whom are your friends and admirers, but I must admit that it does not seem to have had that effect and I am so glad it all passed off with so much distinction and success.’ He also did his best to ensure a suitable financial settlement for the Duke and Duchess. As he confided to his wife: ‘HMG are preparing a dossier about the DOW’s finances, debts and spendings on acct. of Cutie wh I fear they mean to use to his detriment when the Civil List is considered.’

  Churchill was well aware that the King had informally promised, at Fort Belvedere at the time of the abdication, to ensure that his brother received £25,000 a year, if necessary paid for by himself, as a pension. But all discussions about money had been poisoned by revelations that the Duke was in fact far better off than he had led his brother to believe. The Duke defended his position by arguing that he was badly off and that his personal fortune – according to George Allen he had deposited £800,000 abroad, with a large part of it under the control of Mrs Simpson – was irrelevant to the £25,000 which he looked upon in the light of rent for Sandringham and Balmoral, both left to him in his father’s will. As it soon became clear that the House of Commons was in no mood to vote the Duke money from the Civil List and no one wanted an acrimonious parliamentary debate on the matter, the haggling dragged on unpleasantly for months and the size and nature of the Duke’s pension was not finally settled until 1938. Churchill did all he could to avoid a discussion in the Civil List Committee, arguing that for the maintenance of the honour and dignity of the Crown, the Duke should be dealt with as one of the King’s sons, not as an outcast.

  Churchill, whatever his private thoughts about ‘Cutie’, made a point of visiting the Windsors in the South of France, where they now rented a magnificent villa in Cap d’Antibes called the Château de la Croë, hidden behind high walls on a twelve-acre estate overlooking the Mediterranean. Wallis tried as best she could, with the help of interior designers such as Elsie Mendl, to recreate here the palatial and royal residence she believed her hu klieughtsband deserved. They had liveried servants, who were never quite paid the going rate but were asked to refer to the Duchess within the household as Her Royal Highness, and there were reminders everywhere of a past regal life. Pride of place in the drawing room was given to the imposing desk at which the ex-King had sat to sign the Instrument of Abdication; it was a piece of furniture that they tried to ensure followed them to every house in which they lived. The dogs, too, followed them everywhere – three spoiled Cairn terriers called Pookie, Detto and Prisie who were often literally spoon-fed from silver bowls by the Duke or Duchess meals that had been especially prepared for them. The Windsors’ dogs increasingly were the children they never had but were indulged as no royal nanny would ever allow royal children to be indulged. Churchill explained to his hostess, Maxine Elliott, at the end of 1937: ‘There is just one uncertainty that faces me on 5th [January 1938]: the Duke is leaving on 6th and I have to go and see him on 5th … whatever he suggests I shall have to do as I have not seen him since that dark day when he left our country and, as you know, I am a devoted servant.’

  Clemmie, harsher than her husband in her judgements on the Windsors, was less devoted and Winston even had to coax her into writing a thank-you to the Duke, who had sent them a Christmas card. ‘You can refer to her as the Duchess, thus avoiding the awkward point,’ he advised. In fact, both Clemmie and Winston were scrupulous over the years in unfailingly bowing or curtseying to the Duchess. When they finally met for dinner at Maxine’s villa early in 1938, the house that the Windsors had so nearly rented the previous year instead of the Nahlin, he reported back: ‘The W’s are very pathetic, but also very happy. She made an excellent impression on me and it looks as if it would be a most happy marriage …’ Harold Nicolson, who met them at the same dinner party, was also struck by their dilemma. As an excuse for the couple’s late arrival the Duke said: ‘Her Royal Highness couldn’t drag herself away. He had said it. The three words fell into the circle like three words into a pool. Her (gasp
) Royal (shudder) Highness (and not one eye dared to meet another).’ Later in the evening Nicolson had a chance to talk to the Duchess and she left him in no doubt that living in England again was what they both wanted; ‘after all’, she told him, ‘I don’t want to spend all my life in exile’. Matters cooled slightly thanks to Colin Davidson, a young equerry, who warned the Duke that ‘every time they heard in England that he was doing it [referring to his wife as HRH] the reconciliation and the arrangements for his return were probably retarded’. Bravely, to set an example, Davidson refused to bow to the Duchess himself.

  And so the Windsors remained, perching in France, constantly hoping to be given word that a return to Britain was in order. In the Duke’s mind, a visit in spring 1939 seemed possible – that was already a delay from a suggested November visit – and Monckton too thought that the new King’s position was firmly enough established that a short private visit then would cause no embarrassment and break the ice. As the Duke’s friends (and lawyers) continued to point out, permanent exile had never been intended in 1936. Allowing the situation to fester was insulting. When the Duke sought legal advice he was told by counsel that nothing short of an Act of Parliament could rob a British subject of his right to return to the UK. As Churchill wrote to his wife two years after the abdication, ‘They do not want him to come, but they have no power to stop him.’ The power was vested in the refusal to grant Wallis a royal appendage.

  Walter Monckton became their only channel of official co kf oan>mmunication, and Wallis was frank with him. ‘This is just a reminder’, she wrote in February, should he feel inclined to speak to Neville Chamberlain, who had been prime minister since 1937, ‘about the rather difficult position the British Embassy has put the Duke of Windsor in as regards the reaction of the French themselves and their Embassies here. After all we live in foreign countries to please England therefore why must England make this more unpleasant? The ambassador here did not answer HRH’s letter and as I said we are never asked there. It is a small thing but an unnecessary insult to the brother of the King.’ Colin Davidson reinforced the same message in letters to Monckton: