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

by Anne Sebba

  The public must soon realise that she is making him very happy and that she must have some reward. And that the only way to manage him is to refrain from what he thinks is insulting him. If only his family would sink their own personal disinclinations to treat her as his wife, I feel they would be doing a National Service. She may be a little common and twice divorced but nevertheless she is the legal wife of the ex-King of England and after all he did abdicate. He was not kicked out.

  A Gallup poll conducted in 1939 concluded that 61 per cent of the British public wanted the Windsors to return to England, with only 16 per cent opposed.

  But there were constant delays, deliberate or not, caused by indecision over where they would stay, who would meet them on arrival and where, and the form of words to be issued in pre-visit statements to clarify who had instigated the meeting. Because of the importance of this ‘greater question’, Wallis exercised enormous self-restraint in reacting to the press and turned away myriad requests for interviews. She hated the relentless media intrusion which had destroyed her peace of mind. Nonetheless, she did not object to being named in 1938 one of the ten best-dressed women in the world, an accolade she was careful to retain for the next four decades. But she did relent in the spring of 1939, telling Alice Henning of the London Sunday Dispatch that she and the Duke ‘in many ways live more quietly than the average married couple … I expect to take my husband’s name and rank, that is all. And I expect ordinary human graciousness in human relationships.’ She went on to discuss the dresses I wear ‘and all that … Those are not the real things of life. I hope as I grow older I realise it.’

  Then two months later in May, just as the King and Queen finally sailed to the United States, the Duke was invited by Fred Bate, head of British and European operations at the National Broadcasting Company of America and an old friend of the Windsors, to make a speech on the world situation pleading for peace. The Duke wrote the broadcast himself without advice, and at some point it was decided that it would have greater impact if he made it from Verdun after a visit to the battlefield. Following a genuinely heartfelt appeal for peace, he concluded: ‘I personally deplore for example the use of such terms as “encirclement” and “aggression”. They can only arouse just those dangerous political passions that it should be the aim of us all to subdue.’ Although some, especially Americans, wrote to praise the Duke, the BBC decided not to carry the broadcast; ‘aggression’ was precisely the word to describe Hitler’s activities in Austria and Czechoslovakia and there was a feeling that having abdicated the Duke had no right to step so clearly into the political arena. Mary Simpson, knowing Fred Bate, concluded that the notion they just happened to be at Verdun was ‘blatant hypocrisy … eyewash’ and wondered ‘h kwonte,ow people could be such fools and rogues’ to believe it. The broadcast did nothing to advance the Duke’s case and so the months passed without agreement on a return, the Duke now urging an autumn 1939 visit rather than an August one, when he feared his friends would be away.

  But by August 1939 war was imminent and the issue of his return became acute. Monckton was now fielding pressing requests from the Duke to do appropriate war work while insisting on suitable arrangements being made for his return journey to England. Could the French government help him with the removal and storage of his effects in France, he asked, evidently feeling himself entitled to such assistance, which Monckton felt, in the current chaos and panic, he was not. As other British subjects were fleeing as fast as they could from France, the Duke and Duchess would have to make the best arrangements they could by themselves, he believed. Then, at the end of August, the Duke sent a telegram to Hitler pleading for peace. ‘Remembering your courtesy and our meeting two years ago I address to you my entirely personal simple though earnest appeal for your utmost influence towards the peaceful solution of the present problem. ’ Hitler replied on 2 September, the day after Germany had invaded Poland, assuring the Duke ‘that my attitude towards England remains the same’. The next day England was at war with Germany, and suddenly the question of how to get the Windsors home became urgent.

  Lady Alexandra Metcalfe was incensed by the way the Windsors were treated at this time. Writing a full account in her diary she said that once it had been decided that they had to return to England ‘they were offered no accommodation anywhere so I invited them to stay at South Hartfield [the Metcalfe home in Sussex] … not only were no rooms offered to the Windsors during their visit but no car was made available to meet them. Walter asked the Palace but was told nothing was going to be done from that quarter so they were our guests.’ Walter Monckton recorded later, in a succinct account of the arrangements to bring the Duke and Duchess back to England, that he had offered on the eve of war to send the King’s personal plane to Antibes but that the Duke wired the night before refusing to make the journey unless promised accommodation at Windsor. ‘I was therefore compelled to cancel the flight and war was declared with the Duke and Duchess still at Antibes.’

  But the reality of events in those tense days of early September was far more dramatic. Wallis was terrified of flying, especially in such a small plane, a fear that was aggravated by the Duke’s anger at the way his family was treating them. Fruity Metcalfe, deeply upset by the Duke’s refusal of the King’s plane, fed Monckton a vivid account of the overwrought atmosphere. ‘The lady here is in a panic, the worst fear I’ve ever seen or heard of – all on account of the aeroplane journey, talks of jumping out, etc.’

  So when Monckton told the Duke on 2 September that he was coming in the morning with a pilot and should be at Cannes by 10 a.m. and that he hoped they would be ready, the Duke responded by asking how many people the plane could carry. When told just four he asked Monckton why it was necessary for him [Monckton] to come too as he would take up valuable space on the return journey which he wanted for luggage. Monckton said he had been told to fly out in the hope that he could help. The Duke then asked what was to be their destination in the UK, and insisted that unless his brother was ready to have him and his wife to stay in one of their houses, they would not return to England. Nevertheless, he said, he still wanted the plane to take Metcalfe and a secretary back home. Monckton reported this conversation to kverss,Hardinge, who decided that the flight would not take place at all under the circumstances. The next day, 3 September, there was further communication between the Duke and the British Embassy in Paris, with the Duke telling the Ambassador that the plane would have to make two journeys, because in addition to himself and the Duchess there was also Metcalfe, a secretary, a maid and luggage as ‘they could not be expected to arrive in England for a war with only a grip’. He thought a destroyer in one or two days’ time would definitely be a better plan. Metcalfe, appalled by this behaviour, did not shirk from telling them that in his view they had ‘behaved as two spoiled children … women and children are being bombed and killed while YOU talk of your PRIDE’. Monckton did indeed fly out to the Windsors in the first week of September in an attempt to explain in person how things stood. In the event, Churchill, who was now First Lord of the Admiralty, organized a destroyer, as the Duke had wanted all along. HMS Kelly, commanded by Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, sailed to Cherbourg to bring home the former monarch and his wife. They were met on 12 September at Portsmouth by Alexandra Metcalfe and Walter Monckton. There were no members of the royal family.

  ‘We arrived at about 6.30 p.m. and went to the Queen’s Hotel,’ wrote Baba Metcalfe in her diary.

  We booked a ghastly red plush double room for Wallis and HRH. Luckily the C-in-C of Portsmouth played up well and said he would put them up … At 8.30 p.m. a message came to say the Destroyer Kelly with the Windsors on board would be in at about 9.30 p.m. We went down to the Dock (the same one from which Walter saw HRH off after the abdication). A Guard of Honour of one hundred men, wearing tin hats and gas masks, was drawn up and a strip of red carpet was laid to the gangway … This part of the show was done bang up, all due to Winston, who had given orders for the Winds
ors to be received with all due ceremony … Walter and I went first, followed by the Admiral. After a lot of handshaking and guard reviewing, we went down and had dinner in Dickie’s cabin. Fruity had made the whole trip with the Windsors by motor, from the South of France to Cherbourg, where Winston had sent Randolph to meet them … Later we all went to Admiralty House [in Portsmouth] and left the Windsors there for the night. Fruity and I, Walter and Randolph went to the Queen’s Hotel, where Fruity and I had the ghastly plush suite. Next morning, I went to fetch the Windsors in my car, while Fruity drove our van with their luggage … The Duke never once gave the impression of feeling and sensing the sadness of his first return after the drama of his departure.

  Apart from one sentimental visit to the overgrown Fort Belvedere, Wallis and Edward spent most days at the Metcalfes’ London house, 16 Wilton Place. It was here with the furniture under dust sheets, that the Duke’s business was transacted: clerks, secretaries, War Office officials, boot makers, tailors and hairdressers all streamed in and out, fed by sandwiches and tea from a Thermos flask. Two weeks later, reflecting on the visit, Baba wrote: ‘There have been moments when the ice seemed dangerously thin and ominous cracks have been heard but night has brought a thickening up and we have skated on.’

  Wallis did not cause a fuss over the way her husband’s family ignored her; she almost accepted it and displayed some dignity in doing so. ‘So far as David’s family, or the court, were concerned, I simply did not exist,’ she observed later. That was not quite true of course, but she did not exist as the Duchess of Windsor and, when not referred to as ‘That Woma k ="0">

  At the end of September, the Duke returned to France to take up his new job outside Paris assigned to the British Military Mission, with Fruity Metcalfe appointed his ADC. According to Wallis, this was not the job he wanted and he would have preferred to stay in Britain in a civil defence post that had first been offered. Nonetheless they went, travelling back again to Cherbourg in a destroyer, with Wallis crouching on the floor of the captain’s cabin this time as the ship rolled around in rough seas, the Duke in shock at his isolation from his family. Baba noted: ‘I see endless trouble ahead with the job in Paris … I do think the Family might have done something. Except for one visit to the King, the Duke might not exist. Wallis said they realised there was no place ever for him in this country and she saw no reason for him ever to return.’

  With the Duke stationed at Vincennes, Wallis moved first into a hotel in Versailles from where she joined a French relief organization, the Colis de Trianon, but only after she had been rebuffed by the various British agencies. She poured out her heart to Walter Monckton, as she was often to do in the years ahead:

  I have in fact given both time and money to the French, having waited for some time to see what attitude would be taken by the numerous British organisations formed here for British troops. It soon became apparent that there was no use waiting to be of use to them. Had I had some backing from the Embassy or GHQ I think I could have been useful regarding the canteens in the station. The young British officers there were longing to have some helpers in the French canteens that knew and speak English.

  So she decided to move back into their house on the Boulevard Suchet and took a job with the Section Sanitaire Automobile (SSA) of the French Red Cross, delivering plasma, bandages and cigarettes to the hospitals behind the Maginot Line in eastern France. ‘I was busier and perhaps more useful than I had ever been in my life,’ she admitted. Realizing that the British press would not write about her activities, the Duke urged Rickatson-Hatt to get his wife some publicity for her work visiting hospitals and the forward areas of the French army and carrying out other duties on behalf of the SSA. He sent Rickatson-Hatt a long account of how Wallis was billeted within the sound of gunfire and had much interesting information about the conditions in which French troops were living at the front. But British views of her remained unchanged by knowledge of such work, which in any case did not last long. While the Duke was stationed at Vincennes they saw each other rarely, but then, on 10 May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, quickly broke through French defences and threatened Paris. It was time once again to flee.

  Desperate families, loading all their possessions on to carts or car roofs, jammed the roads out of Paris. With the help of their chauffeur George Ladbroke, the Duke kke,sioand Wallis (she never learned to drive) joined the jostling hordes on the road to Biarritz on the Spanish border. The Duke deposited Wallis there and then returned to his job in Paris. Two weeks later he was back, his need to be with his wife so overpowering that he now abandoned his oldest and most loyal friend, Fruity Metcalfe, without a word of warning, leaving him to make his own way back to England without any means of transport. Not surprisingly Metcalfe saw this as a callous disregard of twenty years of friendship and threatened never to forgive him. ‘He deserted his job in 1936, well he’s deserted his country now, at a time when every office boy and cripple is trying to do what he can. It is the end,’ he told his wife. Philip Ziegler defends the Duke on the grounds that he probably left Paris with the approval – indeed to the relief – of the Military Mission. More significantly perhaps, the Duke also understood that at a time when everyone else seemed to be against the Duchess, he had toto be with her to support and defend her. From Biarritz the pair went to their home at Château de la Croë and waited there for news of the German advance and French collapse. It was agreed with the British Embassy in Madrid that the Duke and Duchess were to get to Spain somehow ahead of the fleeing French government whose members it was expected the Germans would try to bomb once they arrived at Perpignan. In mid-June they set off in convoy with the Duke’s equerry, Major Gray Phillips, driving through the night, camping where they could, intending to get to officially neutral Spain. But the Spanish Fascist leader, General Franco, was far from a reliable friend of Britain and it was clear that this was only a temporary post and they would have to be moved on as quickly as possible.

  On 22 June 1940, the day the new French leader, Marshal Pétain, signed an armistice with Hitler, it became known to the British government that the Windsors had arrived in Barcelona. The Foreign Office telegraphed to the Madrid Embassy: ‘Please invite their Royal Highnesses to proceed to Lisbon.’ As Michael Bloch points out, this was the most critical moment of the war, the French defeat having left Britain dangerously alone now to fight the Germans. ‘Yet Hardinge, the King’s secretary, could find time to write to the FO reprimanding the official who had used the forbidden words “Their Royal Highnesses” and expressing the King’s desire that steps be taken to ensure that such an error never occur again.’

  There followed one of the most bizarre episodes in the entire history of the Duke and Duchess’s lives. Churchill had now taken over from Chamberlain as British prime minister, yet even at this low point in the war he made it his concern to instruct the Ambassador in Spain to establish contact with the Windsors and ensure they were looked after. They were soon installed in comfort at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. Churchill wanted the Duke to go immediately to Lisbon and then fly home to England. But a difficulty arose because his brother the Duke of Kent was about to visit Portugal to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Portuguese independence and no one wanted the two Dukes there together. So matters were delayed before they moved on to stay at the mansion home of an eminent Lisbon banker, Dr Ricardo de Espírito Santo Silva. But the Duke still insisted on certain conditions before he would agree to return. Above all he wanted an assurance that his wife would be given the same status as other members of his family. He made it clear that this meant he and the Duchess should be received at Buckingham Palace if he returned and, in addition, if his return involved them in additional taxation due to their loss of non-resident status, then this should be made good from the Civil List or other public funds.

  The Duke’s stubborn and self-centred behaviour at this most critical juncture in British history, when the country of which he had once been king was fighting an existential battle
and he was telling diplomats privately ‘that the most important thing to be done was to end the war before thousands more were killed or maimed to save the faces of a few politicians’, has not endeared him or the Duchess to posterity. Churchill now finally lost patience with the man he had defended for so long and at the end of June reprimanded him for failing to obey military authority; though not actually accusing him of desertion, he believed the Duke had left Paris in May in doubtful circumstances and ordered him home. Wallis may have shared his views on conflict in Europe, but they were unquestionably his, long held and deeply felt – as were his views on his wife’s dignity and status. It suited the Germans to keep the Windsors on the Continent. Entire books have been written about plans to kidnap the Duke and use him as a pawn, plans that were known to Churchill thanks to British intelligence intercepting coded messages. Would the defeatist Duke have agreed to become a puppet king if Hitler had invaded and occupied Britain? It is of course unknowable, and Philip Ziegler has argued that he was too much of a patriot ever to have been part of such a scheme. But he had only himself to blame that people should believe such a ruse possible. Wallis was not only not part of this, she desperately wanted to return to England. As long as they remained in France she felt they were ‘like rats in a trap until the end of the war’. She had chosen to live there more than ten years before and now more than ever believed that, if she returned there, the difficulties with her husband’s family might be ironed out. In vain, she urged her husband to return and not quibble in advance about terms.